Tornado

When my mom parked her coupe in my driveway that morning, she asked if should she take her raincoat and umbrella. “It’s not going to rain,” I said dismissively. Los Angeles has a rainy season, November to March, and it was late May. Maybe some early June gloom, but rarely rain, not even a drizzle…

-aside-

Of course, Los Angeles isn’t supposed to be humid. I can think of my one thunderstorm growing up. I was ten, riding my bike up the hill toward my house, and the clouds arrived, went black, it rained and thundered really hard for maybe five or ten minutes while I stood there with my bike, marveling at how drenched I was getting, and then it stopped, the clouds moved on, and the sky went orange before fading to that almost white summer sky, etc.

Meanwhile, it was really humid here yesterday, and humidity is fairly common now. It must be the additional million people who now populate the city (vs. 1975), the concomitant water consumption, global warming, fumes from the earth’s crust — theories abound.

-end aside-

Anyway, it did rain that day, and had we left the nursing home even an hour later than we did, we would have found ourselves stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. An 18-wheeler overturned on the Pomona Freeway because of a tornado. I’ve spent a lot of time in Memphis the last several years, and the clouds in the distance looked like tornado clouds, but again, I thought, No way there’s going to be a tornado. We don’t have tornadoes in the Southland…

-aside #2-

I was being a little disingenuous because I remember Mike Davis in his book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, writes about tornadoes being a occasional occurrence. He wrote something about a big one in Long Beach in the early 1930s, I think…

(I keep getting e-mails from Amazon Associates noting that I haven’t made any money with its program; hence, these links, what the hell…)

-end aside #2-

At one point, while we were wrapping up my grandmother’s Meissen figurines and other breakables, it started pouring rain. Mom didn’t give me too much shit over it (one of her many qualities that make her so lovable), but she hates getting wet. So I suggested she get a coat out of Lucille’s closet. Lucille may have willed most of her things to that woman in Orange County, but according to Lucille’s executor, the woman was mostly concerned with getting my grandmother’s fur coats, which neither Mom nor my aunt wanted anyway. Mom chose a fleece jacket, and the executor, a healthy looking 75-year-old man with a full head of gray hair and clear blue eyes, freed an umbrella from this weird hook thing at the end of the clothing rod.

Here is a photo of some of the breakables that I took on my Motorola RAZR. My mom was adamant about getting these items because they were in her mother’s bedroom. And the executor, seeing that Mom and my aunt only wanted either photos or things that reminded them of their mother (stuff Lucille kept after my grandfather died, stuff she promised to will back to them, but probably forgot about as her mind started to go), signed off on it without consulting this other benefactor.

Tags: Hassen, Hemet, Lucille, tornado