TKG Take Ten . Night Storm across The Prairie

Thursday - I have traveled to many countries round and round I go but I have found that the most dramatic thunder and lightning storms are right here on the plains of Illinois.

Right here on the prairie.

When I was living here in Illinois as a New Zealand AFS student in 1977, I was 16. I used to become anxious in these storms. I had never seen lightning storms like this before and sometimes the thunder rolls for minutes at a time. I was billeted with a family of boys and the third son who was about five years younger than me became my companion and friend during the storms. He was kind. The others not so much. My bedroom was on the second story of a very old farmhouse and his was down a long hallway. I had never slept in a room by myself. I came from an all girls school. I was a kid from the beach transplanted into the prairies. I was used to storms but they were all about the sea. There was never thunder and lightning like this. Everything was strange in those first few months. These storms felt dangerous. A phenonemon. A statement. A portent.

Once when there was an especially bad storm Jimmy brought his record player to the door of my room. He did not say anything. He smiled to me and nodded to himself. He laid the record player on the floor in the doorway. The record player was in an old case that looked like a typewriter case and he lifted the lid, place a single record on the turntable, wound the contraption up with a tiny removable handle and out came this haunting music.

He had only one a tiny black record. A single. This he played through the whole storm. Just the one side. Over and over again.

It was They Shoot Horses Don’t They by Racing Cars. Do you remember?

If you can play this track at the same time as the sound of the storm I am sending you, you will be transported back to 1977 with me. A summer night in a big old farmhouse in the middle of cornfields on the prairie. I am sitting crosslegged on an old fourposter bed in a room with dark paneled floors and ceiling. The bed covered in hand made quilts, the walls with ancient blue paisley wallpaper and along the walls dark old looming huge monstery furniture. The room is surrounded on three sides by tall open sash windows, the lace curtains whipping in the wind. The storm thundering and splashing light across the bed where I sit. The wet scents of pine and whipping corn. The light hits my face. In flickers and snarls. My eyes wide and my back ramrod straight. My knuckles in my mouth. Jimmy, on the floor just outside the door, a tow haired boy, in his white boxers, his skinny twelve year old legs stuck out as he leans back on the wall of the corridor. Relaxed. He sits there in the dark, his eyes closed, opposite me, his own face lighting up with the lightening flashes. He shows no fear. Says no words. He just listens and rests. Playing this track over and over again.

Put all that together and slowly, slowly you will find the calm he brought to share with me.

And no - I have never seen the movie. I guess I should right?

Have a lovely evening.

Celi

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