Thunder
I’m just raising my head again after a week’s sick, raising my eyes to the cat-breath smeared windows, past which at this moment a long, deep roll of thunder is finishing its tremolo. I wait eagerly for what my memory sense tells me is approaching – the roiling heavens, the electrical Armageddon, the barn blower. But this night, like all others previous to it in Seattle, holds one clap, one flash of lightning, and nothing more but gust and wet.
I used to follow storms back in Ohio, used to drive up on the ridge with my friend Kimi in her blue pickup and watch them slowly engulf the city. Some obscure Peter Gabriel song would be blaring from the radio and the smell of horse, of curry brush and pick, would be strong and pervasive. We’d lay there in the bed feeling the wind, feeling the charge of the air, our heels propped up on the gate.
After a long silence, she’d speak. “Gonna be a gully-whomper, Beej,” she’d say, turning to me, grinning wide. I’d swing myself off the back and around to the right, and those long, thin legs of hers would trundle her body over the side and into the driver’s seat. We’d race off home again, sensing the storm behind us like a herd of snorting, white-eyed stallions.
I miss thunderstorms like that, miss the baptism of god, miss the rise and fall of the chorus, the thrust and inhale, the maddening whirl. I haven’t seen one in seven years now, and those times on the ridge with coke bottles and Doritos were easily almost twenty years ago. Things have changed. Things always change.
Impermanence came to see me yesterday, sandwiched between the first anniversary of my father’s death and the first anniversary of my wife’s departure, echoing out again the second punch of the three punch of 2002. When I heard the news this time, heard the warning bell again for my employment, my reaction was a short burst of anger, followed by a whisper in my ear that said “impermanence”. I calmed down immediately, let go a tremendous weight, and was centered and mindful within it.
And that really pissed me off.
I stomped around about it for a few hours, feeling cheated. I wanted misery, to suffer and be mortified, to find a way to turn it back on myself, to find a way to turn it back on somebody else. I wanted the reaction I had come to expect, to know of myself, the one I felt I deserved to have. I tried to work up a good sulk, but failed when the waitress at my usual restaurant haunt discussed her saucer-full of Buddhist knowledge with my thimble-full of Buddhist knowledge, and gave me my favorite fish and the best coffee I’ve had in ages.
I left, replaying the past five years over and over, beating my hands on the steering wheel, holding my breath and shaking my head, but it just wasn’t there. I arrived home and the cats climbed in my lap and I sneered at them, trying to fight off the warmth of their bodies. I tried laying in bed and staring at the ceiling, but became more interested in story plots and future road trips and the cadence of the rain on the gutter. No, it was gone as quickly as it started. There was to be no great gnashing of teeth. Instead, impermanence leaned over to me, pushed her hat back, and said, “Beej, it’s gonna be a gully-whomper.”
Things have changed. The thunder is rolling out along the valley, but I’m not the storm anymore. I’ll ride with it, let it take me where it will, be absorbed and absorb, but its job and my job are different. I’ll stay or I’ll move. I’ll pair up or I’ll be solitary. I’ll find a place to root in for a while or I’ll ramble for the next few years. But my job anymore is simply to find a path through, and to let the path find me.
The flux of my career, my employment, is reaching a resonant frequency that will eventually shake itself apart. It’s only a question of when. And around all this, the continuing layoffs and uncertainty, is a holistic, multi-dimensional, all-encompassing magnetic polar shift. I see it, a big change coming over my horizon, bigger than I can discern the end of, deeper than I can imagine. It’s coming, and it’s mine.
And this scares me, and it excites me. It sometimes saddens me, and it causes me to miss things or to hope for things, but it doesn’t cause me to fall to my knees and scream at the heavens, “MENDOZA!” It doesn’t cause me to be righteous in my pain or to wallow in my resistance to change, or to wish it away so fervently that I’d rather just stop than go. No, as much as I’d like it to, I’m just not made of that anymore. And that alone is a strange, strange land to explore.
