DRAWING A BLANK WITH A #2 PENCIL

wooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOPPPP !! 

WooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOPPPP!!!!

WooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOPPPP!!!!!!

It was 5:40 am when suddenly the tornado siren started going off. 

Look, nasty natural disaster type things happen everywhere. Each year the East Coast and Deep South repeatedly get slammed by brutal damaging ugly Hurricanes with incongruently trendy happy names that read like the attendance chart of a Montessori kindergarten class. Without a moment’s notice Earthquakes shake-up millions of lives by rattling the West Coast as if it were a snow-globe being loosely held by someone with severe Parkinson’s… sitting in a rocking chair… within a moving mobile home… with a flat tire… driving on a dirt road.  The Rockies and far North get deadly bitter-cold blizzards that turn the unprepared, unbelieving, and/or unintelligent into no-longer living human popsicles. And every year countless people living in Ohio die in a tidal wave of cataclysmic boredom. There are volcanoes, droughts, tsunamis, and here in the buckle of the Midwest’s belt where I reside, we get tornadoes. Just like the ones that caused that early morning’s blaring wailing warnings.

The closest storm siren to our home is mounted on a very tall pole in the parking lot of a high school a half mile away. The school is far enough that we don’t hear the daily cacophonic roar of the students, but close enough that in our backyard we can make out the echo of their marching band’s drums during football games and practice. Despite the distance though, that morning, the storm siren’s ululating wails were easily heard inside our house above the steady howling wind, repeated thunder cracks, pounding sheets of rain, and clunking hail that we feared was turning our pricey solar panels into a crackle glass art project.

Luckily, this does not happen every day. But it’s frequent enough that we have a system down pat. And whenever it does occur, I always catch myself wondering why do I live here? They never mentioned anything about tornado storm sirens in my head’s imaginary ‘So You Want To Move To Texas’ brochure. There was just a lot of stuff about guns, cattle, oil, cheaper housing, no state tax, and distinct instructions not to “mess with” the locals.  

Like I said, I know bad crap happens everywhere, but we never had killer destructive weather like this where I grew up in New York City. Sure, some folks took cover hunkering inside due to fear of who or what lurked in the streets, but there were no neighborhood sirens for that, just the ones on the police cars chasing the perpetrators of all the crime and violence.  But even if they did get constant tornadic storms, the buildings there were built to last centuries versus years, with the biggest problem being the occasional flooded basement.

The brick house I was raised in felt so secure and sturdy, I could imagine it being the only structure left standing unscathed among the sooty charred wasteland remains of a post-nuclear-apocalyptic war. I’ve seen the flimsy way stuff is constructed nowadays. The worst mistake I made at our old house was watching it get built. Its rickety wood frame and slapdash sheetrock walls reminded me of those card houses I threw together as a kid, that collapsed onto themselves if I sneezed.

My current house is 50 years old, but it is no better. I’ve been in the attic and seen the ramshackle way the dried-out 2x4s are nailed together. It looks like a pack of blind, one-armed monkeys on LSD build my roof. I know when we bought the place, the inspector said the roof was okay, but he also said the plumbing and foundation were good, and to date we have spent enough repairing those, to buy a snooty Italian sportscar. Whenever hefty windstorms blow in, like the one with 80mph gusts the other morning, I can’t help feeling like I am panic-ally cowering in the hey or stick homes of the first two Pigs, while the third Pig is off throwing one of those fun-filled storm parties in the secure protected comfort of a sturdy brick house like the one I grew up in.

I was already up and knee-deep in my well-worn morning routines, when I heard the unexpected surprisingly strong storm front roll in. My wife was still sound asleep when the screeching sirens launched her out of bed like a burning slice of Wonder frantically shot out of a toaster a few seconds too late. By the third woooooOOOOOOOPPPP, we were already racing around the house gathering up the pets, so we could all, once again, huddle together in the guest bathroom. It’s the safest windowless room in the center of the house, and it’s already pre stocked with flashlights, a battery phone charger, blanket, and portable radio.

Keeping those types of basic needs ready in there, does not feel strange after living in Florida where the local newscasters and government flunkies constantly preach having an emergency ‘hurricane box’ filled with stuff like candles, batteries, bottled water, and a weeks’ worth of canned food. My high school girlfriend’s paranoid dad took that to an extreme. He had their Miami home’s laundry room stocked with enough basic staple food supplies to sustain the family in a devastated post-hurricane world for months. It looked like the stock room of a grocery store.

Along with a camping stove and a big enough supply of propane to cook thousands of meals, he also had several cases of very high-end expensive canned delicacies like escargot and faux gras. He figured if society completely collapsed in a storm’s aftermath, he could barter and trade with rich people. Or possibly bribe marauding gangs, drug-lords, or crooked cops in exchange for protection. It seemed comical to me at the time, but now as I have grown older and more paranoid, it does not seem as far-fetched.

I was talking with a friend the other day about how the older you get the more intense things feel.  As a punk-ass kid I didn’t worry about stuff like I do now. If something cataclysmic happened, I felt I could always get through it. With my two strong arms and quick wits, I would simply dust myself off, reinvent myself, and rebuild my world.  But now that I have crossed over into the upper half of middle aged, that does not seem as easy anymore. Time seems like a more precious and finite commodity that can no longer be wasted frivolously. The time and ability to rebuild doesn’t seem there anymore, which puts undue pressure on maintaining the status quo.

And that emotion trickles down to little things. I never used to care if I was driving in a torrential rainstorm. But now I am uncomfortable with it. I stare out the windshield like an owl on amphetamines tightly white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel in fear of skidding or other cars ramming me. I used to find it soothing lying in bed listening to a thunderstorm. Now I sit fretfully worrying about damage to my house. In the past when I went on vacations, I left my worries behind. Now when I am away, I constantly check our security cameras fearing for the safety of my pets or that my house will get broken into.

I’ve always had a certain level of fear and paranoia, but it seems different now. Maybe it’s because with a happy marriage, a nice home full of pets, and a good job, I simply have more to live for than when I was young, lonely, unhappy, and unanchored. Or maybe I have lived long enough to have repeatedly witnessed enough other people’s lives unexpectedly collapse into unrepairable ruins after disaster struck.

One day many years ago when I was younger, I was having a lovely morning hanging out on the beach with that same old high school girlfriend I mentioned before. We had long since broken up and she now had a groovy condo right on the ocean off Miami Beach that she would let me crash at when I was visiting the area. Later that day we went to have lunch with that panicky father of hers. Over the years he had grown older, divorced her mother, and was now retired, but I recall thinking he was still the same worrisome guy as he fearfully told us about an incoming hurricane “bearing down” towards the city.

We laughed it off as another one of his blown out of proportion fears.  Until a day later, when we were forcibly evacuated from the beach and spent the night hunkered down riding out massively destructive Hurricane Andrew in a friend’s Kendall condo. We made it through okay, but I know lots of people whose homes, workplace, and lives as they knew them, were forever blown away in the category 5 storm.

Sometimes life feels a bit like a circus high wire act, where you are trying to get from the beginning to the end without falling. Some folks race across, others pace themselves more slowly, some are bold and fearless, and some have no safety net below them if something goes awry. And sometimes, as you are carefully walking that wire, a storm blows in. And the wind starts roaring. And the rain starts falling.  And the tornado siren goes off. And fears and paranoia insidiously creep into your head as you worry if you will make it to that other side unscathed.