Hurricane thoughts

1. I remember being in at least three of these as a kid, and back then I lived less than a quarter mile from the ocean. Far from my mind as a child were the things that usually trouble people during big storms: mortality; property damage; an entire refrigerator full of rotten food; clearing heaps and heaps of brush from the lawn; lost crops. My main memory of these storms was this: This is really, really boring.

Looking back, "boring" was really a good thing, as it meant that our roof didn't blow off or anything dramatic. I think we lost a few windows here and there to high winds, and the yard was a total wreck - a potpourri of fallen branches, fallen trees, and who knows what else, all heavy with water. It's just that there was nothing to do. My parents, my slightly a.d.d. little brother, our two cats, and this mysterious old lady neighbor who only seemed to come over during hurricanes would all huddle in our basement, beginning well before the storm hit and lasting long after it seemed reasonable to go back upstairs. I'm pretty sure this old lady came over becaue her house didn't have a basement level, but it always made the quarantine even more uncomfortable as she was clearly one of those adults who hated children (or maybe just the stir-crazy, locked in the basement with no electricity kind).  While the power remained on I was okay. I'd bring a pile of chapter books down to read, and other than the cement floor issue and the inability to shut my brother out of my space, it was more or less how I would spend any other day.

The trouble always began for me when the lights inevitably went out. My brother would get even more fidgety and sitting in the dark with this old lady I didn't know kind of gave me the creeps. And of course there was the plain fact of not being able to read anymore. I wasn't allowed to read by the one window in case the glass blew in and I wasn't allowed to squander flashlight batteries on keeping myself entertained. The radio was on but it was forever news, news, weather, news, weather and it bored me to tears. I tried to just go to sleep but that never worked, either, probably again because of that whole lying on a concrete slab stuffed into a Care Bears sleeping bag business.

A bathroom and food break was permitted as necessary, but the best time to do this was as the eye of the storm passed over. For those unfamiliar with hurricanes, this is when the winds and rain stop and everything gets eerily quiet and still. With the imminent threat of smashing glass and trees tumbling at a standstill, I could go to the bathroom and get a snack without my mother shrilly calling from the basement for me to hurry up and get my butt back down there.

Even once the storm ended, the boredom didn't. The power stayed off for days - once over a week; the phone lines were out almost as long. The yard was off-limits, and the meals got stranger and stranger as we plowed through whatever we had in the house. I remember one time just begging and begging to go to McDonald's - which I didn't even particularly like - just becuae I had heard that morning over the radio that they had re-opened and this seemed like a viable way to get the hell out of the house.

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Now I am an adult with a few (though not all) of the adult-type storm worries that never concerned me as a child. But I will say this: even with the internet, and the power still on, and adulthood levels of patience and nobody here to interrupt my reading I am still bored.  So now I have the perhaps paranoid fear / nervous anticipation of my windows blowing in or a tornado striking plus an unfocused attention, a strange inability to just zone out and get absorbed in a book. I could even read by flashlight later if I wanted, or turn the radio on to rock-n-roll. These are the choices I can make as an adult, but at this particular moment this revelation is alarmingly not as gratifying as I'd imagined.


2. Another thought, 12 hours later: Irene, thank you for being such a wienie. I didn't even lose power. The basement didn't flood. Thank you for that.