"What's up with that?"

This was how he posed the question to me this evening. It struck me as odd. I suppose some context is in order.

Today has been a bad weather day for my corner of the Deep South. After midnight on Tuesday, high winds and a few tornados had left hundreds of thousands without power. Little One's school had no power, so no school. My office, some 20 miles away, was also in the dark. Thankfully we had power at home, so I was able to telecommute and get some work done.  By noon, it was a pretty day, but the forecast was ominous.

Late in the afternoon the local TV stations abandoned their "regularly scheduled programming" to start tracking the severe weather. And the weather today lived up to - hell, exceeded - the warnings of the weather folks.

The live news footage of a tornado that was estimated to be almost a mile wide was horrific. And it was tracking towards the metropolitan area where I live, and to the specific neighborhood where I live. Even though the storm was moving quickly, waiting for its arrival seemed to take a very long time.

Little One was playing in the apartment with one of her school chums. The Neighbor Kid's phone rang, and her mother wanted her to come back home. So Little One and I walked Neighbor Kid home. On the way back, Little One ran at a sprint to get back to her 'safe area'.

I took a more leisurely pace, and encountered a man in the parking lot. He was watching the skies, as were a number of my neighbors. He asked if I had been following the weather and I responded in the affirmative. He spoke of the video of the large tornado that was reported to be heading our way, as well as the 4 or 5 other tornados that were also being concurrently tracked in neighboring counties. He remarked that he couldn't recall  a time when we had so many large, destructive tornados at one time. Then he asked 'what's up with that?"

I don't know if that was a real a question, or merely a rhetorical one, and admittedly I was little confused. Could something about my mode of dress led him to believe that I possessed some sort of expertise in looking at clouds and explaining the weather? My shorts were old, and stained with the paint of our prior residence. My flip-flops weren't special either, and my t-shirt, too, was rather mundane.

And yet he waited for a response. My mind fumbled for an appropriate answer. Being in the Bible Belt should I toss out some theological reference about God smiting us for our wayward behavior, like beer drinking, dancing, Coke zero, and the designated hitter rule? Should I offer up some pseudo-scientific explanation, or go with some banal global warming sound bite?

After what seemed like forever, I shrugged my shoulders and said "I don't know."

Thankfully the storm passed a mile or so to the north of where we live. That said, per the 10 o'clock news there were 53 confirmed deaths in the state with more expected. What's up with that?