I’m a big, fat liar. An inadvertent one, to be fair, but five year-olds don’t make these subtle distinctions. My son thinks I’m a big, fat liar because I promised him a tornado would never hit New York and shortly thereafter we watched one whirl past his bedroom window. I can explain the concept of freak meteorological phenomena ‘til I’m blue in the face but it doesn’t change the fact that I now have about as much credibility as those wackos who still argue the earth is flat.
The Brooklyn cyclone, as wild as it was, wouldn’t have been that big a deal for our family except for one thing. My son just so happens to be terrified of tornadoes. It’s not the most common fear for a city kid, but then again, it’s not the least common either. Everybody’s scared of something, I like to tell him. Some kids are scared of dogs, others are scared of fire; some kids are scared of freight elevators and men with mustaches and those hand-dryers in bathrooms that blow air at you like they’re trying to rip your epidermis off.
“Everybody’s scared of something,” I reminded Giovanni, “And the great thing about what you’re scared of is that it’ll never happen in New York.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, his brow furrowed.
“I’m positive,” I replied, “You get tornados in flat places, like Kansas or — “ I actually didn’t know where else you get tornados since the totality of my information was derived from The Wizard of Oz, “Or places like Kansas, “ I ventured, “Arkansas? No, maybe I’m thinking of Oklahoma.”
Giovanni looked skeptical.
“Places with prairies,” I continued assertively, “New York is neither flat nor does it boast many prairies, ergo, it cannot have a tornado.”
Now, if you’re either some sort of meteorological savant, or from the Mid-West, you’ll probably be quick to point out how flawed my theory is. But remember please, I’m a native New Yorker, with a self-obsessed sense of geography and this is the best I can do. It’s not particularly a point of pride for me to speak authoritatively about things I’ve only been exposed to through fictional movies from seventy-five years ago, but I’ve got a kid that asks a lot of questions and my response has got to work according to a “best guess” strategy, otherwise I’d be glued to Wikipedia.
“You promise?” Giovanni asked.
Like most modern parents, I am concerned with earning the trust of my kids, so I try not to make promises I can’t keep. But this one seemed pretty safe, like promising that the Boogieman wasn’t real.
“I promise.”
Just goes to show how much my word of honor counts for, because despite my promise, Giovanni kept right on worrying about the possibility of a twister in Park Slope. He’d bring it up almost every time there was a rainstorm: so it was not surprising when I picked him up from school one gray afternoon in late September and he asked, “Is there going to be a tornado today?”
I raised my eyebrows and said, “We’ve been over and over this, honey. There are no such things are tornados in New York. It’s just a little overcast.”
By the time we walked home, after my daughter’s ballet class, the sky had graduated from a little overcast to a foreboding gray. Still, it’d been threatening to rain all day with nary a drop and, as I reassured Giovanni, a little rain did not a thunderstorm make, so instead of heading straight home, we stopped at a playground close to home, where I instructed the children to exhaust themselves.
Giovanni consented to the fun begrudgingly but kept looking at the sky like a workaholic who won’t stop checking his Blackberry during dinner. And, just as he’d worried, the sky kept getting darker and darker until it was positively apocalyptic and Giovanni had to put his foot down:
“The sky is too dark,” he said, “We have to go home now.”
I sighed and went to find his sister who was bounding across the playground, throwing herself down the spiral slide headfirst, as unconcerned with the state of the sky as her brother was fixated on it. The only question she had about the lightening was, “Can I ride it?”
“Let’s just give it a few more minutes ‘til your sister’s tired out a bit,” I reasoned. “Look, we’re a block away from home, It’s not even raining yet.”
As if on cue, a clap of thunder sounded, followed by a flash of lightening. It was as if the sky was announcing “This is the final boarding call for flight MORON, to ANYWHERE BUT HERE.”
“I want to go home NOW!” Giovanni yelled,
Getting my hands on Stella required that I mount the playground apparatus and suffer the indignity of running up the slide and leaping across the shaky drawbridge, always ten steps behind her, because she is a speed demon, with particular emphasis on the demon part.
“This is NOT GOOD LISTENING!” I shrieked at her, over the thunder.
Meanwhile Giovanni was yelling prophecies like Nostradamus: “LISTEN TO ME! THERE IS GOING TO BE A TORNADO!”
“For the last time,” I yelled, ”There are NO TORNADOES IN PARK SLOPE!”
I finally caught Stella, stuffed her in the stroller and speed-walked home, just as it started to rain. As we rushed through our front door, I patted Giovanni on the head and said, patronizingly, “See that? Safe and sound.”
But Giovanni had already run to the window
“Mommy,” he said, his voice breathless, “come look.”
The sky was no longer a charming shade of Gotham-City-Gray, it was Crap-Is-Going-Seriously-Wrong Black. Flashes of lightening split the darkness over and over and a spectacular surround-sound thunder boomed.
Then, suddenly, we couldn’t see the neon lights of the stores across the street anymore, or the cars down below or anything. The very air in front of the window grew dense and dark. I’m no meteorologist or anything but when it looks like you can scoop a handful of air into your hands and made a ball of doom with it, it’s probably a pretty bad sign. Then, the black cloud which consumed the street began to howl so loudly that I got flat-out freaked-out. I closed the blinds, took the kids in the other room and distracted them with an impromptu tea party.
About a half hour later, David came home from work and told us that on his walk from the train he’d seen trees that had been uprooted, crushing cars, and that a man was blown down the stairs of the subway and was carried out on a stretcher.
“What was it?” I asked.
“T-o-r-n-a-d-o,” he spelled out.
“No. Freaking. Way.” I replied.
“What does that spell?” Giovanni asked.
“Are you kidding me?” I said, laughing at the insanity of it all.
“Taaar,” Giovanni ventured, “taar-ney-doo? What’s a tarneydoo?”
Then his eyes grew big, “Tornado? Does it spell tornado?”
“Umm.” I stammered, “Ummm.”
“That was really a tornado? Really?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure,” I answered, “I mean, I think they have to analyze the high-velocity …“
But he was not about to be dazzled and disoriented by my invented jibber-jabber, “You lied, Mommy,” he said, very matter-of-factly, “You said we can’t have tornadoes in New York.”
“I know I did, honey, but . . . but . . .” For once, I was at a loss for words.
“Mommy didn’t lie,” came David to the rescue, “There never had been a tornado in New York before. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. And, you know what else? Sometimes even Mommies make mistakes.”
But Giovanni didn’t look upset. In fact, he looked relieved.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he reassured us, “I feel better. I saw a real live tornado and it wasn’t so bad after all. Nobody’s house got picked up and blown away.”
“This is true,” I said, shooting David the “are-you-getting-this?” look.
We had a pleasant evening and the kids were A-OK, no problems going to sleep or off to school the next day. But when I went to tuck Giovanni in the next night, he said he had a question.
“Sure,” I said, “Shoot.”
“Are there volcanoes in New York?”
“That is a very good question,” I replied, flipping through my brain’s exceedingly slim volcano index – Vesuvius, Bali Ha-i, was Mount Fuji volcanic or was it just a regular mountain? — Then I took a deep breath and said: “I’m gonna have to get back to you on that.”
To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog A Mom Amok at http://amomamok.blogspot.com.
