It seemed like everyone wanted to get together Saturday: it was all invitations to slow-smoked pork, Apples to Apples, Hurricanes or Dark and Stormys and bunches of us gathered somewhere, eying the rain, laughing about the weather. The impulse was understandable— everyone safe together— but we kept calling them parties. No one could shake the implication that mostly it was going to be fun.

Of course it bore us out, stayed mild enough to be funny: at ten thirty or eleven it was calm and quiet and so T and I took a little walk to the all-night grocery and back, bought some paper towels, just to stretch our legs. She slept in the next morning while I read, finished off the cookies we’d baked, thought about a morning cocktail, why not. We’d prepared for disaster and it had passed us by; my brother left lower Manhattan for Vermont, and look how that turned out.

I’m trying to avoid saying trite and obvious things about the difference between what we predict and what we expect and what we plan and prepare for. Mostly I keep thinking about a conversation I had with JQ this summer about all of the stupid things I did when I was his age (four years ago!) and how, against all the stupid odds, I had in fact learned things from them. “I just don’t want to have to screw up to learn lessons,” he said, “I want to learn from something other than mistakes.” Yes, I said to him, don’t we all.

But a hurricane is not a mistake anyone made or a lesson to be learned; to equate it with the boys I should or should not have kissed in college is my own mistake, trying to draw lessons out of weather, out of air. I want there to be a moral in our parties, in my weekend, in how I prepared for the worst without believing it was coming and how, in fact, it never came. I keep trying to explain things that don’t need an explanation. I was spared. I should be grateful.