august, or maybe july. it was a long time ago. many moons and pounds ago. i think it was a hurricane. it's nice to remember. i sometimes daydream that heaven is a giant library where you can see your life's span charted by any category you can think of. like nightmares or wet dreams. or hurricanes ...
a few weeks ago fb reminded me of a post from a year ago. i like that. it was like a time dart. brought us right back. very outoftheblue. and when the hurricane hit, i thought about old memories and about how i always forget the weather from previous seasons. ...did it snow last winter? yeah it snowed last winter. it must've... the bee's nests were real high off the ground last summer. ... oh yeah, it did snow a lot - we kept making those admiral peary jokes, remember?
2011 hurricane irene. heads up the east coast causing massive panic and then massive destruction. first time i can remember seeing school cancellations in august. as for maine, we battened down the hatches. boats were coming out early. national weather service declares state of emergency. mannix, who wears some crazy alpha-male goatee these days, discussed astutely the impact of the wind on the trees. all the while curling a 10 pound dumbbell.
we went to bed on the eve of the storm in calm weather, but closed all the windows. quiet night, listening to the wind and reading anatole france. then woke up at 7 in the morn and walked jack. awesome eerie sky, wind that wasn't cool or warm. but blowing pretty well. it was ... nice. so rare and so gentle on the skin, and combined with the absence of anybody else on the streets, lended to the early morning an otherworldly atmosphere. walked right up north street, back down bedford. a fine morning to walk your dog. topically, dozens dead, none in maine. sebastian bach's home' allegedly destroyed. huge power outages. a guy commented that two people in florida were killed in irene related rip currents. scary way to go - to have the sea pull you right into its chaos. probably really loud. the today show broadcast on that sunday morning (aug. 28) day of the new moon. they kept telling us how 30 mile winds at ground level became 50 mile winds at 30 stories up. and how 50 stories up, it rose to 500 mile winds. fuzzy math. al reported from the boardwalk that the ocean has met the bay, which last happened when triceratops strolled the ancient pavilion of triassic forest. back then nyc was just another couple million acres on pangaea.
a light drizzle became a heavy rain about ten minutes after me and jack got home. there was still power and so, coffee. after the today show i'm sure netflix came on. the today show, by the by, ain't the same without meredith. later we lost power for a couple of hours. into the darkness of the evening. checking fb later on, tweedle dee posted something about irene being a bitch. points for personification, i suppose. good show, lad.
the blue angels canceled sunday's show. but maybe they went up anyway. a cool thought, those jets superspeeding through the storm. maybe it's the pilot equivalent of a hedge maze. first one that can figure out how to get into the eye wins. no radar equipment allowed. some of those guys must wear goatees, right? and chew double mint gum? when a pilot is backing out, and he misjudges and bumps another jet, reckon he just slowly rolls away, then guns it into the wild blue yonder?
hurricane bob is the one i remember. 1991. i was 15. august 17 into 18. sunday into monday. i would've been working at the gas station then. those early days up there. i think my parents were away then. nashville? i remember being home, during an especially gray stretch, again as evening descended, with pat. and leigh. i was reading the bachman books. can't remember which story. maybe apt pupil. something intimate about steven king with dusk coming on and no power. and in august. on the heels of lots of free time and just before the cramped boredom of school-life schedule takes effect.
i think it was the smell of the air when i walked jack. it brought me back to the gray afternoon of hurricane bob. i think the memory materialized itself as willow branches swaying in the wind. lots of ticks on those branches. thinking on it, on those scarce details that i can recall, a little more of the younger days come into focus. it's like shining a flashlight into the basement. across the floor and up one of the walls. it comes to rest on the smashing pumpkins poster that you stuck with thumbtacks over billy corgan's eyes because of that one weird night when they followed you across the room again and again, even after the lights were out. and you thought maybe you were crazy then? now you know better.
my family: lots of playing cards around the table. til we hated each other. shoveling for my dad. waiting for the truck to get there to collect us, then out in the storm, then home playing cards or reading. and televisionnnnnnn. look, i've gone and idealized it. pretty cool though. a lot of love. a bit of crazy. that's today and yesterday and about 230 million years ago for ya. maybe heaven is just getting back to sit in on those experiences whenever you like. til you hate each other. maybe it's where hurricanes are created and set loose. maybe you had similar thoughts during the hurricane?
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