My mother said to me around Christmas that she had noticed women wearing colorful versions of “that hat you got your dad” – the mad bomber hat. I don’t know where I got it. It was a long time ago. Now Quentin’s WWI aviator’s suede helmet I bought at the original Banana Republic, I didn’t buy it for him. He was little then, but later he found it. He likes it and wears it for the same reason: he tells people, “It’s warm.” Yes, it is. It is also a little odd looking, but then Quentin has the most marvelous smile and the hat takes on a renewed flair.

But I was talking about the Mad Bomber hat, the one I gave my dad. It was sort of a joking Christmas present because when I was in high school, he used to drive me crazy by sticking the zipped-off hood of a parka coat on his head to putter around outside or walk the dog. The sideflaps poked out down around chin level like beagle ears. Overall, it gave him the look of a homeless man. It was some shade of green; I can’t really call it forth clearly in my mind’s eye because I always rolled my eyes when I looked out the window and saw him wearing it.

When I saw the Mad Bomber hat years later, I knew I had to get it for him. That Christmas morning, I remember my mother telling my aunt about the infamous hood and remarking, “She hated it, just hated it.” He wore the Mad Bomber and I think it kept him warm, and that I had learned, was the important thing.

Then these stylish versions turned up at Eddie Bauer and Mother took a fancy to them, so I got her one for a late Christmas present – although she insisted on paying for it. I got her, though, I told her it was half as much as it was. Hers is blue with the fur in the usual places – on the forehead flap that folds down, on the ear flaps and around the edges of the neck. Mother is 81; she has panache.

She wore it down to the bookmobile and into a couple of her thrift shop haunts. She doesn’t wear it to chop kindling; she says she doesn’t want to get it dirty.

Easter is early this year; I don’t know whether it was early or late or right in the middle in 1965, but that is the year of the Palm Sunday tornadoes. One went over our heads, but we didn’t know it. I wouldn’t remember the day as special had not we become aware of what had happened to our neighbors.

Because of what I saw later that day, I remember the hours before. It was a gloomy day, warm enough to go out in shirtsleeves; we were looking out the windows like we would on any potentially stormy day. My dad and I were looking to the west from the  – okay, we called it “the west room” then. (Later, my father would rechristen it “the cold room” – not to be confused with “the little cold room”.) Mother was looking out the back door of the porch. The old school house was a across a block of field converted to lawn (yard) and beyond that, the tree line. She came and said there were black clouds up high moving very fast.

She and Grandma went to the basement, down the old stairs that had more the angle of a ladder. Daddy and I just kind of stood upstairs, thinking if we should go down or not. Nothing happened. Mother and Grandma came up; Daddy went back to reading the paper and I guess I wandered around, probably thinking of homework I would always put off until it was almost too late.

Someone knocked at the front door and wanted to know if our phone worked. I don’t remember if it did or not, but I know something was said about the Bassett house, which was about the same distance to the northeast of the schoolhouse as we were to the south, being moved off its foundation. That was the least of it. Teddy Gage was sitting outside in a lawn chair beside the towering roots of a once really towering tree. Metal was wrapped around stripped trees. Homes were picked up and dropped in the lake.

Everything was fine right around our house. The tornado had hopped.

I am up because I have to take my daughter-in-law, who doesn’t drive, to work at the hospital; she likes to get there early for her 12 hour shift of nursing. Tomorrow I will do it again . . . but today, today, I see white, slick roadways out there. But this is not as bad as it could have been; our snow measurement is less than an inch and the predictions for much more have been cut back. Auggghhhhhh. Given the percentage of good calls by the weather guys in our area this year, that might mean we will actually wind up snowbound.

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UPDATE: 6:45 am. Sydney’s tracks are filled in and more and the snow is coming down fast and furious. On the way to the hospital I followed a little car with the taillights of  Corvette going 20 mph; no way I was passing him on the right. On the way home, I met a salt truck and my first thought was to be nice and safe in it. Well, it is big . . . but all the salt is behind it. That could be a bummer. Anyway, if this keeps up, we could have a lot of snow. ACK.

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What I am doing here is reacting to the situation in a manner influenced by the Internet and The Weather Channel – this awareness of everyone’s weather and emphasis on our own, in light of what is going on elsewhere. Hey, we have had many, many snows in March and April; this is really northern Northern Indiana and this is the way it sometimes goes.

Shoot, back in 1935, they a terrible time getting to the hospital when my cousin Freddie was born because of a blizzard.

Shoot, back in 2000, Quentin and I went by two semis and lots of cars that had slid off the highway on our way to Indianapolis. In fact, just as we thought we were out of it, we felt the tires let loose on an overpass. We got lucky. And then it was nothing but just rain.
I got him to the airport and then went over to Fountain County to check on the engraving that was supposed to be added to my father’s tombstone. I remember pulling into the cemetery – The Kingman Fraternal Cemetery – very early on a foggy morning. It was too early to stop at anyone’s house and I was really too tired to go anyway. So I pulled the car off to the side of the cemetery lane, climbed in the backseat and went to sleep beneath one of the sleeping bags we never travel without. I awoke to bright sunlight and a clear sky. The morning of incredible snowy ice could have been a dream.

When I got home that night, everyone had tales of how things had come to a standstill after we left – road warnings were issued: stay home. It seems Quentin and I had unknowingly been traveling in a break of the storm – it had been much worse on the highway about a half-hour before we passed and new yuckier ice and snow were following us.

I told them I had slept in a cemetery that morning. Now that impressed them. Hey, it was bigger news than bad weather in Northern Indiana when it was supposed to be spring.