It Was 27 Years Ago Tomorrow

So we're up and preparing to leave on a road trip -- to see our beloved Hurricanes open the season in Orlando against the hated Florida Gators. Wifey and I will stop in Aventura to fetch Paul and Patricia, and then the 3.5 hours up the pike to Orlando. I can never see that city's name again without hearing the song from "Book of Mormon" about how it is the promised land for the young missionary...

And the Herald reminded me that tomorrow is the anniversary of the BAD kind of hurricane -- Andrew, which wrecked our part of Miami 27 years ago tomorrow.

Anyone who lived in South Dade then has Andrew as a marker in their lives. Saying "before" or "after" has immediate meaning for us.

The storm was one of two times I actually feared for the life safety of Wifey and my Ds. The other time was completely different. We were on a walking tour of the Jerusalem market on :Nakba -- the anniversary of the Israeli takeover of the City, which the Arabs call "catastrophe," and the hair on the back of my neck raised. But that's another story.

We had my elderly mother with us in Miami -- the storm originally was slated to hit farther up the coast, and we figured she was safer with us. She was only 72 at the time, but seemed already very fragile to me.

The storm completely "mistroyed" our house, as 3 year old D1 said at the time, but it taught us an essential lesson -- the material possessions you have are so much crap. Those you love are precious.  I like to think the Ds got the lesson. D1's house -- beautifully decorated, has very few tchokes.  She abhors clutter.

D2 is moving from NYC and leaving ALL of her furniture -- she and Jonathan have mostly used and donated stuff. Their move will consist of a series of UPS boxes -- mostly containing D2's clothes.  The first 5 of them arrived last night -- luckily Wifey spotted them out front -- late. Had I not schlepped them inside, D2 might have had a lot of WET clothes -- the boxes were already in rough shape. I thought of the hilarious but since pulled ad from a luggage company -- where an ape knocks around a suitcase...

Anyway -- lots went on in our family in the 27 years since that maelstrom. It turned out that 1992 was one of our greatest years. D2 was born in February, and I made the first big money from a case I brought in. The liberal property insurance from those peri-Andrew days provided us with a true financial windfall -- so to speak.

As Paul noted -- it converted all of our less than museum quality possessions into significant cash -- which I invested in the market, providing much larger returns than furniture and other tchokes would have...

So cyclones are a price of living in the Tropics. After Andrew we had Katrina and Wilma -- the same year -- and those just caused a bit of roof damage -- far below my deductible -- and a few weeks in hotels for me, and Atlanta for Wifey and the Ds, while the power was out.

Two years ago Irma did a tiny bit of roof damage, as well as lots of tree damage -- but nearly 2 years later, you can't even tell it was here -- except for the adventure tales of Wifey, me, Joey, and D1 fleeing to Atlanta in Joey's packed suvs with three very confused dogs...

It's funny -- when Wifey and I married, the one verse we asked the Rabbi to say was from Dylan -- we promised to be each other's shelters from the storms of life. It turned out we were prescient -- in a literal way.

But not today! To Orlando ...Sea World, and Disney...neither of which we'll be anywhere near. To us, Orlando should be the land of a pre game barbecue -- at Jeannine's house in Geneva, North of town, and fun times with my dear brothers and sisters on Church Street and then the old Tangerine Bowl.

Storms come and go, but for us, the Hurricanes are forever.