On Wheels and Fortunes

A girl from Indi­ana can­not com­pute the word hur­ri­cane, even as it’s bar­rel­ing toward her. I’ve heard tor­na­does hap­pen, while they’re hap­pen­ing even. Been spared the fly­ing cows, the roofs blown off houses, the red shoes under uprooted foun­da­tions, knock-on-wood. And for a moment, it seemed that some­thing might actu­ally hap­pen — around four in the morn­ing on Tues­day, the win­dows brac­ing against the wind. It wasn’t quite tor­nado loud, but it was close enough that I put a pot of water on the stove, my keys and a lighter in my pocket.

We didn’t even lose elec­tric­ity. And so I sat rapt to twit­ter, watch­ing my friends and col­leagues in the City post updates and pho­tos of the faces torn from build­ings and washed out streetscapes; Man­hat­tan in the dark like a hor­ror movie.

Blessed be! We made it through. Praise G/g o d/dess! My friends and fam­ily are safe, dry, unbro­ken! That is the news now. The other side of the coin — the dis­placed, dam­aged and dev­as­tated – those vis­ited by death — they don’t tweet.

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