Commoratio (kom-mor-a’-ti-o): Dwelling on or returning to one’s strongest argument. Latin equivalent for epimone.
The wind was blowing 100s of MPH. My Bill Nighy anemometer was beyond its highest speed—125 MPH. The house was creaking and was probably going to blow away with us in it—tumbling down Chestnut Street in a cloud of debris. We were probably going to die.
Grandpa, aka Chuck, was visiting from Sarasota. He was born and raised in Florida, descended from the “Swamp Billies” who had settled Florida when it was a Spanish colony. According to Grandpa, he’d ridden out hundreds of hurricanes, and this was a baby—what called a “”Baby-cane”—compared to what he had been through in the past. His biggest hurricane—the “Atomic Cane” of 1957—blew everything away. Nothing was left standing. People were found in the Gulf floating on all kinds of things—telephone poles, alligators, chicken coops, and dogs. According to Grandpa the wind had topped 600 MPH. When I challenged him on the wind speed he cited, he threw his portable ashtray at me and yelled “Shut up boy, your wind measurer is a Goddamn toy anyway.” I said “No Grandpa. It is guaranteed by the Bill Nighy Association to be accurate to within 1 MPH, so, get back to your chair a sit down.” He said, “Go ahead and call it a Hurricane, but it ain’t.” I said “My anemometer doesn’t lie you old bullshitter.”
Just then, the front door blew off the house. Even though the electricity was out, Grandpa turned on the TV to check out the weather. We were all shocked when a man came on the screen. He looked like Jethro from “Beverly Hillbillies.” Grandpa yelled “That’s my great grandpa ‘Gator Smith. Listen!” ‘Gator said, “The boy’s right. Quit pickin’ on him Chuck. You were always a Bully. His wind measurin’ machine doesn’t lie, unlike you, you steamin’ crock a shit.” At that point the screen went blank.
The Hurricane abruptly ended and the sun came out. I went out on the front porch and looked around. Our front door was nowhere to be seen. A man floated by on one of those rubber girly dolls. She was face down. I thought that was pretty rude and yelled at him. I called him a pervert and felt pretty good about it.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu.
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