Hurricane Memories

A bit off-topic, but I find myself wandering down Memory Lane with the approaching storm. I wanted to share some hurricane memories with you…..nice ones, as it turns out.

I grew up on the Gulf Coast, in Houston; hurricane tracking is in my blood. Every summer, my dad picked up a Gulf tracking map at the grocery store at the start of the season. When a storm spun up, he’d religiously watch the evening news on KPRC, both at 6:00 and 10:00, and carefully record the latitude and longitude, read out by weatherman Doug Johnson, of any Gulf storms. Dad then sat at his desk (now upstairs in my study) and carefully recorded the new coordinates on a map. The National Hurricane Center website maps all hurricane tracks for the past several years at the click of a mouse. I remember tracks meticulously penciled in, tacked to Daddy’s office closet door. (And yes, he’d save them over the years so he had a history. It will not surprise you to learn that Daddy was a scientist…a geophysicist.)

In all the years I lived in Houston (1968-1979), a hurricane never landed. We did, however, experience some depressions and storms. One year, a tropical storm landed on the night of our annual cherished tradition, an excursion to a game between the Astros and the Cincinnati Reds. Now, mind you, these were the classic Reds….Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose (when he was “Charlie Hustle” instead of “Wagered on the Game”). I hovered at the front door, watching the rain come down in sheets and worrying what Daddy would say about heading out to the game when he got home. When he arrived and declared the trip off, I just burst into tears, completely involuntarily. Really. I wasn’t (and still am not) given to fits of sobbing, but I just couldn’t help it. Bless his heart, most dads are mostly helpless in the face of such fits, and off to the game we went.

We walked to the Astrodome from our car in the midst of this roaring storm. The umbrella lasted about five minutes before turning inside-out and collapsing; we were soaked through by the time we got in. Then we froze to death in the air conditioning. I must say…..those were the best seats we ever had at an Astros game; the place was deserted. We quickly abandoned our second tier seats and sat right along the first-base line. It was fun to listen to the players banter back and forth, something I’d never heard before from distant seats. And we also learned a peculiarity of the Astrodome…it leaked like a sieve. Probably still does.

And it’s not just father-memories. A storm was the only event that drove Mom to bake bread from scratch. To this day, the smell of baking bread reminds me of an approaching storm.

My heart goes out to those in the storm’s path. Here’s hoping this is a light one.