As someone raised in Phoenix, Arizona, I never put a lot of thought into the weather. We had three types of weather: hot, fucking hot, and raining. People only talked about the weather when it was fucking hot, but that was only from late March through September. How fucking hot? It once reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius). Sky Harbor International Airport was forced to close because the extreme heat caused the air to be less dense and it was felt that airplanes would not be able to generate the required lift necessary for take off. That’s fucking hot.
I spent several years in Los Angeles and there were only two types of weather there. Perfect and raining. It was perfect about 98% of the time. However, I would get annoyed when rain or even the prospect of rain became a major news store for days. A single drop of rain would take a city already faced with gridlock traffic and ensure it would not move at all.
Spending so much time in Phoenix and Los Angeles, I realized I never heard “the joke” there. It was in Colorado Springs, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle - that I would hear it at least once a month. The joke never made me laugh and it went like this, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait fifteen minutes and it will change.” Hilarious, right?
Chicago definitely had four seasons of weather. The winters were brutally cold followed by summers marked with blazing heat and high humidity. The transition was gradual from Winter to Spring and every once in a while a beautiful day would pop up in February forcing the entire city to drop everything and go outside. However, “the joke” does not apply since if a day started nice it would end nice. If it started crap, well, it would end crap too.
San Francisco did not have near the extremes of Chicago. The winters would get a bit chilly and the occasional heat wave would come in during the Summer. Still, the transitions were gradual and “the joke” did not apply - no matter how many times I heard it.
Seattle, in some ways, was the anti-Phoenix of my youth. The weather consisted of some kind of combination of cloudy, raining, and/or cold with only a handful of sunny days scattered about to trick oneself into thinking that it is a beautiful city. I have told many people in Melbourne about the thickness of the cloud cover in Seattle and I can see the skepticism in their eyes. For about eight months a year, the cloud cover is so thick that it was not uncommon for cars with automatic headlights to turn on in the middle of the day. “The joke” was told there often. I didn’t like the weather. I waited a decade. It never changed.
Well, here I am in Melbourne, Australia having moved here in the dead of winter. My mate (see I am assimilating) picked up Julie and I at the airport. He apologized for the “cold” weather and then told “the joke”. I rolled my eyes. Except... Now that I’ve been here for a few months I am ready to grant the fine people of Melbourne the right to tell “the joke”, for it is absolutely true.
I have firsthand witnessed days that started out with torrential downpours of rain, turn to blue skies and sunshine, and then back to ominous rainclouds. Julie said it the best over the weekend, “The weather here is... psychotic!”
Last weekend was a perfect example. Saturday was a typical Seattle winter dreary day. It was cold, cloudy, and constantly drizzling without quite ever managing to rain. We took the kids to the zoo anyway. The zoo was completely empty. There were no crowds, no lines, and aside from the poor weather; the day was enjoyable because it felt like the zoo was open just for us. Just before noon, I decided to get Julie and I second coffee. There was no one in line and I was chatting to the girls working at the coffee stand as the kids were amused by a bird exhibit nearby.
“Excuse me,” I said, “is today Saturday?”
“Uh, yeah,” one of the girls answered as if I were crazy.
“Well, where are all the people? The families? Mothers and fathers taking their children to the zoo?”
“The weather is a bit crap,” the girl said, “and the footy is on today too.”
I laughed. It was week nineteen of a twenty-four week season. It hammered home the point that Aussies, at least Victorians, sure love the footy. The zoo was as empty as it would be in the States for Superbowl Sunday and this particular Saturday was just a few regular season games. The finale (that’s what they call the playoffs) situations are still very much open. There were no critical games. Just a regular mid to late season day of sports combined with a mild and sporadic drizzle of rain was all we needed to have the place to ourselves.
The kids came home exhausted and we put them straight to bed. The next day, to my surprise, turned out to be one of the most beautiful Winter days I have ever seen rivaling any of the great days we had back in Phoenix or Los Angeles. The skies were blue. The sun was out. The kids spent the day on the beach, covering themselves in sand. Saturday was Winter and Sunday was late Spring/Summer. That’s weird. However, the same pattern can happen in the course of a single day with clouds moving in and out and the temperature changing by thirty degrees.
Julie has vowed to dress in layers and always carry an umbrella. I have vowed to complain even more than usual and preparing for the weather would cut into my ability to complain.
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