Weather Witness.
When I was in sixth grade I became obsessed with tornadoes. I read everything I could find which, at the time, wasn’t much because the school library was pretty limited. What sparked this obsession was the annual watching of the tornado awareness film which always happened in late spring. It was the same film I’d seen every year since kindergarten so I don’t know what sparked such an intense interest that particular year. I always thought tornadoes were kind of cool and I thought it would be interesting to see one, but before sixth grade the feeling passed quickly. Maybe the information just hit critical mass with me, having been subjected to the same bass baritone narrator intoning about, “Tornadoes: nature’s tidal wave. They wreak untold devastation, destruction, and demolition. For the next twenty minutes we will begin to understand all that scientists don’t understand about these unpredictable natural phenomena that strike every year with frightening regularity…” The film covered how tornadoes were caused by rotating columns of air when cold and warm fronts collided, and what to do if a tornado was coming, which was mainly get away from windows, preferably into a basement or cellar, put your head down, and wait it out. There was even a shot of a group of kids just like us huddling in a line with their heads down, and what always stuck with me was that there was one kid who turned around and looked up. And I thought, yep, that’d be me, even though in an enclosed space safe from a tornado there wouldn’t be anything to see except the wall and ceiling. Still, I wanted to look. After the film we would have a practice drill. We’d be taken out into the hall because for some reason our teachers thought the ideal place to be during a tornado would be a long corridor with doors to the outside at either end. I never questioned this but I never understood it either. The restrooms, which were completely enclosed and had heavy tile communal sinks that looked like they were designed by Antonio Gaudi would have been so much safer. In the hall we had to squat down and put our heads between our knees, and when the teachers turned away I’d look. Sometimes I’d be close enough to the doors I could see the trees outside, branches moving slowly in the breeze.
One afternoon during my sixth grade tornado obsession I was outside and saw a few leaves blow around in a circle, one of those strange miniature vortices you sometimes see twirling leaves or trash and I got really excited. The next day I told my friends I’d seen a dust devil, one of those small tornadoes described in the film we’d watched. And this started a long argument about whether a dust devil could be made of leaves or if it had to be dust. Not that it mattered: what I’d seen was just a light wind curling around itself.
All this came to me the other night when a cold front came through and for a few pensive hours the area to the north of us was under a tornado watch and I realized it was nearly twenty years ago that a tornado hit downtown Nashville. The date was April 16th, 1998, to be precise. I was at work that day, it was the afternoon and there were reports of storms. A group of us were gathered at an office window and we could see the clouds begin to rotate, curling downward. At the time a tornado had never hit downtown Nashville. I’ve never confirmed this but it seemed all of us thought it was impossible, that the tall buildings acted as barriers to any a tornado ever forming. There was a sense among all of us, though, as we watched the clouds gather into a downward funnel, that something very terrible was happening. Someone said, “I think we’d better get away from the windows.”
It was terrible but short-lived. A few hours later when my wife and I drove home together there was an eerie calmness. I was glad it had passed. I had seen enough.
Have you ever accidentally followed someone? Maybe this only happens to me. I’ll set out in a particular direction and there will already be a stranger fifty or a hundred feet in front of me. They’re going to the same place, or maybe they’re just headed in the same direction to a slightly different destination. Either way I start to get very self-conscious that I’m making them uncomfortable because I’m following them. If I can I’ll stop and pretend to be interested in a flower or sign or fire hydrant to give them some time get farther away, but then I think that just looks even weirder. I don’t want to get close, though, or, worse, pass them, because that’ll make them even more uncomfortable, I assume, but if I’m on a schedule I’ll probably pick up the pace because no matter where I’m going I like to be fashionably early. This is especially true when I’m headed home because I’d rather get to the bus stop early than have to run to catch it or, worse, miss the bus entirely.
April 2017-The Freethinkers Anonymous fiscal year runs from April 1st-March 30th for reasons no one can remember and no one really wants to bother to research because the archive is located in the attic and there are wasps up there. This year the team responsible for writing the 2017/2018 annual report looked at the calendar and was faced with a crisis: delay because April 1st was Easter, or go ahead and risk getting egged? After much discussion the decision was made to go ahead when an assistant manager said, “If you’re going to postpone it you better hurry up and do it.” There was also discussion about whether April 2018 would be mentioned in the report, but this was put aside with a company-wide vote affirming that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb with really bad diarrhea.
The university I work for pays me to ride the bus–that is, as long as I’m going to or from work I can swipe my employee ID and ride for free. If I’m riding the bus on my own time, just for fun or going somewhere, of course I pay my own way, because making the university pay for it would be dishonest and unethical and most importantly I don’t know if they check for that sort of thing. And it’s a good program. As a top-level administrator recently put it, “A university is a collection of academic schools all united by a common parking problem,” but that’s another story. Mostly too getting my card out of my wallet when the bus comes trundling along isn’t a problem, although there was one time when I was putting my card back in my wallet and the bus lurched forward. I fell and broke my card into pieces and was prepared to pay the $20 replacement fee but the people at the card office told me the replacement fee was only for lost cards and they gave me a new one for free. So if I ever do lose my card I know I just need to steal someone else’s, smash it, and pretend it’s mine and hope they don’t ask me to prove I’m a 79-year old Sri Lankan professor of entomology.
There are things you just don’t realize until you’re in a certain situation. For instance I never realized before that if you take the worst aspects of a doctor’s office and a J.C. Penney’s and put them together you get an eyewear store until I went shopping for glasses and the store was vaguely clinical with a lot of neutral colors and uncomfortable furniture but also mirrors that reflected back the dismal reality that I’m getting old and a lot of pictures of happy models wearing glasses, all of whom seemed to magnify the dismal reality that I’m getting old. And I wondered why none of them were modeling contacts until I realized that contacts don’t have a lot of stylistic variety and that basically this year’s contacts are going to look exactly like last year’s contacts, which actually makes contacts a better option if you care enough about fashion that you’re willing to start each day by sticking a small piece of plastic in your eye.
Supposedly there’s a Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” I say “supposedly” because I once asked a Chinese scholar about that and she said, “I’ve never heard any such thing in my life.” It’s probably an expression some guy cooked up and to make it sound more interesting he decided to claim it was a Chinese curse. Uninteresting times can be a curse too. Recently I took a trip by Greyhound bus to Cincinnati. I made the same trip last year and then it was interesting because it had been about a quarter of a century since I’d taken a Greyhound bus anywhere and things had changed significantly. This time all the things that were different before were still the same. Well, almost all the same. The men’s restroom had just been repainted and I went in there and literally watched paint dry. Then, because I have a smartphone and the station had free wifi, I went out and looked up “watching paint dry” in Wikipedia. Smartphones mean we never have to be bored ever again, and I had mine loaded up with podcasts and music, and even if the battery went dead I had my bag with my journal and copy of Mark Twain’s 
When we stopped in Louisville I went into the restaurant/gift shop to get coffee. Then, still holding my coffee, I wandered out then tried to go back in. “Sir!” yelled the man behind the counter. “This is for customers only! Once you go out you can’t come back!” This was more baffling than it was interesting.