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So yesterday started much like any other day. Get up, fix Tin breakfast, and after he was in school, write a post on my new site about the harrowing effects of racism in our society and then PAUSE, EMERGENCY, TAKE COVER, TORNADO WARNING came through my telephone taking away all the white noise and producing nothing but crisis silence. I grabbed my phone and sought shelter from the only place imaginable in this shotgun, Tin’s inner room, inner closet. The bathtub was not a choice because if you know anything about a New Orleans shotgun, the kitchen and bathrooms are all built after the fact and are usually shaky like a trailer.

Once in the closet, I called Tin’s school and got a little miffed when the person who answered seemed a bit cavalier about this impending doom. I urged them to put the nursery kids into the library, the interior room and she called back and said they were doing that. I then wrote an email with follow up info about the tornado and still got the impression that I was overreacting but didn’t give a fig because, well because, it’s Tin for godsakes.

I got a text from a friend that the watch was extended and so I made myself comfortable and listened to the freight train thunder – the sure sign that this is a tornado. And then after an hour, there was a dead eery silence and I got up and realized I was locked in the closet.

In my email to the school I had said instead of discussing an action plan, you should have one, and now here I was in the closet, with no action plan because the only person who had keys to my house was Tatjana – whose phone had been turned off for an hour and a half during this whole event.

So now I’m texting everyone – my old neighbor in the Can Company to go knock on Tatjana’s door, my friends who think it is hysterical, and one friend who texts: “Grrrl, get outta that closet” – but I must say Tornado’s are not funny. It sounded like a train coming through my house and a friend who was eating lunch in Metairie said she saw an 18-wheeler get turned over as well as light posts coming down and wind that almost sucked out the windows of the restaurant.

No tornados are not common to New Orleans. The first that I had ever heard of and I think that was ever reported was in 2006 right after the 2005 Federal Flood, around Rita.

Thank god I was dancing in the streets to the Stooges Brass Band come night time because Tornados and me are not a good fit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 25th, 2013 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.