Once More, With Feeling (and details)

My last post, I was so into the narrative that I forgot to write like a writer. This is a 2nd draft. A blog should “take you there,” even if it makes no pretensions to be literary. So here goes again.

Dreadful to wait for the wrath of a storm like Wilma or Katrina, wondering if the hit will be whammo direct, or if the monster will skitter off to devour other unfortunates. I work with a woman whose aging parents live in Florida in an area where there is still damage from two years ago. They won't leave and there are no shelters. They’re on a canal where a storm surge would bring water into the house. This is scary stuff.

Thursday evening, marching along on the treadmill, I read an article about two companies based in New Orleans and how each handled the issues and problems as a result of Katrina. One had hired an ex-special forces to help the IS staff man the servers. He was as resourceful as Odysseus, and poured kerosene into the generators to keep the power on. They bartered bandwidth and computer help for food and water with other business in their high rise. A vacuum cleaner manufacturer had a totally different approach. They moved the business off site—all the way to Denver, because their backup site in Alabama got hit with the same storm. They actually had UPS tap into their mainframe computer to ship the sales. Each business coped and each will survive. Coping skills that FEMA could have used.

The magazine is Baseline. It’s geared to the high tech industry, but the stories are so informtive that anyone interested in business or technology will find it a good read.

Two days ago, I recalled my grandparent's storm cellar beneath their frame house on the central Kansas plains. In the summer, thunderstorms rolled across the plains with ungodly regularly. And yes, I did see hail the size of baseballs.

My grandfather would get up at night and go outside and look at the southwestern sky. What did he look for? What did he see? Did the roiling clouds speak to him? Lightning would illuminate the forty-thousand-feet wrath-of-God cumulous giants. Were little funnels forming beneath the behemoths? Did the wind have a peculiar moan? I never asked. Never wondered.

Based on what he saw, we would all be herded out of bed and down into the cellar. Or not. We sat on a beat up old couch, staring at the ax and old kerosene lantern and the cinder block walls. Red, orange, yellow, green, white—all the efforts of my grandma’s summer work weighted down the shelves lining those walls. Strawberry jam, apricot jam, peach jam. I can still taste the tart sweetness, mixing with the melting butter on a piece of toast. On another shelf, the red canned tomatoes vied with the apricot, peaches and pears in clear glass canning jars. Green beans, so yummy yet dangerous, with a tendency toward botulism. A summer’s hard work. Leisure only came around after the dinner dishes were washed and dried. What did we talk about? Small town talk. Crops, gardens, gossip, friends, relatives.

Grandpa would leave the cellar to observe the sky again and give the all-clear-go-back-to-bed signal. Or not. How did he always know? Was it spending sixty seasons studying that weather? Sixty seasons on the farm.

He was a great baseball player in his day. I have a great photo of the team. I lived with my grandparents in that tiny Kansas town during the summer when I had my first real job. The house had no air conditioning, not even fans. And Kansas is hot in the summer. I slept upstairs on the big iron bed with my head literally in the window to pick up the slightest breeze. About four in the morning, just when the temperature would be cool enough to sleep, the robins would begin their chirpy endless song, and then all the birds would chime in, an avian chorus expressly designed to awaken the tired sleeper.

I must have spent a whole summer sleep-deprived. Started smoking. Bad. Learned a lot about life. Good. My arches fell because I refused to wear kludgey waitress shoes while I spent all day on my feet on a cement floor. Bad. I had my first crush on a boy. Good. So it goes. You can't tell a fourteen year old anything.