Rain and Reading

A friend and I stood at the door of our office building and watched the storm that passed over campus at a little after three o'clock in the afternoon. Lightning flashed, and the thunder was less than a hung breath behind it. "I miss it," my friend said, meaning both the intensity of the storm and his native Alabama. I knew what he meant, even though I've lived most of my life in these mountains, where thunderstorms tend to be so corralled by the ridges that their intensity is felt only if they pass directly overhead. I learned during my years in Nashville that in flatter lands thunderstorms have free reign and are able to grow as strong as they can, even to the point of spawning twisters. I remember once being at the house of an acquaintance in Nashville. Although I can't recall who the person was--we were trying, unsuccessfully, to cowrite a song--or where in town the house stood, I clearly remember the storm. Its intensity called us out of the house and onto the porch, where we watched the flashes of light and the pouring of the rain. The storm was right on top of us. A particularly close flash of lighting brought thunder so strong and quick that I still remember feeling it on my face, as if an angel standing nose-to-nose with me had said, "Pray."

http://faculty.etsu.edu/codym/song_thunder_and_lightning2.htm (Click the link that follows the lyric to hear an mp3 of the song.)

I didn't stand watching the rain all day. Most of my time was spent in the office, where I was reading what is now my favorite Mark Twain novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). It's a stumbling and often morally confused dark comedy about the complexities of Missouri slave culture in the mid 1800s, when miscegination had progressed so far as to make the complexion of many slaves the same as that of the slaveholders, allowing one particular slave, switched at birth with the master's child, to "pass," for a time, as a member of the dominant group.


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