Volume 1, Issue 2: "Greetings from Mother Nature’s red-headed step child!"
![Picture](/uploads/1/2/3/8/12382595/9746146.jpg)
“Hello?”
“What are you doing?” My dad.
“Uh, watching rap videos,” I said reluctantly.
My father is a man possessed of scholarly knowledge and abiding love for the limitless permutations of the twelve bar blues scale as expressed by ancient, weathered old men from a different time and place. He really dislikes rap. But he asked and it WAS what I was doing. I sat at the computer a couple of hours ago to do...something and became distracted by brash, ornamented young men from a different time and place deconstructing those same progressions.
“You need to get those cars under something.”
Years ago, the heavens cannonaded ice bergs directly at my father and his worldly possessions, resulting in a weather-related post-traumatic stress disorder for him and the Bonnie and Clyde-style massacre of my most favorite, most loyal car, then living out its retirement in the pasture of my dad’s backyard. Triaging the damage after that freak storm, my car had been blinded, no glass remained intact anywhere; its headlights and mirrors amputated; its body tenderized like Karate Kid Ralph Macchio’s leg after it had been swept. But…it still ran. It…still...ran. In a scene as emotionally fraught as the last exchange between Travis and Old Yeller, I took Lorne the Green Demon’s front seat as a memento and then put him down as scrap. And if it was just my car that I mourned so deeply, imagine what my dad felt like when he found out Nature wanted to ingeniously kill him.
A man of action, my dad found ways to deal with Nature’s callous attention. Having never paid anybody for anything, Hank the Helper Hater is about as close to a Renaissance man that our highly specialized world has to offer, only with a lot more obscenity. He converted a floor furnace into a do-it-yourself storm shelter, replete with flashlight, blanket, radio, water, and poster of patron saint Jimi Hendrix. Then Hank looked at everything he had made and he saw that it was very good! He decided the second-worst part of that hail storm was being at the nexus of these related facts:
1. Hank is the only person in the family with any money.
2. We pay only for liability insurance (because we don’t have any money and our cars are not worth, well, much beyond sentimental value).
3. Many family windshields no longer shielded wind.
He then turned his mind toward defending the family’s cars from another precipitous (get it? Ha) atmospheric salvo.
Discarding an early battle plan that included breaking into an abandoned garage and inciting Watership Down for several rodent and feline families, he settled on an ambitious strategy requiring a precise set of conditions and close coordination. His strategy hinged on me and my driving son. Hank instructed me to drive to a nearby hospital garage whereupon my driving son would pick me up in his car and we would drive to stuff that vehicle in my mother’s anorexic garage.
Unfortunately, that very day, my car had succumbed to the epidemic of infectious dead batteries then working its way with 100% efficacy on the family’s fleet.
“My car is dead, dad.”
In the past two weeks, every car in the family fell to a plague of dead batteries.
“Wh-AT? Why is this the first I am hearing of this?” (This sentence, as is all of Hank’s dialogue, has been scrubbed of several of my father’s favorite words)
“I was going to call you…” (but I started watching those addictive videos). I didn’t tell him that last part.
“Well, what you need to do is get out the insulation and put it on the car.” Hank always has a plan B.
I stopped paying attention after that sentence. What my dad referred to was definitely NOT a “piece of insulation” but an insulation-rope-particle board Frankenstein pieced from the detritus of construction sites that my dad scoured for useful material in between his light lunches and bouts of helper rage. His invention served as a last-ditch effort to armor vulnerable windshields out in the open. He delivered it a couple of weeks ago, uglying up my front yard ever since. I had no idea how to install it. I did not think it was a fortuitous time to ask since I suspected he had just explained it to me while I considering all of the above.
A ten minute diatribe outlining all the ways six broken windshields would cost him in expense and inconvenience followed. Then he hung up.
I reluctantly closed the Youtube window and brushed my hair for the first time of the day at six pm. I vaguely hoped that my evening plan of cold 12 pack and the netflixxed Tudors could be salvaged. I delivered my father’s command in such a way to my driving son that he might interpret HE was supposed to be the weather refugee. His response dissipated my optimism. I would flee.
I started the 94 Nissan Sentra, Blanca, that used to be mine but is now in ownership purgatory, whored out to whatever family member is experiencing car trouble (by the way, Blanca would succumb to dead batteryculosis the very next day). The timing of my expedition proved smart—the sky menaced but the rain had just begun.
I drove the four miles blissed out from my first relaxing week of summer vacation. I parked the car and opened the always unlocked garage to find it overfull of Ford Taurus, nicknamed the Yacht. Apparently my dad neglected to take measurements to ensure his plan’s objective. A visionary, he seldom gets mired in such small details. I park the car under a tree and between two houses thinking, “good nuff”.
I don’t knock. I meet my sister, Sindy, in the front room. The phone rings before I sit down. My sister answers with a long litany of affirmative responses. She hangs up.
“It was dad. Know how he said hello?”
“How?”
“Is your sister there?! She was watching rap videos!” (Again, censored for sensitive constitutions)
“I knew I should have lied and said I was reading the Bible.” That would have pushed another of my VERY secular father’s buttons.
My mother, sister, and I settled down to watch the prime-time weather reporting. Apparently, my week-long nirvana left me unawares that we were under great threat of severe weather. Our attention turns toward the maps on the screen informed by entities named “Doppler” and “Gitner”. Human storm chasers supplement with frantic observations. I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country but in a short period of time, natives of Oklahoma learn to look for, without meteorological guidance, the tell-tale hook at the base of a storm suggesting restive wind on the cusp of fury.
I look. It was there, near Mustang, exactly where my really nice aunt, Jeanne, hero of past Kronikles, lives. I ask my mom about Jeanne’s relative location. She assures me that my cautious aunt will have taken the full measure of cover available to her.
I make some mental calculations. At its present course, my house is distantly, but directly in the path of the storm which isn’t a confirmed tornado yet but…
I watch. I wait. I joke. I long ago gave up the specific anxiety of being tornado fodder. Should a vortex inattentively attack me, I will be making dark comments about sticking it to the student loan company all my way to Oz (not the doctor). My current sticking point, though, is the thing isn’t headed for me—it’s headed for my family. I discover that is a substantively different tapestry of emotion.
A tornado, apparently nasty rather than anemic, is sighted on the ground near the airport, still some distance from my house but gaining strength and moving at a quick jog toward the northwest.
My eyebrows raise. I call my driving son, channel my dad, and tell him to “take his tornado precautions” which is Oklahomese for “get everyone in the one hallway in the house lacking exposure to external windows and walls” that the mid-century Yankee architect inadequately designed. I don’t envy my lifetime male companion’s obligation to mitigate our three children’s (four if you count our beloved, wacky dog) tension in the face of uncertainty. He’s adroit in a crisis, though, thinking of things I rarely do, like putting on shoes before one finds oneself in the midst of debris and collecting proof of identity.
Upon hanging up, the phone rings and my dad is on the line to tell us to “take our tornado precautions”. He, a thorough patriarch, outlines what we need to do: move to the hallway, lugging mattresses to cover human and canine fragility. We agree with dad, hang up, and keep watching TV, the stilted images and sounds briefly crackling through the atmospheric interference that mucks up the antenna reception.
Having done what I could do, I learn the storm is likely delivering its opening barrage right on top of my house, with a tornado in reserve about two miles away. Storm chasers frantically report over each other and the lack of linear narrative frustrates me. They report the tornado’s path along a highway heavily laden with cars, jilted by sheer numbers in their attempt to flee. They call out power flashes near the most local of landmarks—a summertime meeting place for adolescent dalliances called White Water Bay and an always-been-there furniture purveyor Mathis Brothers.
I confront the possibility that this tornado could actually hit my house when a storm chaser reports his location at Portland Boulevard, the major street nearest my house. More focused, more tense than when I read the final confrontation between good and evil in “The Stand” (I really liked that book), I watch the screen as closely as a race car driver watches the rapidly advancing road.
Then…the vortex makes a hard right turn. Fickle, it elected to wreak havoc on the city’s expansive Southside. I experience some relief but I also realize the Southside is densely populated with students of mine, future, current, and former.
I wish the tornado would go away.
It won’t. That carousing tornado, unleashed on a humid Friday night, menaces the entire Southside, Midwest City, what is left of Moore, Norman. I don’t recall anyone ever reporting it lifting or dissipating so I guess it is still out there, only outside my viewing area.
While the tornado skitters across the city, a new threat emerges: the waterboarding of much of the city. It is so much water in such little expanse of time Noah would have been like, “Yup. Take your flood precautions.” The liquid inundation is rejected by the land. Water collects in low-lying areas, gathering strength and revealing their spite like specters in stories of the supernatural.
I watch the window and the screen closely. I decide, while not optimal, I have to leave right away if I am ever to leave. I rise abruptly, call good-bye behind me and move toward the door. I turn toward the car and spy a sliver of blue sky that I take as a sign that I calculated correctly. I speculate on the path home, developing a circuitous itinerary of back streets and higher elevations. I cross 23rd street to find an eerie, pervasive blackout. I think about how this was how it looked for the bulk of humanity’s existence. Then I remember the Neolithics lacked headlights so…not exactly. I slowly drive past some cars, parked cockeyed and abandoned. It looks like the beginning of every zombie movie ever. I take my shallow draft vehicle up two blocks, see a number of cars trying to negotiate a flooded intersection and correct my course, giving wide berth to the obstacle. Leaves litter and limbs frame the streets. Medians where the wealthy exercise their slim bodies and well-heeled dogs are flooded.
I cross an overpass and consider stopping so I can take in the bumper to bumper traffic pointed south on the highway below. There is a car behind me so I move on, my curiosity curbed by traffic considerations.
I pull into my darkened driveway. My family is a little worse for wear but collected.
“Hey!” I notice my car--the insulation Frankenstein worked!
“What are you doing?” My dad.
“Uh, watching rap videos,” I said reluctantly.
My father is a man possessed of scholarly knowledge and abiding love for the limitless permutations of the twelve bar blues scale as expressed by ancient, weathered old men from a different time and place. He really dislikes rap. But he asked and it WAS what I was doing. I sat at the computer a couple of hours ago to do...something and became distracted by brash, ornamented young men from a different time and place deconstructing those same progressions.
“You need to get those cars under something.”
Years ago, the heavens cannonaded ice bergs directly at my father and his worldly possessions, resulting in a weather-related post-traumatic stress disorder for him and the Bonnie and Clyde-style massacre of my most favorite, most loyal car, then living out its retirement in the pasture of my dad’s backyard. Triaging the damage after that freak storm, my car had been blinded, no glass remained intact anywhere; its headlights and mirrors amputated; its body tenderized like Karate Kid Ralph Macchio’s leg after it had been swept. But…it still ran. It…still...ran. In a scene as emotionally fraught as the last exchange between Travis and Old Yeller, I took Lorne the Green Demon’s front seat as a memento and then put him down as scrap. And if it was just my car that I mourned so deeply, imagine what my dad felt like when he found out Nature wanted to ingeniously kill him.
A man of action, my dad found ways to deal with Nature’s callous attention. Having never paid anybody for anything, Hank the Helper Hater is about as close to a Renaissance man that our highly specialized world has to offer, only with a lot more obscenity. He converted a floor furnace into a do-it-yourself storm shelter, replete with flashlight, blanket, radio, water, and poster of patron saint Jimi Hendrix. Then Hank looked at everything he had made and he saw that it was very good! He decided the second-worst part of that hail storm was being at the nexus of these related facts:
1. Hank is the only person in the family with any money.
2. We pay only for liability insurance (because we don’t have any money and our cars are not worth, well, much beyond sentimental value).
3. Many family windshields no longer shielded wind.
He then turned his mind toward defending the family’s cars from another precipitous (get it? Ha) atmospheric salvo.
Discarding an early battle plan that included breaking into an abandoned garage and inciting Watership Down for several rodent and feline families, he settled on an ambitious strategy requiring a precise set of conditions and close coordination. His strategy hinged on me and my driving son. Hank instructed me to drive to a nearby hospital garage whereupon my driving son would pick me up in his car and we would drive to stuff that vehicle in my mother’s anorexic garage.
Unfortunately, that very day, my car had succumbed to the epidemic of infectious dead batteries then working its way with 100% efficacy on the family’s fleet.
“My car is dead, dad.”
In the past two weeks, every car in the family fell to a plague of dead batteries.
“Wh-AT? Why is this the first I am hearing of this?” (This sentence, as is all of Hank’s dialogue, has been scrubbed of several of my father’s favorite words)
“I was going to call you…” (but I started watching those addictive videos). I didn’t tell him that last part.
“Well, what you need to do is get out the insulation and put it on the car.” Hank always has a plan B.
I stopped paying attention after that sentence. What my dad referred to was definitely NOT a “piece of insulation” but an insulation-rope-particle board Frankenstein pieced from the detritus of construction sites that my dad scoured for useful material in between his light lunches and bouts of helper rage. His invention served as a last-ditch effort to armor vulnerable windshields out in the open. He delivered it a couple of weeks ago, uglying up my front yard ever since. I had no idea how to install it. I did not think it was a fortuitous time to ask since I suspected he had just explained it to me while I considering all of the above.
A ten minute diatribe outlining all the ways six broken windshields would cost him in expense and inconvenience followed. Then he hung up.
I reluctantly closed the Youtube window and brushed my hair for the first time of the day at six pm. I vaguely hoped that my evening plan of cold 12 pack and the netflixxed Tudors could be salvaged. I delivered my father’s command in such a way to my driving son that he might interpret HE was supposed to be the weather refugee. His response dissipated my optimism. I would flee.
I started the 94 Nissan Sentra, Blanca, that used to be mine but is now in ownership purgatory, whored out to whatever family member is experiencing car trouble (by the way, Blanca would succumb to dead batteryculosis the very next day). The timing of my expedition proved smart—the sky menaced but the rain had just begun.
I drove the four miles blissed out from my first relaxing week of summer vacation. I parked the car and opened the always unlocked garage to find it overfull of Ford Taurus, nicknamed the Yacht. Apparently my dad neglected to take measurements to ensure his plan’s objective. A visionary, he seldom gets mired in such small details. I park the car under a tree and between two houses thinking, “good nuff”.
I don’t knock. I meet my sister, Sindy, in the front room. The phone rings before I sit down. My sister answers with a long litany of affirmative responses. She hangs up.
“It was dad. Know how he said hello?”
“How?”
“Is your sister there?! She was watching rap videos!” (Again, censored for sensitive constitutions)
“I knew I should have lied and said I was reading the Bible.” That would have pushed another of my VERY secular father’s buttons.
My mother, sister, and I settled down to watch the prime-time weather reporting. Apparently, my week-long nirvana left me unawares that we were under great threat of severe weather. Our attention turns toward the maps on the screen informed by entities named “Doppler” and “Gitner”. Human storm chasers supplement with frantic observations. I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country but in a short period of time, natives of Oklahoma learn to look for, without meteorological guidance, the tell-tale hook at the base of a storm suggesting restive wind on the cusp of fury.
I look. It was there, near Mustang, exactly where my really nice aunt, Jeanne, hero of past Kronikles, lives. I ask my mom about Jeanne’s relative location. She assures me that my cautious aunt will have taken the full measure of cover available to her.
I make some mental calculations. At its present course, my house is distantly, but directly in the path of the storm which isn’t a confirmed tornado yet but…
I watch. I wait. I joke. I long ago gave up the specific anxiety of being tornado fodder. Should a vortex inattentively attack me, I will be making dark comments about sticking it to the student loan company all my way to Oz (not the doctor). My current sticking point, though, is the thing isn’t headed for me—it’s headed for my family. I discover that is a substantively different tapestry of emotion.
A tornado, apparently nasty rather than anemic, is sighted on the ground near the airport, still some distance from my house but gaining strength and moving at a quick jog toward the northwest.
My eyebrows raise. I call my driving son, channel my dad, and tell him to “take his tornado precautions” which is Oklahomese for “get everyone in the one hallway in the house lacking exposure to external windows and walls” that the mid-century Yankee architect inadequately designed. I don’t envy my lifetime male companion’s obligation to mitigate our three children’s (four if you count our beloved, wacky dog) tension in the face of uncertainty. He’s adroit in a crisis, though, thinking of things I rarely do, like putting on shoes before one finds oneself in the midst of debris and collecting proof of identity.
Upon hanging up, the phone rings and my dad is on the line to tell us to “take our tornado precautions”. He, a thorough patriarch, outlines what we need to do: move to the hallway, lugging mattresses to cover human and canine fragility. We agree with dad, hang up, and keep watching TV, the stilted images and sounds briefly crackling through the atmospheric interference that mucks up the antenna reception.
Having done what I could do, I learn the storm is likely delivering its opening barrage right on top of my house, with a tornado in reserve about two miles away. Storm chasers frantically report over each other and the lack of linear narrative frustrates me. They report the tornado’s path along a highway heavily laden with cars, jilted by sheer numbers in their attempt to flee. They call out power flashes near the most local of landmarks—a summertime meeting place for adolescent dalliances called White Water Bay and an always-been-there furniture purveyor Mathis Brothers.
I confront the possibility that this tornado could actually hit my house when a storm chaser reports his location at Portland Boulevard, the major street nearest my house. More focused, more tense than when I read the final confrontation between good and evil in “The Stand” (I really liked that book), I watch the screen as closely as a race car driver watches the rapidly advancing road.
Then…the vortex makes a hard right turn. Fickle, it elected to wreak havoc on the city’s expansive Southside. I experience some relief but I also realize the Southside is densely populated with students of mine, future, current, and former.
I wish the tornado would go away.
It won’t. That carousing tornado, unleashed on a humid Friday night, menaces the entire Southside, Midwest City, what is left of Moore, Norman. I don’t recall anyone ever reporting it lifting or dissipating so I guess it is still out there, only outside my viewing area.
While the tornado skitters across the city, a new threat emerges: the waterboarding of much of the city. It is so much water in such little expanse of time Noah would have been like, “Yup. Take your flood precautions.” The liquid inundation is rejected by the land. Water collects in low-lying areas, gathering strength and revealing their spite like specters in stories of the supernatural.
I watch the window and the screen closely. I decide, while not optimal, I have to leave right away if I am ever to leave. I rise abruptly, call good-bye behind me and move toward the door. I turn toward the car and spy a sliver of blue sky that I take as a sign that I calculated correctly. I speculate on the path home, developing a circuitous itinerary of back streets and higher elevations. I cross 23rd street to find an eerie, pervasive blackout. I think about how this was how it looked for the bulk of humanity’s existence. Then I remember the Neolithics lacked headlights so…not exactly. I slowly drive past some cars, parked cockeyed and abandoned. It looks like the beginning of every zombie movie ever. I take my shallow draft vehicle up two blocks, see a number of cars trying to negotiate a flooded intersection and correct my course, giving wide berth to the obstacle. Leaves litter and limbs frame the streets. Medians where the wealthy exercise their slim bodies and well-heeled dogs are flooded.
I cross an overpass and consider stopping so I can take in the bumper to bumper traffic pointed south on the highway below. There is a car behind me so I move on, my curiosity curbed by traffic considerations.
I pull into my darkened driveway. My family is a little worse for wear but collected.
“Hey!” I notice my car--the insulation Frankenstein worked!