Storms About Town...

I was sitting watching TV yesterday and a storm is blowing in to the neighborhood. It was getting dark, the wind was blowing and off in the distance I could hear thunder rolling. The thunder got louder as it approached and I could tell this was going to be a good one.

As I sat there and the storm got closer, a loud clap of thunder roared just above our house. The walls shook and the scared dogs ran into the small rooms of the house as if it would protect them further from harm. Relaxing now since I like storms, I began to lull in my chair and drift off to a nap. I had finished my paper, the house was quiet and with a thunderstorm was in the area: I was thinking “What a perfect Sunday.” CRACK! The walls shook again, a clap of thunder roared through the house and the TV popped and blinked as did the lights. Our house had been hit by lightning.

I looked at the TV and it had been reduced to the RGB colors that make it a color TV set: The only problem was it was green in the right corner, blue in the left and red on the bottom. Then the middle was a purple color I had only seen in a MS Windows color scheme called eggplant.

I turned the TV off as I sat sad now knowing I would have to watch the small TV from the bedroom since this one was fried. I let the TV sit and relax for awhile while I checked out the rest of the house. All but upstairs seemed fine. I had not checked upstairs because the baby and my wife were asleep in a nap.

I turned the TV back on and it was actually repaired. The lights had gone back to normal and the set was working fine again. I was very pleased. One reason was we do not have the money to shell out for another TV right now. Moreover, the other was this TV has been active since around 1996 and has been through so much already and weathered well. It is still a great TV set.

So later while I was upstairs, I turned on the TV and it was in the same condition as the other one was. The RGB was burned out on it. This one however, is a newer set but much cheaper so I am fearful it may be on the road to the electronic nether world. It still works but it is a headache to watch. We’ll let it rest and see if it clears up on its own.

MORE FUN
This week I have box seats to see the White Sox play. That will be fun. Then on Sunday, we have seats near the patio to watch them and get some free food too. That will be a lot of fun!

THE BABY
My little girl is starting to show off her smarts. She has basically sat dormant and quietly absorbed so much information from either conversations with us or watching her favorite TV shows. We have been doing flash cards with her and she knows almost all of them. For the most part, the ones she misses are a little misleading in the way they are drawn and they definitely look like other objects than the ones she is supposed to be naming but she is still getting a large vocabulary.

That got me to thinking about my language. The last thing I want my little girl to be doing in pre-school is cursing at the teacher. I need to reel in my language and be more observant of her recognition of vocabulary so it increases with appropriate speak and not colorful metaphors.

CELEBRATION
My wife’s birthday was this past week and we have been a bit on the broke side. I only gave her a card for her birthday and she graciously let me cook some stuff for her, which she ate despite taste being the blessed woman she is. Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up soon so I hope I can make it up to her.

WEATHER AND SADNESS
I watched a show last night on Discovery called Raging Planet. They covered Floods, Hurricanes and lightning. During the flood show, they talked of the Storm Surge from Katrina and this man told a story about how he was on top of his house during the first hours of the surge with his granddaughters. The youngest was three years old. The surge lifted the house from its foundation and floated it down the street into a tree. The jar was so hard that it knocked the three year old into the surge and she was gone.

Now first, I was crying because this poor little girl suffered a horrible death in the black water in the middle of the night. Then I felt anger swell up in me in that this little girl was trusting her grandfather, who was not that old, to care for her and protect her. My first question is Why did you stay?! If you want to stay and be stupid that’s fine. Kill yourself. But those kids did not deserve that because you didn’t want to go. That baby is dead because YOU didn’t do what you should have as an adult, a guardian a GRANDFATHER!

I thought of how I would feel if I saw KB fall into the water like that. I’m going in after her and I am dying with her in my arms before I ever let her just get sucked into the darkness like that and then sit coldly on a documentary and say she feel off the house into the water and she was gone and not shed a tear. The man didn’t even look like he cared!

Why was the baby there? Why didn’t you leave and get those kids somewhere safe? It’s not right. And I don’t want to hear about how hard it was to get out. This man knew when and what was coming and he stayed. Now a three year old little baby never gets to experience what its like to long for summer break during a boring class at school. She doesn’t get to have her first kiss from a boy or taste her first cotton candy at a fair. She doesn’t get to look up at her Grandfather and say thank you for taking me away during the storm. She had that chance taken from her by someone who didn’t want to leave.

I cried last night and I cry right now as I sit here thinking about it. All the children that this story embodies from such tragedies. The little smiles and experiences they shared are now just memories of a child that never grew up and never shared the joys and sadness of life with the people they love as one is supposed to.

Back to work. I need to shake this off and love my daughters and sons.