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A series of thunderstorms blew through New Jersey this afternoon and made for a wonderful moment for me and my son Jake.
I love summer thunderstorms. I love the way they sound, the way they look, the way the air smells as they roll through. I love the release they represent. A summer thunderstorm usually follows a day, or a series of days, of incredibly hot, humid weather. That heat and oppresive humidity just builds and build a tension in people. Everyone talks about the heat with one thing in the back of their minds: when is it going to end? With every passing hour and day, the tension raises. Until that sweet release of the pouring rain and cooling winds come sweeping through.
When we lived in Madison, we had a small house with no air conditioning. So those days of heat and humidity were brutal some times. When the enevitable thunderstorm would threaten, I would take Jake out on our front porch to watch it roll in. We lived there for three summers right after Jake was born. So I started doing this when he was an infant. The sky would darken with the rain clouds, the wind would pick up, and the leaves on the trees would turn over in that way they do right before the rains come would. The first year I would just hold him and watch the weather change. As he got older he took a more active part in my little ritual. We would cheer the storm and welcome it to town. We'd wait for the lightning and then cheer the thunder like fireworks. We'd chant "we want thunder, we want thunder" like two morons. People in the street would be running to and from their cars covering themselves as best they could while we were dancing around each in a pair of shorts, taking turn leaning out from under the porch and getting drenched. We loved it.
About a year later, I was on the phone with my brother talking about something and the subject of an upcoming storm came up. And he told me about his son (my nephew, duh) who just was scared to death of thunder and lightning. If a storm happened during the day, he ran to an interior room to get as far away from the light and noise as he could. And if the storm happened at night, then he was immediately into their bed. I reflected (to myself) how lucky I was that my son loved thunderstorms as much as I did. And then I realized that I conditioned him to storms from his earliest days. I was a smart parent and I didn't even know it at the time. And it was purely by accident. But I have done the same thing with Bobby and Claudine and I have never had kids in our bed in the middle of the night because of a thunderstorm.
So today, we all went out to dinner. Claudine is on call this weekend so we took two cars so that if she had to dash off to the hostipal she could just leave. But she didn't get called so on the way home, Bobby wanted to ride in her car while I took Annabel and Jake. Just about a mile away from home, the skies opened up and started pouring. I pulled into the gargage but didn't close the door. Jake hopped out of the truck and just stared at the rain. He turned to me as I was getting Annabel and her car seat out of the truck and said, "Dad, I need a place to sit". So I opened the tailgate to the truck and plopped Annie's carseat down in the middle of it. Jake climbed up on one side and I sat on the other. And we watched. And listened. And experienced the storm. Claudine pulled up shortly afterwards, and she took Annie and Bobby inside the house. Jake and I just sat there for about 15 minutes. We didn't talk much. We just sat and shared the storm with each other. It was perfect.
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