I was becoming increasingly anxious watching the updates on the news. Weather maps and satellite video, the Weather Channel reporters talking about millibars of barometric pressure and storm surge while the local politicians droned on about evacuation routes and shelter facilities, and out my window, the pounding rain and howling wind. I wanted something else to think about, I didn’t want to watch, but I had to watch, it is the sensible and safe thing to do, even if it is the aggravating and alarming thing to do. This is how we live in New Orleans from June to November every year. I wasn’t going to evacuate, I had no place to go. So, my plan was to shelter in place – I hate that phrase – although if the power goes out with these summer temperatures, it was more like swelter in place, and hope the damage is not too severe and the duration of the storm mercifully short.

But then, one of the poor rain-soaked and wind-swept reporters on the television said something that saved me from obsessing about the storm and let me reminisce about something else, even if it was something I once saw that I sometimes wish I could un-see. Yelling into her microphone, she said, “These big storms feed on themselves, drawing on their own internal energy to intensify.” This made me recall something I read in a Stephen King essay, “Laughter is like a hurricane, once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self- supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny.” When I saw this quote the first time, years ago, I immediately thought of my father, famous in the family for telling jokes, but equally famous for laughing so hard at his own jokes that he couldn’t get to the

punchline. There’s one about an engineer, a bicycle, and a naked woman that I’ve heard him start many times, but have yet to hear the end. Another about coffee in a clean cup, another about a man who’s about to tell a Polish joke, and still another about a man out to dinner in a fancy restaurant who is served a bowl of soup that is not quite right. Truth is, he got bigger laughs for his inability to finish the jokes than the jokes themselves ever would have, and I think at some level he knew this, and was glad that he never had to let his jokes stand on their own.

But it was impossible to think about my father the jokester without also thinking about his other side, one he rarely showed at home, which I had the chance to observe when I saw him at work. I was home from college and had plans in the City, so I accompanied my father on the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan. We agreed that after I finished, I would meet him at his office and we’d go out for a late lunch. I wrapped up my appointments early, and so arrived at his Fifth Avenue office building, rode the elevator up to the 40^th floor, and arrived about forty-five minutes before the time we had agreed on. He motioned me into a chair by the window in his office, and told me to be quiet and “look serious.” This was puzzling until I saw what happened next. He straightened his tie, took his suit jacket from the coat rack and put it back on, and buzzed his secretary and told her to send the next group in. He proceeded to humorlessly and mercilessly upbraid three junior engineers he supervised – two men and one woman, all about my age. He insulted their gaps in technical knowledge, their inability to meet deadlines, their work ethic, their lack of professionalism, their character. I thought he was going to fire them. He appeared to take some sadistic pleasure in humiliating them, and they appeared scared to death and on the verge of tears. I remember wondering how this boss-from-hell could possibly be my joke-telling, uncontrollably-laughing father. Each morning, when he walked through the door of

this office suite way up on the 40^th floor, did something change? Was he a sun shower at home and a hurricane at work?

This last thought threw me back into the Weather Channel’s field reports, dire warnings about tornados and flash floods, shouted into microphones to be heard above the wind and rain, and the persistent anxiety of hurricane season in New Orleans. It was no laughing matter.