Ah, finally I am beginning to feel like a normal human being again. So, what exactly happened to me last week, you ask? Well, I’ll tell ya… mainly because I don’t want to repeat this story over and over again a hundred times in e-mail, phone, etc.

OK, starting from the beginning… my mother was on a business trip in Miami and the night she arrived, as she and her colleagues were coming back from dinner, she tripped over one of those concrete parking lot barriers and broke her wrist, bigtime, spent all night in the ER, you can do the math on that part. Well, she ended up staying in Miami for the next three days and completing her duties there… they couldn’t have done what they needed to down there anyway as far as surgery (well, technically they could have, but she certainly couldn’t be staying down there for weeks). Luckily this was her left arm, as she and I are both right-handed and boy wouldn’t that have sucked.

Anyhow, via friends of the family we had arranged for her to see a doctor back home and have what we thought would be fairly minor, no big deal, surgery, on Thursday last week, the morning after she was to arrive back in Nashville. There was some discussion between her and me over the course of the early part of the week about whether she could drive her car home from the airport or not – most unfortunately, this just happened to be one of the few times she flew out of Nashville instead of Memphis (oh thank you to my faaavorite airline, Northwest, for jacking up prices so high in Memphis and being such buttholes about letting other airlines have terminal space that it most of the time makes more sense financially to fly out of Nashville or Little Rock. Jerks. I recently caught the head of the Memphis airport saying in the paper that Northwest does what’s good for Memphis or something like that… bullsh*t.)

Anyway, it was finally decided that whether or not she could drive I was going to drive to Nashville Wednesday night anyway to either drive her home or follow her home, no problem. Since I hadn’t been truly prepared for this (my usual procrastinatory fault) I wound up sleeping about two hours on Tuesday night, with expectations that I could still get from Memphis to Nashville and backtrack halfway to eastern Northwest Tennessee and still be able to get a decent night’s sleep on Wednesday night… little did I know.

So, OK, it’s Wednesday by now and the first thing that happens is I walk out of the office on my way to my car late in the afternoon and the tornado sirens are going off, but the sky in Crosstown is clear as all get out. I even stop to get gas at the hated Tiger Market on Union, standing there pumping my gas while the sirens are going off and thinking, well, it must be the siren in Whitehaven I’m hearing ‘cos there is nothing going on up here in Crosstown and Midtown, which turned out to be true for the moment. I have the good sense to listen to talk radio on the way home to make sure I’m in no imminent danger, get home and my weather-predicting dogs go bounding outside, which is a pretty exact indication that nothing weatherwise is about to happen for the time being, so, great. Just about the time we get back inside I hear thunder – NBD (no big deal).

Then the sky turns black, then comes the monsoon. At this point it appears to be just lots of rain and thunder and lightning, but I turn on the TV just in case, to keep an eye on things. As I’m trying to get some stuff ready (in vain, ‘cos it will be another three hours before I can even go outside to put stuff in my car), I keep noticing interesting things on the weather report on TV, and my plans (”OK, I’ll leave about 7…”) kept getting later and later (”OK, I’ll leave about 8… OK, I’ll leave about 8:30…”). Then Channel X scares me to death by pinpointing what they think may be a tornado in southwestern Shelby County, tracking its upcoming path northeast up over the south loop of I-240, then up to Airways and Lamar, then toward… you guessed it, straight for me.

Dobie and I are sitting on the couch watching this phenomena and I have already gauged my direct route to the hall closet and how long it will take me to get there once I hear what everyone says tornadoes sound like, like a freight train or something… I can get there in seconds, yank everything out of the closet and have me and Dobie in there. (Baby, of course, being scared to death of not only thunderstorms but just plain rain, always has the safest place in the house anyway, under her usual table.) Well, I never heard the siren go off if it did – it’s right behind my house at the fairgrounds – nor did I hear any freight-trainlike noise – so I just stayed put and lo and behold, no tornado. (Of course, the other problem with the weather reports, which stayed on for about four or five hours straight that evening, was that it was raining so much and so hard the Doppler radar was barely able to pick up anything thru all the rain anyhow.)

Finally all the blasted rain and thunder and lightning dissipates and I’m getting things ready to go again, and I’ve already called the Nashville airport to get them to give my mom a page when she arrives, allegedly at the time on a 10:15 pm flight, to tell her I’m running late because of the storms here. I finally split town about 9 pm, about two hours after I’d initially planned and an hour after I’d planned during the course of the nastiness down here. Also, during the course of all the weather chaos there was a three-alarm fire at the FedEx superhub, so I hope there weren’t many of you expecting something from FedEx last week…

Anyway. Finally, I am on the road, slightly tired but having a great time as I’m in love with my CD player anyway and have some good music completely blasting. The weather’s calmed down by now tho I’m trying to keep an eye on the sky, prepared to pull over and hit the ditch at any moment if necessary, but for the first hour and a half, everything’s cool. I start hitting a little rain just north of Jackson, but that’s okay, rain’s no big deal other than the fact that every time an eighteen-wheeler passes me or I pass them I’m temporarily blinded by waterfalls over my car. Just about the time I get across the Tennessee River and the land where my beloved hometown lies, it starts getting worse. Nasty, nasty, nasty, but still quite driveable. Nooooo problem.

About the time I see my second humongous tree lying on the interstate, I decide maybe I better turn on the radio and see what’s up. KDF in Nashville, which I listened to and supported for years and years when I lived up there, let me down and, unable to find anything substantial on any other station, I was forced to listen to the big FM country station up there the rest of the drive (you know it had to be bad if I was listening to the country station). About the time I’m getting up around Kingston Springs (home of Christabella Wilson, grin), a caller calls in from Fairview (a very tiny town where my car once died about fifteen years ago on a drive home from college, I was stranded for hours and after a while beginning to feel like I was stuck in the movie Deliverance). While listening to the caller’s tale, it occurs to me that, had I left Memphis when I intended to, I would have hit the Fairview/Franklin exit on I-40 just about the time the tornado touched down in Fairview, which is only a hop, skip and jump from the interstate exit. I don’t know which of my guardian angels (all of them, I reckon) was looking out for me that night to make me wait out the weather in Memphis and then piddle around a little longer than I meant to getting ready to split town, but, man. (shudder)

So, I’m listening to the radio the rest of the way to Nashville and listening to how there’ve been touchdowns in ten counties, including Davidson County (Nashville), and by the time I hit the city limits I already know that most of East Nashville and a good deal of the rest are without power and there’s power lines down all over. Most of West Nashville looks okay so I’m sort of starting to take the death grip off the steering wheel, while still keeping an eye out for fallen trees and power lines, as I tool around the 440 loop. Well, it’s still raining, and I’m having a little trouble seeing, and then I realize why I’m having so much trouble seeing, because by now I’m in East Nashville and it’s pitch black. After finally maneuvering my way to the Nashville airport, I’m trying to do the right thing by parking where I think I’m supposed to park in short term parking, but I can’t see a darn thing, pitch, pitch black. I get parked (thanks to the little construction guy who was walking around with a flashlight, who was nice enough to inform me that the airport had been hit by a tornado), and walk thru the completely dark parking garage and up to the main door, where a security guy asks if he can help me. After telling him my mother was supposed to have arrived on a 10:15 pm Delta flight, I’m informed that the airport shut down around 9 or 9:30 due to the tornado. Great.

So, I leave the airport, thinking my mom is still in Atlanta at this point, and nearly have about fifty wrecks driving up Murfreesboro Road trying to get somewhere where there is electricity. I park at the Waffle House (ahh!) and then proceed to call everyone save for the people I really don’t want to be waking up at 1 in the morning trying to figure out where my mother is. (If you’re doing the math, Nashville is about a 2 hour, 45 minute drive or so from Memphis, and I left Memphis at 9 pm.) One of the first calls I made was to Delta, misguidedly thinking my mother was still in the Atlanta airport, and then I am informed that my mother got on a standby flight that landed in Nashville at 5:30 pm.

Okay, so, now I don’t know whether my mom is at the Nashville airport (in which case I was going to make her get a cab to the Waffle House as I wasn’t relishing any more possibility of a wreck on the way back to the airport), or if she got her car and tried to drive on home, in which case she might have gotten caught by the tornado. In any case, there’s no answer at my mother’s house; nothing on the answering machine at my house; and the Nashville airport folks, who I also called, were no help (”This lady is having surgery at 9 in the morning two hours away and you won’t go look for her?” – “Sorry, ma’am, we can’t.” Bah.)

Having exhausted all possible phone attempts and being on the verge of just getting the heck out of Nashville and driving back westward, I realized I had no other real choice than to retrace the murderous, war-zonelike path back to the Nashville airport. So I do, without incident (I should interject here that one of my thoughts as I was leaving Memphis that evening was, “OK, God, if this is gonna be my night to die then so be it, but if it’s not gonna be my night to die, then please don’t let me wreck my car!!”). This time I go up the arrivals ramp of the airport and park where they would have probably arrested or ticketed me if there hadn’t been a tornado and ensuing blackout, and go in search of my now-handicapped mother. The emergency lights are on in the airport so you can pretty much see, but I walked around for about a half hour in the utter chaos the airport had turned into with stranded passengers with no luck. I was just about to leave, having decided that I didn’t know where she was but she wasn’t there, when I decided to make one more trip around. As I got ready to start up some stairs, a fellow standing at the bottom stops me and goes, “Are you looking for your mother?” I say, “Yes, a blonde with one arm in a sling?” Bingo. After having been in Nashville for almost two and a half hours, finally.

The rest of the tale is a little shorter… we arrive at my mom’s house around 4:30 in the morning, get up a couple of hours later (at this point I’ve had four hours’ sleep in two days) and head to the doctor’s office, where we think she’s going to be having fairly minor, not a huge deal, surgery. Wrong. At 1 that afternoon she’s headed into what we now think is Same Day Surgery, which turns out in the course of the surgery to wind up being fairly major surgery. Actually this probably turned out for the better, since the other would have put her in a full arm cast (in which case she wouldn’t have been able to do much of anything and would have probably had to come to Memphis to stay with me indefinitely), and instead she’s got the whole rods-and-pins thing, which is gnarly and has been quite painful but she’s able to move fingers and elbows and such, so that in the end is much cooler. You do not even come close to realizing how much you need your fingers and shoulders and elbows until you break something like this…

Anyway, other than the fact that it was a pretty painful situation it was kinda neat since we were there at the hospital back home and the majority of nursing personnel around were either Mom’s students or former students and also included my best friend from the 7th grade, as well as many of my mother’s colleagues, and we pretty much got the VIP treatment, which was cool. My mother was insisting on going home but finally gave up insisting, someone sent me home for a while on the premise that I could get some sleep but, knowing that if my head hit a pillow I wouldn’t wake up ’til the next morning, I just did some stuff and went back and spent the night on a very uncomfortable hospital couch. And in the morning we got to go home earlier than we would have probably had we not been getting slightly VIP treatment, so that was cool too.

There was much to be done at the house too, tho, before I could leave and go back to Memphis, suffice it to say I didn’t get all that much sleep the rest of the week either but that was okay! There was also the problem of how to get my mother’s car back to where it should be from Nashville, and let me tell you I was not looking forward to having to drive back up there, but that turned out spiffily as my grandmother and her husband (who live in Nashville) just happened to be coming from there that weekend and were kind enough to drive the thing back to us, yay. So, with Mom situated and I having gone out to the store and bought enough stuff to keep her from having to go to the store for probably three or four weeks, I moseyed on back to Memphis and arrived home in the middle of the night early Monday morning to deal with the certain chaos there would be at my own house, and here I am. Still tired this early Friday morning, but better.

In any case, last week was not a good week.

So, what else… well, I saw Tommy Womack and his lovely wife, Nashville’s Channel 5’s Beth Tucker, on TV briefly while I was home, that was kinda cool. Tommy informs me that at the moment he is not on the schedule for the downtown Nashville thing with NRBQ in June so that’s a bummer, I hope that changes.

I am tickled that my eBay rating is edging closer to 200 now, although it would have been nice if everyone I’ve sold stuff to would have bothered to leave feedback since it’d be closer to 300 than 200 if they had, sigh.

And I’m in the middle of some rather extreme life-changing decisions, but more on that some other time, maybe, as things are pretty tentative right at the moment… let’s just say some things were just meant to be, it just took me about five and a half years to realize it? We’ll see, in any case KC won’t speak to me for years, which is usually kinda a blessing. (snicker) Gotta go as I’m still pretty exhausted, talk to some of you more over the weekend, and happy late birthday to Jules – ’til later…