REBA MAE – THE TEMPEST – Part Three

There were numerous times when I was a kid that I remember my mother, Reba Mae, demonstrating her deathly fear of electrical storms. I think the reason that this trait stands out in my memory is that, although shy, she never seemed afraid of much of anything. I mean, other than bad weather and driving through the rough South End of nearby Lima, Ohio (where she worked, oddly enough, through much of World War II).

She taught me that I had to stand up to bullies, and throughout the long years in which my father, Whitie, lived through pendulum swings between energetic euphoria and crippling depression, whenever he suffered a decline, she always stepped into the fray and ran his business for him—often for months—until he could get back onto his feet and do it himself. And she always did it with a smile and to the very best of her ability, even if, in private, I sometimes saw her cry.

But storms scared her silly. There was no rationale that would convince her otherwise. When the wind was up, the lightning flashing and the thunder rolling, she panicked.

When I was older, Reba Mae told me that her irrational fear of storms came from a childhood incident and that she was glad she hadn’t passed the phobia on to my sister, brother and me. Indeed, when there were tornado warnings, back when we were teens and she would start pacing the house in the middle of the night, trying to wake up the rest of the family and get us to accompany her to the basement, my sister Darla and my brother Jim would tell her to leave them alone, and I would always mumble, “You go ahead, I’ll be down in a while.” Whitie would just keep on snoring. It was his learned response to everything from fire and floods to riots and insurrection.

Anyway, it seems that when Reba Mae was a little girl growing up in the west-central Ohio countryside, she was out on her pony one humid summer’s day, when cooler air marshalled in a canicular storm of major proportions. She was out in the fields of the tenant spread that her father farmed in Shelby County. The storm came up so fast, with strong gusts of wind, thunder and lightning, and cold sheets of rain, that she had no time to make it back to the house. She could think of nothing better to do than to take shelter under a lone pin oak that stood in the middle of one of the fields.

Now, that pin oak, all by its lonesome in the midst of a field made it the perfect lightning rod, and although it had withstood thunderstorms of every intensity, season after season, for donkey’s years, it picked this particular day to attract a lightning bolt. The fire-bolt hit with incredible, explosive force and split the hardwood tree like some cosmic axe. The expansive force of the explosive blast stunned Reba Mae and her pony threw her and ran off to parts unknown. As soon as she could think straight, she picked herself up and ran for home. She arrived shaken, with ringing ears and soaked to the skin. From then on, it was as if every storm were out to get her. No one could tell her different.

Curiously enough, it was as if some poltergeist were following her around making sure that she was never able to shake that otherwise irrational belief. Indeed, three different TV sets of ours were struck by lightning over the years, until the advent of cable television made that a near impossibility. And the last time it happened, Reba Mae had rushed to unplug our set as soon as she heard the first clap of thunder, but despite that preventive action, the electrical charge followed the TV line in, jumped the breach and hit the plug on the floor before knocking out the apparatus.

I tried to explain to my mother that these things happened because Whitie was a stickler for TV reception and always got our town’s resident TV genius, Tom Cartmel, to install the tallest antenna towers available. The metal-frame towers provided excellent reception, but made our house a high-profile conductor just waiting for a chance to catch a bolt. It was years before Whitie figured out that if you were going to put up an antenna that tall, you needed to have it attached to a real lightning rod buried in the soil so that any lightning that struck would be grounded out instead of following the line into the house. But it was useless. To Reba Mae’s mind, storms were out to get her.    

There was one night in particular that I recall. I was about four at the time. Perhaps that’s why I remember it so well. Maybe because it was the first time I realized how unhinged she became when a storm broke. And that set my own fear aflame, even though when Whitie saw that I was scared of thunder, he had assured me that it was only the cooks in heaven rolling the potatoes around in the bin. It wasn’t until I was a pre-teen that I started going out, much to my mother’s displeasure, and intentionally walking around town in the worst of electrical storms in order to lose all fear of them. In the end, I got so that I actually liked them and found them singularly inspiring.

So on this particular late-summer Friday evening, it was about dusk when a big, loud thunderstorm rolled in, turning it pitch black outside. This was back when the Teddy Bear, a soda fountain and sandwich shop that Whitie and two of his brothers had founded right after the war, stayed open late on Fridays. Whitie wouldn’t get home until after midnight, once he’d finished the clean-up. If he was home, Reba Mae could handle her fear better, but when he wasn’t, it took complete possession of her. Like I say, I was around four and Darla around seven when this happened. We had a TV, one of the first in town, but our mother was afraid to turn it on with all the thunder and lightning. So she sat my sister and I (our little brother wasn’t born yet) down on either side of her on the couch and started reading stories to us from one of the beautifully bound and illustrated Childcraft books in the collection that occupied a shelf in a small bookcase at one end of the living room.

I usually loved it when Reba Mae read to us. She was an excellent reader, who made the stories come alive. But right now, all I could hear was the tension in her voice that had gone suddenly high and thin.  She was halfway through the telling of a story about a little dog with a bone crossing a bridge, seeing his reflection in the water and dropping his bone in the river to bark at what he thinks is another dog with his bone.

It wasn’t a story I particularly liked—I much preferred the one about the stork and the fox—because I always felt sorry for the little dog. I guess I identified because it sounded like something stupid that I might do. After that night, however, I would always identify it with frightening tempestuous weather. Little wonder, since right in the middle of the reading, there was an enormous clap of thunder with rolling aftershocks that shook the house to its foundations. And that was it for Reba Mae. She briskly snapped the book shut and in a voice that was tissue-thin and tremulous, said, “Come on, kids! Let’s go get Grandma and go have an ice cream!” And before you could say Rumpelstiltskin, we were in the car and on the way to Reba Mae’s mother’s house on the other side of town.

Reba Mae, Darla and Danny at Grandma Myrt's

When we arrived, Grandma Myrt was glad, as always, to see us, and, its being Friday, Grandpa Vern was off at the Monkey House playing cards. There was a brief powwow between mother and daughter, and then we were off to Max’s Dairy Bar for ice cream. Max’s, a tiny carry-out frozen custard store on the east side of town, was one of my favorite places on earth back then, which made me feel a whole lot better about the storm. Reba Mae too, evidently, since her fear was assuaged somewhat by being in the company of her mother and by virtue of the fact that Whitie had once told her that you couldn’t be struck by lightning in a car because the tires grounded it out.

Grandma Myrt and Grandpa Vern years later

Even after we finished our wonderful, sweet, soft ice cream treat in lighter than air wafer cones, the thunder was still rolling and fire-bolts splitting the night. So instead of going home, we went back to Grandma’s until time for Whitie to get off work. For Darla and me, it seemed like the middle of the night since it was well past our bedtime. We’d been rousted out in our summer shorts and t-shirts and with the rain the evening had grown cool. Eating ice cream had made us downright cold. Cold enough for our teeth to chatter.

Reba Mae told Grandma Myrt not to go to any trouble, but Grandma said it was no bother, and while she put water on to boil for coffee for them, she spread one of her wonderful patchwork quilts on the front room floor for Darla and me to lie down, and once we had, she covered us each with a warm, scratchy Indian blanket. With the voices of my mother and her mother chatting in the kitchen as background, I drifted into delicious sleep next to my big sister. Had I been able to articulate my thoughts into words back then, the word would have been...safe.