The Calm After the Storm

Soon, I'll be posting my assessment of what happened in the ballot boxes and caucuses across America on Tuesday.

But this morning, I'm a little preoccupied. A killer storm, spawning tornadoes, went through eastern Arkansas and western Tennessee yesterday, reminding me of my own experiences growing up in central Arkansas.

I'm especially reminded of a storm that went through my hometown 43 years ago.

My hometown was quite small when I was little. It's grown a great deal in the last couple of decades, in large part because of its proximity to Little Rock, which has made it something of a bedroom community for the state capital. But when I was 5, the population was much smaller, and my family lived outside the city's limits.

If you and your spouse were going to go out for the evening in those days, Little Rock was where you went, and that particular night, my parents went out for dinner and a movie. They may have been going with friends. My recollection of those days is that they often went out as a group.

On such occasions, my parents would employ the services of a teen-aged girl whose family lived a few miles down the road. This girl would come over to our house and spend the evening sitting with my brother and me.

I don't remember how much time had passed between the time her father drove over in his pickup truck and dropped off his daughter to babysit and the time he returned to pick us all up and take us back to his house, where they had a storm cellar for just such emergencies.

But I will always remember, on the drive to our babysitter's storm cellar, looking up through the windshield of the truck into that dark, boiling sky and seeing the tornado as it bounced over us and made its way toward town. Homes were leveled in the tornado's path, including one in which some family friends lived. They were sitting down to dinner when the storm warnings were announced.

That family only survived because everyone managed to find cover a few seconds before the tornado hit their home.

We didn't have sophisticated advance warning systems back then. Thank God for public service announcements. Because of them, our friends knew what to do to save their lives.

Tornadoes are a constant threat in the South. And we haven't even reached the most active part of the season yet.

My thoughts are with those in eastern Arkansas and western Tennessee this morning. They've faced a terrible ordeal. But most of them have come through.

And my thoughts are with those communities and those people in the South whose lives may be altered by the progression of the storm today and in the remainder of the week.

It will take time to bounce back, but they will.

And they will do so with the thoughts and prayers of those of us who have been through the same thing.