At least 56 people died in violent spring storms across the eastern midsection of America on February 5th, the day of “Super Tuesday” voting in primaries across the country. Including Tennessee, which bore the brunt of the storms and lost the most people. Hundreds were injured. Oddly (or not), I had dreamed about tornadoes Monday night. The kind of dream where I’m standing on a rise in “big sky” country watching tornadoes off in the distance. I’m one of those people who seldom remembers dreams, but the ones I do remember tend to be weird premonitions.

My son had it too, informed us all one day when he was four that he’d dreamed something that sure enough happened just like he said it would just hours later. “I’m a psycho,” he told us quite seriously. “We know these things.” Though we of course laughed at his alliteration, this was coming from a guy who’d spent the first weeks of his life in the storm cellar – standard for April in Oklahoma. We weren’t too surprised.

Dream interpretors link tornadoes to big changes coming, though in this case it might just have been forewarning of the next day’s storms. They’re a little early this year, season doesn’t usually start until March, or get really hairy until April. But there are some big changes coming. My new granddaughter should be officially welcomed to the world by this time next month (though her Mom is really hoping for a Leap-Baby on February 29). A Democrat will win the Presidential election in November, finally ending the Cheney reign of terror. The transition from winter to spring is always turbulent, with its storms and wind. Birth can be tumultuous.

Since my state doesn’t get to vote in the primaries until May, of course it was the weather that caught my attention – there’s just something a little synchronicity-like about a tornado hitting Clinton, Arkansas while Democrats there were voting for a Clinton. The best overview of it all is on Jeff Masters’ Blog on Weather Underground. Only one other killer outbreak hit so early in the year – the January 3, 1949 storm in Warren, Arkansas that killed 60.

My husband’s most vivid childhood memory is of when a tornado ripped through his small eastern Oklahoma town when he was eight. His parents managed the downtown hotel, his grandma lived just a block behind. Told me that he went outside to pick up softball-sized hailstones to put in the freezer after the first wave of severe weather passed, thinking it was over. Then, over the hill on the south side of town, it came. Nearly a mile wide, and black as night.

Instead of talking about some “freight train” sound, he said it was deathly quiet until the world fell apart. His Dad hid under the kitchen table with his little brother, his Mom hid in a closet, and he hid under a bed on top of a hotel guest. Who, when the wind died down, was dead (along with 80 other people in the little town). The hotel was destroyed, only one wall still standing. He said the weirdest thing was that a pair of jeans was sticking right through it, the seat inside the lobby and the legs outside the building.

I think it’s terribly sad that so many died on Super Tuesday. I don’t know how many of them knew it was coming, might have been saved. Tennessee is just over the ridge to the west of us, but we somehow dodged the bullet on Tuesday that destroyed so much in our neighbor state. There is no warning system here, no sirens to go off right at dinnertime like in Oklahoma. And here in the mountains the sky’s not big – we’d never see it coming until it was here. Yet in order to hit the house it would have to be aiming for us – drop down straight on top of us – and one thing I learned growing up in Tornado Alley was that if it’s got your name on it, it’ll find you no matter where you hide. If it doesn’t, you can stand on the porch and calmly watch it go on by. That’s pretty fatalistic, I know, but it’s true nonetheless.

Still, people do love to talk about the weather. Every bit as much, they say, as people love to talk politics. So for all the big changes coming, this will be the historic year that the two topics of conversation became one for a day. I’m a psycho. We know these things!

My younger daughter and her husband visited this past weekend from Indianapolis. She’s into her 4th month of pregnancy (her first), just getting over the serious morning sickness phase, needed some Mom-time. Which I was of course delighted to lavish on her, sympathizing with her queazy stomach and re-arranging innards, happy to whip up some colorful stir-fry, hummus, falafel and tabouli for pita sandwiches, anything that sounded good, that she thought she might be able to keep down.

She’s never been a happy morning person, so when her hubby mentioned how hard the last few months have been – a strain on their relationship as well as their income since they work together out of home – I wasn’t very sympathetic. Grandpa could take care of that chore. And he did.

My hubby and I just celebrated our 38th anniversary earlier this month, but didn’t get to go to the lake house like we have ever since it got built because elder daughter blew the engine in her car, my car’s back end is about to walk out from underneath it, and that puts us down to a single pick’em up truck we’ve got to share. Ah, well. We’ve had worse anniversaries…

Anyway, I mention this because my husband – “Uncle Grandpa” to dozens and just plain “Grandpa” to a rising tide of others – is amazingly well trained. I was pregnant for 18 months out of our first 3 years of marriage, and was deathly ill for every minute of it. What my Son-in-Law was complaining about seems trivial compared to that, as well as compared to all the years since I decided to stop doing the pregnant thing. His marital philosophy is one that should be preserved and taught as classical wisdom, which seems to be in very short supply in these days of “for better and screw you if it gets worse” serial monogamy.

She Is Always Right, You Are Always Wrong.

Short, simple yet profound, endearing in the extreme. Growing, having and raising a baby isn’t an easy job, and the vast majority of the physical investment in that endeavor comes exclusively from the woman. That’s just how nature and/or God set things up, we should presume life and/or love set it up that way on purpose: it works, better than possible alternatives. For couples to get through the year it takes to grow, produce and nurture an infant to a good healthy start in life, it’s just best for the Dad to live this philosophy as much as possible, put aside his own juvenile tendencies and ‘all about me’ delusions.

I admit to being somewhat flummoxed by the underlying ‘wrong-ness’ of pair bonding these days, when half of marriages end in divorce before even five short years, kids grow up in multiple homes with multiple Moms and Dads and Temporaries (or none at all), and nobody seems willing to build relationships rather than simply toss inconvenient ones out with last year’s clothes. A year in the course of a lifetime is nothing, relatively speaking. To a mere temporary arrangement, it’s forever.

That’s a shame, but it’s what is real in the world my children are trying to negotiate, and the one my grandchildren will soon be trying to live with. At any rate, I got to baby my baby for a couple of days, Grandpa got to lend sage advice and an understanding ear to her choice of mate. That’s really about all we’re good for at this point.

Though we did spend hours and hours around the campfire, playing dice at the kitchen bar, sitting idly about the living room thinking up baby names. THAT is a fun pastime! I think we went all the way through the alphabet from Adam to Zelda and everything in between – including, of course, Elvis.

But it seems they’ve already settled on a girl name – Sunshine – that I’m hoping may reflect a happier morning person personality than her Mom ever managed. By the time they departed for home on Sunday afternoon, the guys had settled on two boy names I’m hoping will be overruled firmly when the baby is born (if it’s a he)…

GuitarGreg and CoolAssMojo (both as single first names). I voted for Elvis, so this is NOT my fault!

Links:

Baby Names, Name Origin and Meaning

Unique Baby Names, Meanings