The Tornado Warning

It started for me with a drive home from work on a mild Spring night, and it ended with my family huddled together in an absurd yet touching family-bonding moment. As I was driving home from work the weathermen were already forecasting a stormy and turbulent night in Atlanta. By the time I got home, tornado warnings were scattered across the entire metro area. Our 2 older sons, Alex and Adam, were completely unworried and in full Big Brother Bully-mode, doing their best to further frighten their younger brother Christopher. They cruelly suggested watching the movie “Twister” or “Wizard of Oz” to get in the spirit of the moment. Christopher, who has loved maps since he was a toddler, wasn’t enjoying the maps he was seeing on this night. The weather maps on TV highlighted the areas in the path of a confirmed tornado…and our house was well within the boundaries of the deadly red-flashing trapezoid…along with the houses of just about all my friends and relatives in the area. It’s a strange and somewhat surreal thing to be able to watch with such accuracy the path of a potentially deadly tornado. They showed the projected path of the storm detailed to the exact minute of its expected arrival, and they’d say things like…”for those of you in the Dacula area, you have approximately 6 minutes to prepare for this storm”. Six minutes? How do you prepare for something like that in 6 minutes? Well, my curiosity got the best of me and I ended up wasting about 1-2 of those precious minutes outside observing the scene. The second I walked outside I could feel the potential hazard in the air. The winds swirled in odd directions. The rain was sporadic…light then heavy, heavy then light. The sky flashed with near-continuous lightning coming from the exact spot on the horizon I anticipated it would be coming from, churning closer and closer in our general direction. And most noticeable of all, in the distance in all directions, the persistent wail of air-raid sirens could be heard…a sound I had never experienced before.

So I went back in the house. A friend in an adjoining neighborhood called me on my cell phone and asked if were watching the weather. He was concerned because he knew my house had no basement, so he told me to keep an eye on the weather. I told him I would...not fully aware how that would help me in the slightest. Another friend texted me and told me to “be safe”…their family was huddling in a closet. The TV weathermen were now advising people in the path of the storm to hide in an interior closet on the lowest level of the house. Christopher moved from the living room couch to my bedroom, which we determined had the safest closet in the house. The people on TV recommended putting bicycle helmets and shoes on to fend off potential flying debris. Alex and Adam wanted nothing to do with that. Suddenly they were taking this storm seriously, and their focus was on protecting their collection of “Amazing Spiderman” comic books sitting in their bedrooms. They quickly started moving the boxes from their room on one side of the house to our closet on the opposite side of the house. I didn’t have the heart to tell them, but by the time they were done with that, the storm had already moved passed us and into another county.

It turns out we weren’t in the direct path of this storm. But the randomness and suddenness of these events can certainly cause you to ponder things in a different way. A tornado, like any great challenge in life, is very real for the people it touches directly, but it can be viewed as a metaphor, and a reminder, for the rest of us. As my family gathered in my bedroom, and as the storm approached, I realized quite simply there are very few things that really matter in life besides family…except perhaps a very impressive collection of Spiderman comic books.