Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 7, 1994                   TAG: 9412070085
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WEATHERING TROPICAL DEPRESSIONS

I was wearing my Members Only jacket - a garment that is very popular with people my age, which is to say that six out of 10 old guys in the Roanoke Valley have one.

I always say show me an old guy, and I'll show you a Members Only Jacket.

But to return to our theme of recycling and unrest, I had just unloaded my bucket of brown and green glass when a sudden tropical depression passed over the Cave Spring Shopping Center.

It rained so hard I couldn't see the ABC store. But I persisted, and by the time clear and green plastic was gone, the rain had stopped.

Several wise old guys kept their Members Only jackets dry by waiting in their cars until the rain was gone, and got rid of their brown glass and old newspapers in good weather.

This strange quirk of the weather at the shopping center merely heralded what was to befall me, as we sometimes said in Radford.

I went to the cleaners - although the Miller-Lite cap my son-in-law gave me was sodden - and handed a nice young lady a pair of khakis to be laundered because I had spilled a lot of stuff on them during Thanksgiving.

I'm not sure, but the sudden storm may have done something to my head that caused me to order medium starch, as opposed to light. If this is the case when I pick the pants up, you don't have to act like you know me when I come walking funny down Campbell Avenue.

I made some discreet inquiries about medium starch, and I'm told you have to be in pretty good physical shape to push your legs into pants that have been treated that way.

While waiting to see what I had done to my pants, I fired up the mower for a final mulching run on the leaves.

I know you have to run all of the gas out of a mower before you store it, and I tried not to put in a lot of gas. After the mulching run, however, it kept running and running and running.

While it was running, a sudden sleet storm blew in, although such an event hadn't been predicted by certain persons and institutions we won't mention here.

I went into the house, got my Miller-Lite cap and my Members Only Jacket and stood over the sucker in the raging storm until it ran out of gas, say, maybe, in 20 minutes.

Did I mention that Members Only jackets bead up quite well in tropical depressions and sleet storms?