LETTERS FROM HOME: MAKING SOMETHING OF STORMY WEATHER AND BUMPY NIGHTS

May 25, 2000

Dear Leslie,

This is the time of year thunderstorms and tornadoes come calling in Southeast Missouri. They arrive like distant relatives from the West, bursting through the door, unsettling our lives awhile and then moving on.

The television stations run beeping messages across the bottom of the picture updating the warnings and watches from the National Weather Service. The public radio station accompanies the spoken warnings with an obnoxious bleat that does get your attention when it interrupts a Beethoven symphony.

The thunderstorms, the tornadoes and the warnings remind us that no matter how digitized and sanitized our lives become, the world is still a very natural place. "Fasten your seat belts," Bette Davis warned the party. "It's going to be a bumpy night."

DC loves tornadoes and storms the way some people love scary movies. Whether sunny or cloudy, she turns on the Weather Channel first thing every morning. You never know when a tornado might drop out of the sky.

A few nights ago, we were supposed to meet a friend at an outdoor bar after I finished work. When a tornado warning was posted just before we were to meet, I phoned DC to tell her not to go until the storm passed. I suggested she phone the bar to alert our friend to the situation, but she drove the few blocks to deliver the warning in person.

Maybe because he's from the East Coast and maybe because he'd just ordered a beer, he laughed at the idea of taking shelter. Grabbing his collar, DC insisted, "You're leaving."

He did leave but refused her invitation to sit out the tornado in our coal bin, which she had outfitted with matches, candles, a flashlight, a blanket and a phone.

If he'd come along and things had gotten really dicey, he and Hank and Lucy would have been required to prostrate themselves in the coal bin before the power of the whirlwind.

Hank and Lucy dislike bad weather, especially the thunder that announces it. They act jumpy and don't want to be left alone. Fenced in the kitchen as they usually are at night, they pulled a jail break when the thunder began a few nights ago. I must have left the gate slightly ajar, and Lucy must have shoved it neatly aside.

Like kids sneaking into their parents' bed, soon they were bounding out of the dark onto ours. It was hot and comforting to have them there.

When I was a kid, my dad used to stay up on stormy nights to make sure a tornado didn't whisk us away. My mother's attitude was fatalistic. She believed if you were meant to die in a tornado, nothing you did could change the outcome.

I am somewhere in between. My respect for the power of nature is healthy, but I also believe in the benevolence -- not the malevolence -- of the Creation.

I was playing the seventh hole a few mornings ago when flashes of lightning began appearing faintly in the sky. This is the moment to bolt for the clubhouse, before the storm got near, but did I? Since the next two holes were on the way to the clubhouse and one of them was only a par 3, I decided to play as I headed for shelter.

The lightning began to crackle. I rationalized that it would be safe to hit my driver off the No. 9 tee since the shaft is graphite and not steel. It was a nice drive. Standing on the green lining up my par putt, I heard the horn signaling all golfers to get off the course. Taking one last practice stroke, I envisioned myself suffering a fate similar to the priest's in "Caddy Shack." He was struck by lightning after cursing the skies when he missed a putt that would have broken the club record.

Since I made my putt, I would have died happy.

Love, Sam