Talking dogs and bumpy nights

May 8, 2003

Dear Patty,

Tuesday night at a local night spot called the River City Yacht Club, I was listening to a dog named Sylvia talk about life as a canine. Sylvia's concerns were universal: food, shelter and sex. She sounded like a reasonable dog.

Sylvia is a character in a play. When the director suddenly interrupted the dress rehearsal, I wondered if Sylvia had been a bad dog. Instead the director announced that a tornado had hit the nearby city of Jackson. We all should go downstairs, she said. Some wondered if we should take cover in the restaurant's frozen food locker.

Storm warnings are as common as Easter lilies during spring in Missouri. We pay attention, but not the strict kind. Then some tornadoes come along and kill people in western Missouri like they did Sunday night, leaving towns looking like they have been bombed, and those bright-colored patches on the TV weatherman's screen become real.

Tornadoes killed two people across the Mississippi River from us in Southern Illinois later that night. The forecast is for more bumpy nights ahead.

Californians and the newscasters talking about the Midwestern tornadoes don't really know what it's like to wonder if a tornado is bearing down on you, I suspect. On stormy nights, the TV weathermen armed with radar track the movements of cells across the terrain, predicting where they will go from minute to minute. They're like biologists working with radar instead of microscopes.

In "The Wizard of Oz," everyone but Dorothy gets into the storm cellar. When I phoned DC at home, she and the dogs had already retreated to the basement. She was doing laundry, an activity that, mysteriously to me, gladdens her. She also loves storms as much as she fears them. The dogs were by her side nibbling bologna and peanut butter. She was living la vida loca.

Downstairs in the bar below the nightclub we who were stranded watched the storm's movement on a big-screen TV, just like people watch football games. Roseanna, the director, told me she had once reassured her mother that the historic building we were in had withstood the worst weather that 150 years could deliver. That led her mother to reason the building is primed to crumble.

I drove the six blocks home when a break in the storms showed up on radar. DC phoned our parents. Hers had decided to go to bed. Mine were watching the Cardinals baseball game and didn't know tornadoes were about.

Maybe there's an age when the dangers of the natural world no longer concern you. Like the nightclub building, you have withstood them for an impressive number of years. Perhaps you look back on the experiences in your life and somehow know what will be.

I am not there yet. A time came when I thought we should go back down to the basement. We set up a TV on the deep freeze. DC did more laundry. Even with a storm swirling outside, it was reassuring in its domesticity.

The dogs lay on the basement floor peacefully. What would they say if they could talk? Probably "I need to pee" or "More peanut butter," all the things they communicate perfectly well without being able to talk.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.