Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 69

I accompanied my wife, in April, 2009, to Denver, Colorado, where “Great Teachers for Urban Schools” had invited her to speak at their annual conference. While she presented and networked, I photographed gorgeous Colorado.

When we arrived on Tuesday, the meteorologists’ forecasts were grim. They warned from Tuesday all the way to midnight Friday: “If you thought our surprise fifteen-inch spring snowfall last week was something, wait till Saturday!” For four days they did everything but guarantee a three to six-inch snow Friday night followed by several inches more on Saturday.

Our flight home departed at 6:20 a.m. Saturday. I lost three hours sleep Thursday night strategizing, sweating (literally) how I would cope with a foot of snow. What if we get stuck in Denver for days? What if I wreck the rental car driving through a foot of ice and snow? What if the car gets stuck and we miss our flight? What if the rental car employees cannot make it to work and shuttle us to the airport? What if the alarm clock fails to go off at 3:30 a.m.?

The apocalyptic forecasts were greatly exaggerated. Denver got a dusting. “Man!” I heard one red-faced weather expert report early Saturday morning, “If that storm hadn’t gone one hundred miles north of where we expected it to go, Denver would be in really big trouble this morning.”

That experience reinforced a life lesson: never put all your eggs in the basket of experts. My wife had said as much all week: “You know, they could all be wrong.”

Concentrating on undesirable possibilities or even probabilities fuels endless worries. The snowstorm-that-never-was taught me what Mark Twain learned: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”