Our Dad is Nuts

Also from IKE. Pretty much whole cloth. We never named these children.

He: I think my father . . .
She: Our Daddy
He: . . . is not like other fathers.
She: He’s nuts!
He: When I arrived home from school today . . .
She: Everyone else’s parents are rushing around, getting ready for the hurricane . . .
He: He was sitting at his computer looking at numbers, as usual.
She: Our whole house could blow down and he wouldn’t notice unless the internet went down.
He: It wouldn’t do that.
She: The house won’t blow down?
He: No, our connection won’t go down. It’s broadband wireless.
She: Great! He’ll be sitting in the wrecked house staring at the computer. We’re not ready! We’ve got to get ready!
He: I think you’re nuts. When has he ever been not ready for anything. . . . So I go to the study . . .
She: Me too, I go too.
He: I knock, wait a minute and he says come in. He looks up like nothing is happening, so I say there’s a storm headed our way. He looks back at his computer and says “There is storm coming, but I think we’re almost ready for it.” He punches a few keys and the numbers on the screen change.
She: And I can’t stand it, so I tell him that everyone is boarding up their houses, stocking up on food and water, and that even that lazy Mary Grace Crussell next door is hauling their patio furniture into her garage, and that we’re all going to be refugees and that I don’t want to be a refugee.
He: He looks at us a minute like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and says “Oh, yes, the hurricane. We’ll be evacuees, not refugees. It’s much better. We’ll go to your Uncle John’s.” I keep standing there looking at him and finally he says, “Well let’s get out the boards.” He’s got these boards he keeps in a rack in the garage, all cut, painted, and numbered. They fit over every window and door in the house. We pull them out and slip them over our windows with these little clips he has for them.
She: I decide to save the patio furniture and go outside but most of it is built-in as part of the patio. I put the chairs in their little house, went to check on Mom, she’s packing a picnic and asking me what book we would like her to read to us in the car, like it was vacation or something.
He: When we finish putting the boards up Dad tells me to get my laptop and a few days clothes packed up and goes back to his computer. He gets out his PDA and seems to be syncing it up with the computer and some new gadget he’s got. Then he goes back to the screens of numbers he’s always checking. I can hear our neighbors cutting boards and hammering them over their windows.
She: I tell mom there’s a storm coming our way, she says she knows and tells me to get the bag she packed for me from my room. I ask her if we have all the food and water we need for after the storm, and she shows me a cabinet I didn’t know we had high in the garage filled with water and canned food.
He: While I’m putting the bags and picnic hamper in the car, Father stops in the doorway of the house, punches a couple of buttons on his PDA and suddenly I hear that monster generator he has in the back yard—it’s in its own little louver-sided house that every one thinks is a pool house—anyway it started up. He says, “Oops, gave it the wrong command.” He hits a few more buttons and it shuts down. I thought he was a little nuts when he towed that thing home from an equipment auction once, but maybe we’ll get some use out of it now.
She: Driving out of town, I ask mom if our house will be there when we get back. She says, “Yes, I hope so” and dad says “if it’s not we could probably turn a tidy profit selling the lot as a scrape-off.” Mom says, “Now Justin (she always calls him by his first name when she’s scolding him), that’s our home, not some commodity you flip for cash.”
He: And he said, “You are right dear.” Which is what he always says when she calls him, “Justin.” Except this time, he also said, “confusing homes with commodities is what brought on this storm . . . that and greed.”
She: I didn’t understand, but mom started reading Eragon, and I didn’t want to interrupt.
He: We drive to Father’s brother, our Uncle John, in Austin and just wait for everything to blow over. Both of them work at home, investments, and so they both spent the whole time on John’s computers, screens of numbers, just like Father’s.
She: When I asked them what they were doing, John said they were, “buying and selling,” Dad added, "mostly selling." Then they laughed that funny way they do . . .
He: . . . they chuckle . . .
She: Anyway, it’s irritating. It’s like they’ve guessed a big secret that no one else has a clue about.
He: We sat at Uncle John’s and watched Ike on TV like most everyone else I guess. Father, John and I sat up all night Friday night watching the weather coverage. I was about half asleep, but as the South wall of the storm moved through Brazoria County I heard an alarm on Father’s PDA go off. He looked at it, punched a few buttons and told John the “power in our house just went out,” but as far as he could tell "the integrity of the house is still unbroken."
* * * *
She: Sunday, I figured we were headed home when I saw Mom in John’s kitchen packing the picnic hamper again.
He: We drove home just like we drove up, at a leisurely rate with Mom reading to us from Eragon.
She: As we got closer to Lake Jackson, we saw more and more torn up stuff. Trees, houses, lots of signs just blown completely away.
He: There weren’t many streetlights working anywhere. As we skirted around Houston, Father called Tony—the guy who takes care of our yard and stuff—and asked if he had crews out working already. Then he started punching buttons on the PDA again.
She: He told me he was going to turn on the power at our house!
He: He logged onto the burglar alarm system to find out if there were any windows or doors broken—he said the house was okay. He also had the generator rigged up so he could start it remotely.
She: If everything worked like it was supposed to, he said the house would be cool by the time we got home.
He: It was.
She: I still think he’s nuts. He doesn’t get excited about anything. We were unprepared. We should have prepared more. We were just lucky. (She leaves the stage.)
He: He gets excited about some things. Like Monday, the 15th, right after the storm, I heard him in his study and it sounded like he was talking to Uncle John. I looked in and saw they were using a voice/picture connection between their computers. I’ve never seen anything on those screens but numbers and graphs. They’ve never acted like that before, either—way beyond chuckling. John was almost giggling like my sister’s friends, saying, “You got us out just in time.” Father shrugged, “We were just lucky we were able to sell when we did.” John laughed, “completely out without a hit,” and logged off.