Give Her the Chair

You can tell a lot about a person by how they respond to a moment of adversity. I’ll admit it’s not exactly a novel observation, but I found myself thinking about it the other day when my mother and I were reminiscing over an old family story. In true Iowa fashion, it all began with a tornado.

It was June 2nd, 1980. I was awakened early that morning around seven o’clock by the deafening sounds of thunder and rain—mixed with the vicious rat-a-tat-tat sound of hail against my bedroom windows. I may have been only eleven years old, but I’d already lived through enough Iowa summer storms to know this one sounded nastier than usual.

Alarmed, I climbed out of bed and padded barefoot up the hall to the kitchen, still in my pajamas. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table looking grimly out the window. The rain poured down in sheets, driven almost parallel to the ground by the wind. I could tell she was worried.

“Do you think there’s a tornado coming?” I asked nervously.

“I don’t know, but it looks bad,” she said. “Sit down and wait a minute. We need to keep an eye on things. If it gets any worse, we’ll need to go to the basement.”

I remember being told once that an approaching tornado sounded like “a freight train.” That always struck me as odd, because in my kid brain, the only sound I associated with a freight train was the horn blowing as it came to a crossing.

“Huh. I wonder how a tornado makes that airhorn sound?” I thought. It seemed like a stupid question at the time, so I never asked.

Suddenly, the wind picked up to an almost impossible speed and the furniture on our back patio went flying to the north in the direction of my grandparents’ house. The sound I heard was most definitely not an airhorn. A hollow roar, like an enormous waterfall, seemed to be coming from every direction at once.

Mom jumped up from the table and bolted down the hall to my sister’s bedroom, with me following behind like a panicked little shadow. She burst in and scooped Jill out of bed, blankets and all, and ordered me to follow her to the basement. Amazingly, my sister had been sleeping through the storm’s racket and was muttering indignantly, “What, what?” as she was bounced awake. Mom ignored her protestations and dashed back up the hallway with Jill in her arms.

As we hurried through the kitchen on our way to the basement stairs, I glanced out the window and saw my plastic Big Wheel doing lazy somersaults through the air, almost surfing on waves of rain driven by the oncoming tornado. We hustled down the stairwell and flopped onto a dusty old couch in the far corner.

We could hear the creaking of the house as gusts of wind pummeled the structure, but other than that, everything seemed fine. Of course, by this point, the lights had gone out—but Mom had the presence of mind to keep a flashlight sitting on a small shelf above the washer and dryer.

After we sat huddled on the couch for a few minutes, the sounds of the storm began to abate. Meanwhile, I had decided it would be hilarious to entertain my little sister by putting the flashlight in my mouth and turning it off and on to make my face flicker like a blood-red neon sign.

“Stop being a banana brain,” my mother chided distractedly. She grabbed the flashlight from me and set it on a table next to the couch, pointing up toward the ceiling to provide gentle illumination.

“You two sit still and stay in the basement. I’m going to go upstairs and check on things.”

She crept cautiously back up the steps and went to the kitchen window to survey the damage. One of our sapling maple trees had broken off at the trunk—the top lying upside down next to it, attached by one remaining splinter of wood. Our brand-new patio chairs had been tossed over the back fence some fifty yards away and were lying in the hayfield, twisted and splattered with mud.

Looking to the north end of the yard, she suddenly noticed my grandparents walking through the hayfield toward our house.

“Have they lost their minds?” she muttered incredulously to herself. “What would possess them to walk down for a visit in this kind of weather?”

On many summer mornings Grandma—and sometimes Grandpa too, if he wasn’t busy with farm work—would walk through the hayfield separating our houses to visit and have a cup of coffee. Mom was always happy to see them, but you’d have to be a lunatic to want to go for a stroll through the fields in weather like this.

She then noticed debris of some sort scattered in the distance, tracking eastward almost directly behind my grandparents’ prefab Wausau home. Oh, this did not look good.

Presently, they made it to our back yard and let themselves in through a gate in the fence. Mom could now see they were both still in their pajamas—soaking wet—with a big moss-green blanket wrapped around them.

She opened the back door and called out to them, “Are you two okay?”

Grandma answered in a tremulous voice, “We’re fine, but it took the roof off over the front room. Paul and I were both still in bed when it hit. I went up the hall to see what was going on and all of a sudden the ceiling lifted up and it was just daylight. Everything is soaked!”

I actually never witnessed this exchange—Jill and I had been commanded to stay in the basement, of course. I only learned the details of the conversation later. At the time, all I heard were my grandparents’ voices as they came in the back door, followed by the sound of Mom and Grandma chattering nervously in the kitchen.

Grandpa, in his rain-soaked pajamas and house shoes, came down the basement steps to check on my sister and me. He came sauntering over with a big grin on his face and a drop of water clinging precariously to the end of his nose. He casually swiped the water away and asked, "You wanna buy a house… cheap?”

My sister and I burst out laughing. Grandpa was clearly amused, so I assumed everything was, as he might say, fine as frog hair.

We then went upstairs and changed clothes so we could go to their place and survey the damage. As we pulled into the driveway and saw the front of the house, it was obvious about a quarter of the roof was gone, primarily over the garage and living room.

Going in the front door, it appeared that the twister had sucked most of the furniture out and tossed it into a field to the east. That was the debris we’d seen earlier, along with the remains of the roof itself.

All that was left in the living room was a plate glass mirror on one wall and Grandpa’s favorite overstuffed La-Z-Boy chair in the corner. A couch that weighed at least twice what the chair did was gone, along with two marbled-topped end tables and a coffee table. But there sat the recliner in all of its burnt orange glory, looking only a trifle damp and none the worse for the wear.

A bit like Grandpa.

By contrast, Grandma was rather more overwrought. It turns out the minute she saw the roof fly off into the sky, she raced to the phone hanging on the kitchen wall and dialed the Appanoose County Law Center to report the tornado’s passing.

Actually, “report the tornado” is too tidy a description for what she did. As the tale was later told to me, her exact statement was, and I quote: “My house just blew away, but I still have the chair!”

Evidently it amused the switchboard operator so much, the story was somehow passed along to the local radio station where the news announcer—clearly struggling to maintain his composure on the air—reported that “a lady in Exline” had called to say her house had blown away but she still had her chair.

It appeared she still had her phone as well.

*

It’s funny how adversity doesn’t so much change people as clarify them. Faced with the same tornado, my grandmother became pure alarm and my grandfather somehow became even more himself.

My poor grandmother was so traumatized that for the remainder of the summer, any time the sky darkened and the wind blew, you’d find her huddled in our basement, certain that portions of her house were about to become airborne once more.

Initially, Grandpa would humor her and come down as well, but he eventually tired of the semi-weekly “tornado drills.” He told her that he reckoned if he blew away, he’d be sure to write and let her know how things were in the Land of Oz.

Grandma did not find this amusing.

What she did find amusing, though—we all did—was the story of my Aunt Shirley’s response to another household catastrophe years before. This was not nearly as severe, but every bit as character-revealing.

Shirley was my mother’s older sister. I always thought of her as my “fun aunt.” Her personality was an interesting mix of my grandmother and grandfather. She could get wound up about some things like Grandma, but other times would display Grandpa’s deeply Midwestern stoicism. You just never knew which version might show up.

Long before my grandparents had built their Wausau home in 1974, they had lived on another corner of the farm in an old house that dated back to the late 19th century. It had originally been my grandfather’s childhood home, but at this point in the story it now belonged to my mother’s brother, Jimmy, and his wife Marge.

It was a long-ago summer afternoon at the farmhouse, and my mother and Aunt Shirley were visiting with Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Marge. Shirley’s boy, David, and Jimmy’s boy Ricky were in the backyard playing catch with an old baseball. At some point, an errant pitch from David was missed and the ball came crashing through the living room window, scattering shards of glass all over the carpet.

Aunt Shirley was fit to be tied. Furious with her son, she immediately insisted that she would pay for the broken window. Both Jimmy and Marge tried to calm her down, assuring her that it really wasn’t necessary—boys will be boys, accidents happen, and so forth.

Well, Shirley was not going to be mollified. She was, by God, going to pay for the damages and she wouldn’t hear another word about it. Mad as a wet hen, she got up from the kitchen table and went to the front room to retrieve her purse.

After rifling through the contents for a moment—muttering unflattering comments about David under her breath—she finally succeeded in resurrecting the checkbook and flounced back into the kitchen.

Everyone stared uncomfortably at the evolving scene as Shirley pulled out the kitchen chair she’d just been sitting on a moment before. With her checkbook in one hand and a pen in the other, she plopped down unceremoniously—and the legs of the chair suddenly gave way.

With a great crash, down she went, flat on her backside—the legs of the chair splayed out like the points on a compass.

She sat utterly motionless, mouth in a perfect O of astonishment—leaning against the seat back, pen and checkbook still clasped in her hands. From the other side of the table, she was only visible from the neck up.

For just a second, you could have heard a pin drop. All of the fight seemed to have gone out of her.

Then in a deadpan voice, she asked, “And how much more for the chair?”