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I grew up on the gulf coast.

There were occasionally hurricanes. I have memories of them. Mainly not the storms themselves, but more about my father. My father worked for a utility company. When storms would come, he would have duty, repairing down power lines and the like.

I remember my house and the feeling of safety that came from living in it. My father found the best built brick house he could buy. He then reinforced it with storm windows. During the storms, I would stand in front of the big sliding glass door and watch the winds tear through my back yard. I would watch the pine trees bend double, and then, when the eye passed, bend double the other way. All my siblings and my mother gathered there in the great room and watched out that reinforced glass door at the mayhem outside and were perfectly safe.

My father was wise enough that even in his absence, his family was looked after. I remember after one storm, the power was out for days. My father once cooked eggs for breakfast in the fireplace. I remember him gingerly reaching his hand wrapped in a towel over the bed of hot coals to flip the eggs in a metal skillet. I was perfectly safe and happy, despite the rest of the world.

I had a neighbor who used to say that there was always a beautiful day after a bad storm. For me, this is still true today.

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Dude, this sparked memories.

I LOVED typhoons in Guam, and really miss them. And Guam was a small, flat little island that typhoons hit HARD, and frequently. Winds of 150 mph, etc. Some of my favorite memories are of sneaking out of the house in a typhoon and running hard into the wind, as hard as I could, and barely moving. Sometimes for every three steps, I'd move one real step worth of space ahead. Sometimes I'd just break even, going nowhere when running full out. Sometimes even lifting a foot for a split second meant I'd actually be running backwards while going forwards. It was weird, eerie, surreal fun. There was always at least some faint lick of terror creeping up around the edge of things to inspire it with some extra special flavor. The wind would hit so hard sometimes that it would stagger me back, and I'd wonder if the very next gust might be the one to pick me up. If it did, where would it carry me? Would it rush up and grab me, fling into the sky, and then fade, leaving me to plummet back to earth? Would it shake me like a dog shakes a rat, or drive me into a wall or a tree, or send me skidding over the asphalt until it peeled me like an orange? Would it pin me down while a mailbox, window shutter, or car made its slow, inevitable tumble through the air, leaving me to consider the inevitability of its arc, to crush or decapitate me? Would I go missing and never be found? Should I really be where I was?

Nature was so alive, God come down to earth, the age of miracles reborn so you could really feel it in your skin. It was spooky and glorious.

Going in wouldn't necessarily make you any safer, but a cinder-block house sure helped. I remember the whole family, and we had a big one, kneeling, lying, and squatting around the toilet bowl, the strongest place in the house, each with a hand on the bowl in case the winds came to claim us. The wind hitting the house like a grenade, the dogs peeing themselves. Dad was strong, Mom was warm and probably stronger than she wanted to be. This was how a family was supposed to die, but would we?

Those might have been the best times in my life.

The next morning, if the worst part of the typhoon had passed, we'd tentatively step outside to see how much of the world was left.