I’m posting content from my archives on Throwback Thursday, so please enjoy this story from 2008, when I was trying to get cable set-up in our new Tennessee apartment as a tornado rolled into the area.
I didn’t hear the Cable Guy knocking the first time because I was busy dragging a mattress into my bathroom.
I’ve gotten quite adept at this over the years. At the first sign of thunder and lightning I grab my flashlight, battery powered radio, and make camp in my bathtub underneath my mattress. As the Cable Guy knocked louder, I surveyed the bathroom and decided that setup might look slightly strange to a total stranger so I pulled the bathroom door closed.
I let Cable Guy in and made small talk with him as he proceeded to do his Cable Guy thing. Just everyday normal small talk like “So what’s you name? Chris? That’s a nice name. Do you think we’re going to die in this storm?”
I told Cable Guy Chris about how I was new to the area and wasn’t really sure where the big red tornado storm that thy were showing on the news was in relation to us. Cable Guy Chris nicely explained the weather map radar to me and told me the big red tornado storm was about 20 minutes away from us. “Actually, he said, it’s about to hit where I live. Do you mind if I call my wife and daughter?” So that made me just a tiny bit nervous.
The storm started getting worse, and by worse I mean the big red tornado storm was moving right towards us. At which point I turned to Cable Guy Chris and said to him “Listen, when I was 8 years old I was home when a tornado hit my house. I am terrified of tornadoes. I’m telling you this because I think you should know that I am about to completely freak out.”
I’m digressing from the story a little bit to tell you about the time I got hit by a tornado.
We were getting ready to go to my cousin’s birthday party when it started to rain. Not even storming, just raining, when all of a sudden half of a tree flew past our bay window and the rain started going sideways. My dad yelled for us to run to the basement and there was a sound like I can’t explain, this crazy roaring sound.
Our house was built into a hill, so the front of the basement was the garage doors and level with the driveway. The back of the basement was underground, with two tiny windows up high, looking out over the front yard. We huddled in the back of the basement as trees crashed around us, the garage doors buckled in, and watched as the tornado took off the entire second story of our neighbors house and then proceeded to smash flat every house across the street. We were sure our house wasn’t standing as we crawled over trees blocking the basement door out into the front yard, where the shingles from our roof were now buried.
Our house was standing, damaged, but standing. We had no warning, no siren, no big storm. We were so lucky. From that day on, I’ve been terrified of tornadoes and storms send me into a total panic. Many, many days in the following years that I was a latchkey kid my parents would return home from work during a light rain to find me huddled in the basement under an old mattress. Obviously, I had issues. I really should have gone to therapy sooner. After this story, I should probably go back just to address this specific issue.
So I’m standing in our new apartment listening to the people on the news talk about the Very Big Storm and watching the 60 mile an hour winds outside, completely panicking when, knowing my level of terror, Jeanette calls. “Do you want me to come get you?” she asked. “YES.”
Just as the word left my mouth, the tornado sirens started going off and the people on the news sort of freak out and start saying “If you are in Franklin take cover right now!” And Jeanette says “Oh crap – go get in your bathtub!”
So I hang up, turn to Cable Guy Chris and politely (aka totally hysterically through my tears) invite him to take cover in my bathroom.
“Listen,” I tell him, “I’m getting in the bathtub. I’ve already got a mattress in there. You can totally take cover in the bathroom with me. I know that is weird because we just met each other and all but I don’t want you to die in the tornado.”
He looks at me as though he is slightly afraid of my level of hysteria as the news people start saying empahtically “If you are in (insert road right next to my apartment) area, go to your safe place now!”
So I start running for the bathroom thinking “Safe place? Lady, my safe place is a place where there is no tornado! I’m in a freaking apartment bathtub with a mattress and a man I just met five minutes ago!”
Later that day I called my husband to tell him about this ordeal. When I got to this part of the story he paused for a long time and then carefully asked me “So…you were in the bathtub with the cable guy?”
And the answer to that is no, I was not. Cable Guy Chris, possibly more afraid of me than the storm, declined my bathtub invitation and took cover in the hallway just in front of the bathroom.
When the sirens ended I yelled out “Is it over?”and when he gave the all clear, I crawled out from under my mattress and walked into the living room, where he was nonchalantly hooking up my internet. He looked over his shoulder and said a little too casually, “So, uh, you’re pretty scared of tornadoes, huh?”
Turns out a tornado never even actually hit the ground. Cable Guy Chris was very kind about the whole incident. I gave him a cream soda for his trouble.
