I hadn’t been in Texas very long. It could only have been a couple months because by Thanksgiving of 1994, I already ruined the nascent relationship with the woman I met when I got to Houston. We were down the coast in Kemah to go to dinner at a reasonably nice seafood place, which was a big deal in the Houston area. Both of us were working low paying jobs, so putting on decent clothes and spending decent money to go out, was a supposed to be a big deal.

I can’t recall anything about the meal or the conversation. The vivid memory I have from that night is this amazing thunderstorm. It was out over the water of the bay, so we were stone dry in the warm summer air. Two huge thunderheads were separated enough so you could see them as two clouds in the evening light. You could watch the lightning shoot sideways, from one cloud to the other, like two giants at war, like a movie. It was almost in slow motion. The bolts must’ve been huge because you could see them form from one end to another. Then so many seconds later, you’d hear the thunder and it would be this magnificent rumble and you could tell exactly which lightning bolt it had been from. I don’t know how accurate the count is in my head but it feels like there must’ve been a half dozen, dozen, fifty people standing in that parking lot, the gravel under their feet, watching the storm, knowing it was a bigger deal than whatever puny plans they’d made for that Friday or Saturday night. 

Summer as a six or seven-year-old, during early evening summer in New York when the sky was clear and golden. I was tromping down the stairs in that loud way that only a kid can. Our front door was at the base of our stairs and the screen door was open to the cooling evening air. I jumped off of the second or third step. Just as I thomped at the landing, a lightning bolt, the first bolt of a storm, hit a power-line across the street and blew up a transformer. To this day it’s one of the most vivid memories of terror I have. I remember crying and I remember my mom comforting me.