After the tornado

The faces on these sword carrying crusaders belong to four people who can't possibly think any other way than what it was like to grow up with stories of surviving a big tornado. Cars on water towers. My next door neighbors, Steve and Craig were thrown from the car and their father died. At reunions, there are tables of middle aged people huddled toward the center, and there is at least one person at the table--ALWAYS--whose house was destroyed.

What else defines us? We saw the same images of Vietnam, had the same presidents. Marveled that our short principle was a basketball star and some of us knew him by the name our older brothers and sisters called him by--Stubby. Stubby Steck.

Some of us sniffed glue and smoked mountains of pot later (hey not me, I'm just a reporter!). At least two of us are Vietnam era veterans and one of us saw action there--Rick. We're all fairly literate on computers now, two of us are pretty techno oriented when it comes to electronics. Both have education concerning the passage of teeny bits of energy conducted along wires and other fibers. One of us was a rare beauty--still is I guess and one of us lives in about the happiest places I can imagine for vacation. We all are music lovers and we all think of ourselves as artists.

But that Ruskin tornado has more to do with us than we probably let ourselves remember. This big fucking mean wind came ripping through our young lives, just after our parents had pretty much thought they were home free. They'd survived the great depression (or they still remembered the stories their parents told), and they survived World War II. We were all growing up in a housing experiment which still hasn't had rivals to this day, from the standpoint of little boxes all lined up in square neighborhoods, at Volkswagon prices, that they could all claim for their very own. And along comes the great grand daddy of sucking sounds which made Dorothy's seem like the exit valve on a whoopi cushion, but later was the symbol for Ross Perot's description of jobs moving to Mexico. How and why are we so the same, the four of us? If we could compare the dreams and nightmares that we can't remember, or the sketches just below the surface which haven't quite manifested, or the pain and empathy that we repress, or all the SNL sketches that tickle us in the same way, or the joy we show to be reunited on fb or over the radio waves--I'll bet that whirling twister, that devil of destruction, that freaky spiraling funnel cloud has planted itself so deep inside us that just about nothing can ever hurt us again.

We might not be in Kansas anymore, but we sure are lucky we took that magic carpet ride. Toto! Get back here!