Publisher's Pen
One year ago ...
Lisa Newell

Talk about your basic need for entertainment.

It came to my attention this week that people are actually betting on whether or not a hurricane will strike, and when.

Monday was the one year anniversary of Hurricane Dennis, and while it marked a milestone event in the history of our area, it was also another type of milestone: it represented one full year without a direct hit by a hurricane on our area.

Things must be pretty bleak for me to be celebrating one year without a direct hit by a tropical storm, especially since we could easily have been directly impacted by the grandmommy of them all - Katrina - had she veered about 50 miles to the east.

But think about it, Dennis hit our area just 10 months after Hurricane Ivan hit. We didn't even get a full year to recover before we were back to cleaning up debris from streets and yards.

Cities and counties had to learn to distinguish Dennis debris from Ivan debris. And there was no more talk of "the" hurricane because now it was "which" hurricane.

When Katrina hit, we learned how lucky, yes lucky, we were to only be "slightly" devastated by a hurricane. The wholesale destruction along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in flooded New Orleans humbled us ... we lost stuff, and while that hurts, at least we escaped with our lives.

Lenny Bruce had a saying that satire is tragedy plus time. Humor helps heal, and the late night talk show hosts are the practitioners of this medicine.

Famine in Africa? It's worth a joke or two. So is almost any tragedy, given enough time past the event. Distance probably also helps ... as long as you are the one distant from the tragedy.

For us around here, the wound is still too fresh to make light of hurricanes by betting on the time and location of the next direct hit.

I'm praying for calm waters and betting on recovery.