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How to Orchestrate a Tsunami

 It was a perfect storm.


I shall spare you the details
since it involves two toilet stools working
with all the enthusiasm of an afternoon drizzle
in Oregon--things are already wet:
a little more water doesn't matter much--
as well as something subterranean that did not make
the left turn on the way to the septic tank.


The commode in what one might grandly call
"the Master Bath", operating in the model
of that afternoon drizzle in Oregon, forgot
how to stop drizzling, and next you know
the tide came in and wandered inland
through the bedroom and down the hallway.


"Oh, yes," the Stanley Steemer Man said,
with all the enthusiasm of a man with a warehouse
full of expensive fans, "the water ran through
the closets, too, and up the walls, and 'round and 'round,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh-oh, and it comes out here!"


I have never seen a man with a hi-tech willow stick
happier to douse for water.  He advised drilling here,
a reservoir there, and selling the surplus to the City.
He personally dragged in an industrial dehumidifier,
scorning the help of The Seal Team whose time
is made the more valuable for their special training
in industrial sabotage and homeland security.


"Nothing," the team leader said, "concerns us more
than underground tunnels through which nine-year-old
critters with the calves the size of cantaloupes
crawl up into the carpeting in your bedroom!"
"I wish," he added, "Steve King in Iowa could see this!
He would probably raise the minimum wage to ten pesos!"


All of our beds are standing on edge in the hallway,
since one of the "oh ohs" had to do with the guest room
being the high point of the tsunami surge,
so we are camping out in the living room,
nodding off to the music of ten blue fans and a dehumidifier.


It is something like the Minnesota Orchestra, back from a strike,
finally playing together, but without the direction of Osmo Vanska.
Each fan listens to itself, and the turbines alongside,
but somebody needs to hear them all together, and fine-tune them.
Four or five fans might have managed it without a leader,
but a full orchestra of fans needs direction,
and Stanley Steemer is no musician!





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