Day 17

I woke up this morning gripped by fear. The wind was howling outside my bedroom window and the windows and screen doors rattled in their frames. I could hear the sound of objects hitting the side of the house: milk cartons and cereal boxes snatched by the wind from overturned garbage cans.

I tried to talk my fearful mind down; my fear was after all irrational. I was safe in my bed and the house remained firmly on its foundation. The fear didn't respond to logic. It was attached to a memory by a long string that stretched back nearly 40 years. As I lay in bed I followed that string all the way back.

It was early May in 1971. I was sitting on the front stoop of the old grey house we rented in Joplin, the place we escaped to when my dad was fired from his job in Kansas City. My dad sat on the sagging porch in a lawn chair. He was drinking the last beer. My mom had gone to the store for more while my little brother slept in the house.

I didn't like being left alone with my dad. I was a child who had already learned to value predictability. He was anything but predictable. My mom assured me that she would only be gone a few minutes and that she would bring me a surprise. I anxiously waited, soothed by thoughts of Hostess Snowballs, the treat I was hoping for.

It was unusually dark for this time of night, the sky full of ominous cloud, the air thick and damp. I watched the trees in the neighbors yard bend and sway, dancing amid the breeze until they suddenly stopped. For a moment there was an eerie silence. Then, from off in the distance, a train whistle. It sounded like a locomotive barrelling toward our house. I turned to my dad, "What is it?" I asked.

"It's a tornado." he said, before taking another long drink from his Budweiser which appeared to be his only interest at the moment. It would be up to me to save us. Unfortunately, everything I knew about tornadoes I had learned from The Wizard of Oz. I didn't know what to do so I just sat there imagining my mom as Dorothy, hoping she would find her way back home to us.

Just when I thought the train was right on top of us it seemed to change course and the whistling sound started to fade away. A few minutes later my mom pulled up to the curb in our ancient gold Oldsmobile. She breathlessly told us about being in the store when the lights went out. She had to leave without the beer. She described the destruction she witnessed on the way home: houses crushed by fallen trees, cars overturned, the Dairy Queen on Main completely blown away.

My dad suggested that we wake my brother up and go for a drive to survey the damage. On the way back we would stop at the store for more beer.