A Tornado Warning Delivers New Friends, Briefly

Leave it to our friend Frannie to find vintage letters to spell out the perfect start to every day. The angels show up at random, as angels do.

Good morning at 6:02 a.m. I have just returned from the basement of a six-story apartment building, where I sat in a windowless hallway with five people and three dogs to wait for a tornado warning to be cancelled in Columbus, Ohio.

We were awakened by an emergency warning blasting on cell phones and sirens wailing in the night sky. I hesitated to rouse myself out of bed until I heard footsteps on the floor overhead. Somebody was taking this seriously, so maybe I should, too.

I threw on clothes and grabbed my phone and keys, and paused to look longingly at the French press on the kitchen counter. I quickly decided that showing up with a mug of steaming coffee would be a bad look, definitely. Also, what an embarrassingly way to go. I could hear my grandchildren’s future, grown-up voices as they remembered me to their children with the story of my biggest mistake ever.

“And then there was Grandma Connie. She just had to have her coffee.”

I am pins-and-needles awake now, which happens whenever I’ve been scared to attention in the dark. The phone rings, the house alarm shrieks, the dogs lose their minds over a crack of thunder—there’s no returning to bed after that. I feel ready to run a marathon, which is something I will never do, but you get the idea.

This jolt of alertness is not what brought me to my keyboard before dawn. For that, it took the kindness of five strangers, all of them far younger than I, who huddled with me in the basement of this building that houses dozens. All the other residents either slept through the warnings or decided they could survive a tornado from their perches high above the ground. I want that kind of confidence for a single day, please.

When I first entered the empty stairwell, I felt self-conscious. Here’s Grandma, fancying herself to be Dorothy hurtling toward Oz. Three flights down, though, I met a sleepy young couple with bed hair and a beautiful 11-year-old husky, and then I felt lucky. They were wide-eyed and polite as we made our way down the stairs, and when we reached the basement the young man pushed open the door, smiled at me and said, “After you.” There’s no such thing as a small kindness, I’ve decided.

In the basement we joined the three other humans and two little rescue dogs who are Pekinese mixes. All of us were chatty in that excited way, the dogs included. After a few minutes, I introduced myself and asked their names because that’s what Sherrod would have done had he not been in Washington. He’s rubbed off on me in that way. He would say he’s better in such moments because of me, and this is one of the reasons we’re good for each other. We’re co-authors of this marriage, happy to share the byline. Occasionally, we do argue over the headlines.

After about a half-hour, the tornado alert was cancelled and for just a moment I was sorry to see it end. I don’t want anyone living in fear of a natural disaster, but there’s something to be said for the occasional false alarm that makes strangers happy to find one another.

There are worse ways to start the day. I’ll go so far as to recommend it, every once in a while.