The "It Missed Us!" Story

It was an ordinary day. The blinking red light on the phone in room 372 gave us the news.  Hurricane Ana has bypassed the island of Maui.  This morning I awoke at 7:05 and decided to take a look outside and see what had happened to the grounds of the Kaanapali Beach Hotel which has been our home for the past three days.  

Slowly pulled the curtains aside and stared at the  Tahitian palms that stood about 50 feet from our balcony.  No movement!  They were perfectly still.  Something must have happened since the phone message last night before we went to bed which said a state of emergency had been declared by the Governor of Hawaii.  Not only were the trees totally still, but a light mist was all the precipitation that fell on the manicured lawns below me.  Could we be in the eye of the hurricane where I always heard there was total stillness?  But, that couldn't have been the case or there would have been tremendous damage to the vegetation outside the window.  That's when the red light on the phone began to blink.  The hurricane made a turn to the south and would miss the islands of Hawaii.  Not sure if there was any damage to the island known as the "Big Island," which sits to the east of Maui, but we are safe.  Carol and I showered, dressed and met our traveling friends for breakfast to discuss what our day's schedule would be since we no longer had to worry about weathering a hurricane.  Just glad that our vacation only had a slight blip in it instead of a huge storm as we had feared.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.