It's a Twister!

I grew up in Indiana, the Bible Belt, Tornado Alley. Having lived in some major, East Coast cities, I kind of get the same questions asked of me when I mention growing up here. Did you know David Letterman is from there? Ummmm. Yeah. It's really conservative there, right? Ummmmm. Yeah. Have you ever seen a tornado? Ummmmm. Yeah.

Kids all over the country do fire drills at school. Kids during the cold war did bomb drills. I'm guessing kids in California do earthquake drills. We did tornado drills. The local tornado siren was located right behind my school, so every Friday at 11:00 am, we lost a little more of our hearing and we often conducted tornado drills. This entailed filing into the hallway in an orderly fashion, scrunching down on the floor and putting our biggest book over our heads... most often a math book. At least it was good for something! We did this so often and the siren went off every week, so now when I hear an alarm, I don't even get a tiny burst of adrenaline. I don't often "take shelter" as I'm supposed to. I'm kinda numb to the whole rig-a-marole.

But yes. I've seen a tornado... a little too close for comfort. On June 29th, 1981 (I'm guessing at the year, but it's somewhere around there), I was taking a shower, getting ready for my brother, R's, birthday party. I was about 11 years old, so I was very conscious about my privacy. The rule in our house was... never lock the door when you're taking a shower. We promise we won't come in, but if you fall and hit your head and bleed to death, we won't be able to help. So much to my dismay, I couldn't lock the damn door. So there I was, blissfully using up all of the hot water, letting it stream over me, when suddenly the door shot open! WTF!?!?!??!

"Mooooommmmmm!" I yelled, as my mother whipped the shower curtain open. Hello! Can't a girl get a minute to herself??


"Get out," she demanded. Something in her face told me not to argue. I didn't, until she slapped a nylon blue nightgown over me, which stuck to every wet spot. GAH! She grabbed my hand and started tugging me into the hallway.

I put my foot down."STOP!" I screamed.

She practically ripped my arm out of the socket. "Tornado," she hissed.

We didn't have a basement. Our next door neighbor, who worked for The National Weather Service, did. So when twister weather arrived, we hung out in their basement. But our yards were big. So it was a bit of a run to get there. (It looks a lot bigger when you're human-sized and a tornado is coming!)

So my mom had me by one hand, dragging me behind her (still bitching up a storm) and had R's birthday cake, Texas Sheet Cake (yum!) in the other hand. We ran outside and started across the yards to the L's house. My dad had my two brothers and a bag of presents. They were ahead of us.

And I stopped dead in my tracks. I could see the tornado bearing down on us. It didn't look like the twister in The Wizard of Oz. It was darker and bigger and ever so much louder. And it was headed straight for us! Well, that lit a fire under my ass and I left my mother standing there with cake in her hands. See ya!

The tornado ended up touching down on the Indiana University campus and took out a bunch of farms just north of us. But we had a birthday party in the L's basement, complete with cake, presents and pop (a treat, since we never had any at home). It was actually a fun tornado, in the end.