I only ever saw my dad hit my mom one time. It wasn’t out of anger but frustration. We were in the car, traveling during a terrible thunderstorm. My dad pulled over as the wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain. My mother was crying and screaming, she wanted to get out of the car to run into the church. The rain, then hail, made the two block walk dangerous and my dad tried to tell her. She wasn’t able to listen, my dad slapped her, then grabbed her and held her tight. The storm eventually passed and my dad took us all home, in silence.
We were in the car because whenever a storm came my mother had to get out of the house.
We would leave and go somewhere else, anywhere with people. During the day, if a storm came we would go to the Ames Department store. We would go inside and walk around, I would mainly look at the toys. We could watch the storm through the big windows to the parking lot but it was impossible to hear the thunder.
But the real fun came at night. If a storm was predicted, when we went to bed we would be told to keep our clothes nearby on the floor. Like fire fighters socks in the shoes, pants and shirt handy, we needed to be ready to go when the call came.
“Wake up, there’s a storm”
We would get up and pile into the car and go out. Good nights we went to the hospital, the big waiting room that people sat in waiting to visit someone upstairs in a room or being treated in Emergency. My mom chose there because it was a fallout shelter. The yellow and black sign that looked like a weird pizza to me, the result of Cold War fears, hung outside the building. For mom that was safety. We would go in, climb a set of hard stairs and then sit in plastic covered furniture under the watchful eye of the Pinkerton guard at his desk. I always tried to getting pennies for the gumball machine and was impressed I got two squares not one round one.
The large window that look out toward the river and the church parking lot gave us a clear view of the storm as it passed. Once, my mother went into the back and came out calmer and more comfortable. She fell asleep on the ride home.
If we were in luck however we would go to the all night truck stop at the edge of town,
Aptly named The Edge of Town. There we would cram into a booth as the server brought the children chocolate milk and my parents coffee. We sat among overnight truckers, drunk college students (Denny’s had not come to the North Country) and often women seeking comfort from a driver or offering it for coin.
This was my normal. Storms meant you awoke, went someplace and waited them out. I didn’t realize how strange that was until college. When I lived in the dorms I was always surrounded by people so the realization came when I had an apartment and was sharing my bed through a late night storm. I awoke and quickly turned on the TV to watch the storm information on the weather channel. I felt anxious and wanted to leave but didn’t know where to go as my companion grunted questions about why I was up and to go back to sleep. I realized that maybe not everyone reacts to the storms the way my family did. She fell back asleep in the glow of the TV on mute as I watched the radar show the storm move off to the east. As the weather quieted I slipped back under the sheets and continued the night.
Over the years I have mellowed on my reaction to storms. I watched my son grow up not caring about them. But I still have to follow them, where they are, where they are going, when the threat is over. Smart phones allow me to monitor this with stealth I didn’t have before. I still must be aware of all that is going on. Storms are always my nemesis and I must conquer them each time they come.
Now you might ask why I carry this through life. It is simple. For my mom every time lightening flashed and was followed by a clap of thunder she was no longer a mother of 7, a wife, a survivor or a warrior that I saw her as most of the time. She was the small child, one who heard the planes fly overhead in Mannheim 150 times in the years before she was 10 years old. A child who hid in stairwells and basements and prayed with neighbors that the next bomb wouldn’t destroy their house, their school or their lives. A child who saw the flashes of light at the city edge and waited for the rolling thunder of the bomb’s concussion as it rolled down the streets in the dark of night. I have never faced death at the hands of an anonymous pilot dropping explosives on my home, but I inherited the fear that was delivered as well. I carry with me the scars that she earned as a girl who for her 5th birthday saw her cousin’s house go up in flames from a British incendiary device. The flash of lightening and the sound of thunder of a simple summer storm carried so much more for my mom, and still today for me. A legacy of a war fought against an unspeakable evil that spawned this irrational response of punishment on the people of Germany. My mom is gone, but that punishment lives on in me, a little less pronounced than in her, but still there. I hope my son didn’t pick up on my reaction to the weather. I hope my son will be able to sleep through the storms in his life. But I worry about others.
As drone strikes rain death from far away on camps in Middle Eastern deserts, as bombs take out both ancient buildings and modern apartments in places like Aleppo and Baghdad. I wonder as cruise missiles shake up the centers of the oldest cities in the world. I ponder when suicide vests destroy pizza places and concert venues what exactly will their legacy be. Will there be some mother or father, 20 years from now telling their children to keep their clothes close, there might be storm? Will those children 40 years from now struggle with the weather like I do, knowing full well it is not rational and yet continuing to live in that manner. When will it stop, and will we ever have the will to make it stop?
