Man's Father Becomes Obsessed With Weather

A man in a coffee shop yesterday was explaining that his father had become obsessed with the weather ever since the death of his wife. When his father called he usually began not by asking about the weather in the son's area, but by giving a detailed account of it, and then offering his own extended forecast. He would say things like, you know it's 87 degrees where you are right now? The man said that on visits to his father's place he'd discovered that his father watched The Weather Channel incessantly. He said that even if they were watching something together and he got up for a moment to get a drink, by the time he returned his father would be back on The Weather Channel. His father was apparently most obsessed with the Travel Forecast, and often ended their weekly phone conversations with advice like, if you're going to Chicago, watch out, it's supposed to rain - or, I wouldn't want to be in Boston this week, supposed to be hot. The man told his friend that this advice was particularly strange as he rarely, if ever, traveled.
The friend asked what the man thought it all meant.
The man said he didn't know, but he suspected it was probably his father's strange way of grieving over the loss of his wife, maybe a longing to be somewhere other than where he was. He said that the one time he'd asked his father about it, his father had acted as if he didn't know what he was talking about.
Then, the man said, he spent ten minutes telling me that drivers in North Carolina were likely to need chains.