“It’s gonna pass well to the north,” Garry Prolix announced in such a way as to make sure everyone at swimming lessons understood that he was an Authority on the subject. “They said it was going to rain, really storm it up. But it’s going to pass to the north of us, just like the last one did.”
Garry sighed. He was a big man, big, and loud, with a face that was almost always red. This ruddy color didn’t come so much from sunburn, although he burned easily. And it didn’t come so much from overdoing the alchohol, although there were certainly gin blossoms on his fat cheeks and putty nose. No, the red in Garry’s face was the red born of almost continual disappointment with the rest of the world and a sort of frustration at not being taken seriously enough.
It was a burden being such a weather Authority, especially when people didn’t seem to recognize him as such. His expertise didn’t come from schooling, training, or vocation, but he held to the belief in his own expertise just the same. He was an Authority the way other men are Greek, or Short, or Fit. It was a fact, not to be disputed, inherent in the man. Inborn. He was a weather Authority, dammit, and if the only way to get the point across was to talk loudly in public places about the latest weather reports and how wrong they got it, these idiots who predict the weather, then talk about it he would.
Not that the weather was his only area of knowledge and proficiency. For instance, he had recently gone to Budapest, because his wife’s father lives there, and is slowly dying of some horrible disease. They don’t have proper hospitals in Hungary, Garry was quick add, nor proper medicine. But the old man was set on dying there, and if that backward Third World Medicine could hasten him on his way, so much the better.
Don’t even get him started about the adventure when they took their young son to Hungary and had to substitute Tylenol for Motrin because there was no Motrin in this backward little Third World ghetto the rest of the world called Budapest. Garry considers himself somewhat of an expert on The World, and a treasure trove of comments like this are The World brought to you by Garry, an American Report back from The Great Out There, presented for your enlightenment.
It is this very worldliness that lends even more authority to Garry’s weather expertise. Would you doubt his absolute mastery of any subject he offers to comment on? He’s been to Hungary, after all.
“Yup. Well to the north. No rain for us today, I’m afraid,” he said, finally. “Too bad, too. We could use it. It’s been dry, you know.”
On the way home from swimming lessons, it rained hard.
