Dartboard: Come Again Some Other Day

Harvard students are far too jaded about the weather. It changes so often, they figure, that any attempt to check it on the cover of the newspaper or even on the online quickly-updated Web pages is not going to be a reliable source of whether they can go for a morning jog without facing gale-force winds and whether they should take the tunnels to breakfast. Stick your hand out the window, an average instruction might be, and figure it out.

Yesterday the figure-it-out school was handed a major defeat, and I, admittedly, was at the forefront. Just last week my parents asked how I judge if the day deserves khakis or jeans, a T-shirt, a fleece, a flannel or all three.

As officer and recording secretary of the Mark Twain Committee on Weather (my first-year roommate informed me the old salt once said, "If you don't like the weather in New England, wait a minute"), I explained I looked outside in the morning, listened for wind, tried to judge the character of the clouds, and out I went. No charts, no tables, nothing written down to be contradicted.

And so, employing this system yesterday, I took a fleece for the morning chill and started from Lowell House toward my section, in Memorial Hall.

Just as I was starting breakfast, there had been a loud clap which in retrospect was the beginning of a torrential downpour. Starting out late for section and my mind filled with the day's tasks, I somehow didn't notice the amount of water on the ground or, for that matter, the rain rapidly soaking my fleece.

By Adams House I knew I was in trouble. I could tell I needed a slicker, an umbrella, something and my traditional insurance--raingear in my backpack--had somehow been forgotten. The rain dripping down off my glasses and running in streams on my cheek, I gauged the remaining path and hoped for the best.

Moving quicker now I barrelled through the growing downpour, nearly missing a number of completely bundled and dry, but hence blind, glass, classmates headed up Quincy Street As I reached the door of Memorial Hall, my khakis one color in front and another in back, my shirt wet and my backpack soaked through, I distinctly heard a bearded man in the distance call for animals, two by two.

Weather Committee, I humbly resign.