there's no place like home there's no place like home
-Tornado courtesy of Firetunnel's shared H3 Google Image search, results from page six, last image (page one was Sumthin' Else, entirely).


Tornados I have known:
Dorothy's (actually a cyclone)

May 8, 1979 - it ripped through my school at 2:35 p.m. I was skippin', but only 100 yards away, watching. Had it happened 10 minutes later, the parking lot woulda been full of dead kids.

The one on the Encarta movie that I played for all the Mexican kids during my first year teaching - a technological miracle at the time.

The one in a small Kansas town, summer of 2001, that sent me and my ex into the walk-in fridge of a local grocery store. All the patrons left the shopping carts in the aisles when the warning siren began to wail. About 30 of us crowded in with the friendly manager. He was plump and sweetly disheveled with a little blood stain on his crumpled shirt, his tie askew, passing out grape sodas to everyone, and kneeling on the damp floor to calm the little kids. After about an hour, the tornado moved out of our zone and the sirens quit, and we all got in line with our melted groceries. Then my ex and I drove back to the hotel, where I finished the stomach flu, and got ready for another day's travel from Nevada, to my new home in North Carolina.

Zaragosa, Texas, mid '80's. 50 miles from Alpine, and we considered that a neighbor in those parts. The town was entirely destroyed.

The one in the fictional documentary, "Gummo", that makes all the disturbingly tragic characters who they are.