14. HURRICANE
The one about the one to make you laugh and cry
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Did I ever tell you about surviving my first hurricane?
I was six, and it was late into the summer of 1991.
My family had a house on the water in North Falmouth on Cape Cod. We spent much of our summer packed into this beautiful, storied home called the Irish Mist for the Finigans who all congregated there, and for the morning fog and dew that would show up on the lawn every morning like a cleansing, a fresh start to each day. And always, there was the gift of being so close to the ocean.
By this time, my parents had been divorced for a few years. That same month, the week before, my mom, on August 10th, had married her second husband, who was aptly named Mal, or bad, which was exactly the imprint and energy he would leave on our family over the next thirty years.
But Mal and Mom are not who this story is about.
This was about my dad and Bob.
During what must have been Mom and Mal’s honeymoon, we were spending mid-August on the Cape, enjoying the morning dips in the Jetties, picking up sea glass around New Silver Beach, and buying as much candy as possible from Tea Room Snack Shack. When the news came of Hurricane Bob rolling up the coast from the Bahamas that week, it became clear that staying in an oceanfront home, which was going to get the brunt of the storm, wasn’t a smart idea. So, my father packed us into his Scorpio and we began driving north to his home in Concord. Only problem, aside from the weather, was that the windshield wipers on my father’s car were not working. It was not a great time for this to happen, because there was no place to get them changed, as the Cape was closed down. My father had what he thought was a good idea: he would drive, in gale force winds, as fast as he could, off the Cape with his head out the driver’s side window.
What a scene we must have been. What a crazy time to be escaping this summerland paradise, and doing so with a general who came unprepared. When we stopped at a rest area, probably to get my father’s head back on straight, we went into a store. Perusing the stock in the place, I found a tee that best described this experience. So, I grabbed the hanger and brought it over to my wind-blown father.
“Dad, I need you to buy me this tee shirt.” I expressed my request with a sense of urgency. This was my first hurricane, and I needed to make sure I had a memento to share with the kids back in third grade for show and tell.
My dad adjusted his eyes and looked down at his eight-year-old daughter holding an oversized men's tee shirt with a clear slogan on it.
“Absolutely not.” He said in a disturbed way, walking away from me. I followed him like a dog. “Please, Dad!” I pleaded, “This is my first hurricane! I want to remember it.”
“Oh, we’ll remember it, alright,” he responded. Half of his golf shirt was soaked and his jet-black hair slicked back from the window shower.
“HMPH!” I huffed, as I put the tee back on the rack and made my way back towards the car.
Later on, when this story would be retold in front of family and friends, my dad would do his best to reenact his disturbed reaction to my proposed purchase.
“And after that, driving without windshield wipers, three kids in the back of the car, trying to get out of the storm of the century, I got my daughter here asking to have me, her dad, buy her a shirt that says ‘I got blown by Bob’ on it.” Everyone would burst out laughing, including me, a decade later, when I actually understood the undercurrent of that tee’s sentiment.
And while Hurricane Bob destroyed much of the Cape with its powerful, seventy-mile-an-hour winds that year, nothing could prepare me for the hurricane of my life.