I feel pretty sure God said He was going to stop doing that to people.

I love bad weather. I hate flying.

Putting the two together does not help, because the spectrum on which they reside is of equal value. Both haunt my dreams, and continuously.

I’m hoping…against hope I would imagine since we’re entering that stage of the season where thunderstorms lurk around the farthest oak trees, down the highway, and then appear suddenly, from the limb tops…still, I’m holding out that the weather will be nice toward the end of June when I must board a plane and fly to Tacoma, Washington.

For funsies, you say?  No.

Not for funsies.

My thoughts exactly.

For competition. The community theatre I work with is taking a play to Nationals, this year, and those are being held in Tacoma, Washington.  As the director, I have no choice but to get on a plane, and fly to an airport, where I will de-board and get on another plane and fly to another airport.

I’ve already had nightmares, now, for weeks.  We won regionals back in March. We are now in June. That is like, what, more than a week, at least. That much math I can do.

Last night, though, perhaps a shimmer of calm?, I dreamed I was on a plane flying to Washington, and I was actually doing all right. Of course, there were large beds in the plane, and a high ceiling, and a bar, and it was at night, and the windows had heavy curtains that were closed, and so OK, basically, it was a house, not a plane, it was a flying house.  

Whatever, get off my back.

What’s important is that we landed, this time. In Washington. And we had to grab a taxi which was, in fact, a boat with wheels, in fact, eight of them, and it was very cold in Washington; I had no jacket, so the cab driver gave me his scarf, which I never gave back to him.  On the way to the airport, because in my dream I had apparently only flown all the way to Washington to take a taxi to yet another airport and fly right back, I got to see two moose mate.

I guess that’s the way you’d say that.

It wasn’t a real pleasure to watch, but I was rather unable to do anything about it. (Maybe make it an -ing word. I saw two moose mating).

The point is, I made the trip there and back and all was well.

But, if the sky looks like it does today, I may not get on that plane. Even though Lyle says I have to because the ticket’s already been paid for. And, money spent is a big bag of guilt. That much we all know, huh.

(Sidebar: one of my students today told me her initials were B.A.G., and that she didn’t know it was “stupid” until she got an L.L. Bean bookbag that Christmas she was in third grade and there, emblazoned on it were her initials, which, her friends quickly and readily identified as being a word that also described the thing itself. They were smart children, I guess. 

Please tell me that you’d laugh at her, too?)

I don’t know exactly when I became obsessive about bad weather. I’m not negatively affected by it, like my friend Angie, who, no matter what time of day or night it is, will call you every minute of the hour until the storm passes to make sure you’re alive, or in a basement, or a closet, so forth, and so on.

She’s as bad as U.L. Except he calls every minute of the hour, everyday, regardless.

But, at some point, in my tender years, which I should tell you only came to their end last month, I began to hoard, in my subconscious, some irrational attachment to severe weather. The worse the weather, the greater my fear and enjoyment of that fear, I can’t explain it, but it’s that feeling that makes my groin tickle, in a good way. I was a man born in crisis, so I suppose I have an affinity for it.

Never know where you'll find a promise.

Amanda often says what I’ve heard U.L. say before: there’s a safety in the sense of having something happen that is so much larger than we are. To be made to feel small is an equalizer, a reminder that we’re more alike than not. Despite the fact that I heard a sermon once which indicated that we bring destruction on ourselves. I heard that sermon, no lie, at least three times, in the immediate wake of Katrina. I was embarrassed and upset, I couldn’t accept that anyone would believe that.

I mean, I feel pretty sure God said He was going to stop doing that to people.

What I mean to say is after great tragedy, comes the simple reminder that wealth, age, race, gender, status, none of it holds back the Hem of Fate. It drapes without consideration.

As much as I dream about flying and crashing and all the anxieties that come with air travel…I also dream, and a great deal more, of tornados. Specifically, tornados. Out of all the bad weather phenomena.

They’re not on my list of phobias like being struck by lightning (which comes I think from wearing metal rims on my glasses all these years), or ingesting glass (I blame GamVa for this – she gave me a book, when I was very young, about the Roman Emperors and How They Dealt With Their Foes. In particular, the story of Elagabalus and his feeding ground glass to his “invited guests,” i.e. his competitors, really seems to have stuck. To this day, if I’m in the kitchen and cooking and I drop a jar, a plate, anything, and it shatters, the entire kitchen must be put on lockdown and cleaned, glass or not. FYI: I will not drink from a chipped glass, either).

No, tornados are just wild. A fascination, not a phobia. A fear, not a fault.

But, why I dream about them is anybody’s guess.

Mississippi isn’t in Tornado Alley, but we get our fair share of them. I think they probably cause more damage in our state, per capita, than elsewhere. I’m not sure, but for some reason, I’ve grown up in awe of their beautiful devastation. They remind me a little of family reunions…except you’d have to share the basement.

Amanda sent me an email awhile back describing the “meaning,” or “implication” of my dream motifs. Along with tornados, I tend to dream about shoes and feet, a good deal, and almost nightly, about teeth. I was intrigued by the “meanings” these habitual images portray in my dreams, but also, a little exhausted by it. 

Here, read for yourself about tornados:

Tornados
To see a tornado in your dream, suggests that you are experiencing some extreme emotional outbursts and temper tantrums. Is there a situation or relationship in your life that may be potentially destructive? To dream that you are in a tornado, signifies that you are feeling overwhelmed and out of control. You will be met with a series of disappointments for the next week or so. Your plans will be filled with complications. To see several tornadoes in your dream, represent people around you who are prone to violent outbursts and shifting mood swings. It may also symbolize a volatile situation or relationship.

 That’s hardly conducive to a good night’s sleep.

You only got two options.

And yet, I wait, in anticipation, to go to sleep each night…mostly, I should be honest here, because I can’t wait to see where my dreams will take me. I do curl up with some trepidation, as I certainly don’t want to get caught in a nightmare. Last night, for instance, was a close call. I’ve only had a few lucid dreams in my lifetime. So, it’s a risk.

But, as I sit here typing, I hear a soft peal of thunder in the background, and in that bizarre way that bad weather has over me, I feel comfortable knowing that if danger is stinging the edges of these clouds, I’m as helpless as anyone else to it, and so, why worry.

 

No, instead, I’m thinking to myself: I might as well take a nap – what happens is going to happen, either way. So, if you’ll excuse me…I need to brush my teeth and settle into the couch…because I’ve got a tornado to catch.

 

He’d just always wanted a hearse, he said.

U.L. and I like to take Sunday drives, after dinner, each week.

There’s no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that’s found some way to stick, even to this day).

What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what’s being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still, when I found out that Navratilova was an honest-to-goodness lesbian who barely got the rights to animal visitation; I’d thought she was trying to sell her dogs on national television and had been arrested for it. I hadn’t realized that what I’d been watching was a court trial, of a “divorce,” per se.

This will be the death of me.

It’s not that there’s all that many places to see or drive by in my small, Haven Kimmel-sized hometown. It just gives us time to ourselves, to draw out the necessary conversations that seem to be so much a part of this post-Sunday Dinner ritual.

I always have to do the drive, in his Cadillac, while he sits in the passenger side regaling the same stories, world without end, that he does every Sunday.  Mrs. So-and-So used to live there in that house until her nephew got high on “the drugs” and broke in and bludgeoned her to death, and then dug up that gorgoues purple clematus, for no reason at all and left a big hole in the yard; or, that house is where Old This-and-That caught fire and burned to death when lightning struck his hot water heater, he was asleep, which you shouldn’t do in an electrical storm; you know, stories like that.

It’s too, too painfully southern.

I love every minute of them, though, I really do, despite the nature of this blog. I truly relish these drives.

And every now and then, he recalls a new story, a new moment shared, a story stolen, either at a funeral home, or at Piggly Wiggly, a grocery store that he affectionately refers to as The Pig, when writing his checks there. He used to concoct grocery lists in an aisle-by-aisle fashion, so familiar was he with their layout. It certainly maximized shopping time. Gave you more time to socialize. 

I’ll have to tell you later about an incident that involved a church scavenger hunt, a cucumber, and Miss Ada Lee.

Yesterday, though, as we drove past the sod-soaked fields and yards of our neighbors, the rain has truly been remarkable and of legend, here lately – I keep anticipating animals, approaching two-by-two, gathering on the carport, staring eagerly at the Cadillac, trying to figure out how to get into it. It’s a large Cadillac, and so, somewhat similar to an ark, at least, I’d think, to present-day animals, who I imagine are about as intelligent as the rest of us in the 21st century – yet, we found ourselves taking a new road, a different route, this time.  It was only new because we usually just drive past it and not down it, it’s a dead end, but we didn’t do that yesterday. No, sir.

We drove down it, to the cul-de-sac, and there at the end was a hearse.

U.L. told me that it was an old one, from Nowell’s. And that the man who lived in this house (the one we were practically in the driveway of , so I began to turn the car around before we aroused too much suspicion), had bought it. Because he wanted it. He did not, in fact, work at Nowell’s.

He’d just always wanted a hearse, he said. 

This, U.L. discovered while purchasing some Cool Whip and fresh coconut shavings at Piggly Wiggly, preparing to make his celebrated Coconut Cake, and this man, we’ll call him Frank (because that’s his name) was standing behind him, bragging about the fact that he’d gotten a good deal on that death trap of a hearse at Nowell’s. It only had 40,000 miles on it, and they took six grand for it, as is.

To which U.L. registered surprise. The town indeed must be smaller than he thought. People died all the time around here; it was a hobby. To have only amassed 40,000 miles didn’t seem right. It should have higher mileage on it than that.

I'd rather not know what's in the back.

The man, Frank, now enjoyed driving the hearse down Highway 397, fast as he could (right up to 60 mph, he said), with his two dogs, part-Beagle/part-Yankee, he’d gotten them off a cousin in Chicago, a shovel, and a plastic tarp. He’d drive up and down 397  until he happened upon some version of roadkill, and as a free service to the city, he’d stop the car, pull the shovel out from the back (it had not come with the purchase of the car, as I’d thought) and delicately carry them off to a final resting place, one less likely to be continuously mowed over by Broncos…and Cadillacs.

I trust he had very well-behaved dogs.

U.L. said a hearse was the last thing he would want to ride in. Frank told him not to worry, it would be.

Every Sunday, we do this. Dinner, small talk, a car ride, the same stories, sometimes new ones, and I love it.

And…I also hate it.

All at the same time, I amass these feelings in my bones, in my blood, my knuckles, and it’s usually with a fork of mashed potatoes, or butterbeans, or peach cobbler on its way to my mouth. It’s a saturating, obligatory, exhausting, and lovely wont.

One that I’ve often felt suffocated by, and I don’t like admitting that, but it’s true, because it seems too rote, rhetorical to matter.  I’d never been able to put into anything other than a simple series of words…maybe I wasn’t able to give it better context, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to, because it was of a higher order of thinking than I was able to get to on my own…

…until this morning.

Amanda, having been gone this past weekend to a wedding (yet another one!) in Memphis, had finally returned home, laden with Pottery Barn accessories for the den and bathroom, and this morning, she was starved for my attention, as best friends often become when separated (I starve for hers, as well, and we both ache and starve for Siciliana’s, Erin’s, and vice versa…would that we could all be thinner from such friendly famine – which is just slightly less oxymoronic than friendly fire, to the soul, anyway), she came bounding into my bedroom and woke me up.

It was noon, so I, now that I’m fully awake, have forgiven her. But, in her usual way, she had a passage she wanted to share with me.  This is something we all do, and constantly, this sharing works with each other. Usually, Amanda has more profound (and, also, published) pieces to share with me: cummings, Yeates, Hurston, et al. She is, I’d argue, far more well read than any of us, especially me.

Despite being famously non-auditory in almost anything I do, I humor her and listen. It’s a selection from Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. From page 35, she read:

The child comes home, and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. […] But this thing in itself is not love. It’s just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation.  

I heard every word of that.

I had to look at them, actually, I had to take the book and look at the words, themselves, I was that bothered by the accuracy of his prose. Once, during my first tryst with graduate school (in English), I took a Fugitive Poets class under the remarkably affable, fatherly, likable, and slightly off-key Dr. Phillips, and had read of Warren’s poetry, along with Davidson’s and the tragic Jarrell’s, which struck me less for its poignancy and more because he stepped in front of a bus and was killed, perhaps on purpose. I’d decided, as a poet, Warren’s work was soft, if terse, and what prose we read of his, I found suggestive of needing a closer editor…I felt that way about this piece as well, but somehow it didn’t matter in this context.

The original electric chair.

I was absolutely struck by the meaning, and remembered that meaning is what the reader gets to do, gets to fiddle around with…at least, ultimately.  (I’m a Fish advocate, Reader-Response, etc.). Critics, theorists can say whatever they need to (everyone needs a job, right?), but what resonates is if the reader takes up the mallet and strikes the gong.

Nothing else matters at all.

And this passage was so captively southern, so perfectly southern, so bitterly southern, that …it finally upset me. Warren had, all those years ago, in his novel about a corrupt politician, written down so clearly what I’d been trying to say myself. I guess that’s why I couldn’t: he’d already used the words. 

And had done so, so irreproachably.

I guessed then, after the reading was over, that the only way for me to climb to this higher order, is to do what he did, what they all did…

…just, take off for the open road, and find a quiet, muted place and live out the rest of my days, a fugitive.