Yesterday's conversations, as you can imagine, were all about the earthquake. "Did you feel it? Were you scared? What did you think it was, at first? Did anything fall off the shelf in your house?" and etc.
The most surreal part of the day for me, though, (excepting those very terrifying few moments at 1 a.m.) was when I was sharing with a group of friends that I was convinced it was a tornado. I received a few nods but nobody said anything and, as I continued with my story, Jennie interrupted me with a question.
"What is a tornado, exactly? Is it like a hurricane? What's the difference?"
"You're joking, right?" I asked. But everyone else looked equally puzzled. "Don't you get tornadoes?"
Heads shaking, more questions.
"A tornado has an eye, right?" someone else asked. "Which of them is a twister?"
So I quickly explained that a hurricane is a huge storm that starts at sea and has very high winds, that it dies out as it crosses land, and that it has an eye. A tornado, I said, is the one with the funnel cloud.
"Like in that film Twister," I said. "You know, with the cow."
"Oh, right!!" everyone chorused. "I remember the cow flying through the air."
They were also impressed that I've actually done plenty of sitting in basements during tornado warnings (thanks to summers spent living in St. Paul, MInneapolis and Chicago, and also visiting my grandmother in Kentucky). I don't enjoy it. When the sky turns green, I turn green. I remember one swath of tornadoes that hit southern Minnesota while I, up in the city of St. Paul, was actually watching the video of Twister with my college friends. As the tornado hit on the screen, suddenly the tornado sirens went off in real life. We students had to retreat to our dorm basement for hours. We brought our books with us and studied down there, since finals were the following week.
No, I do not like tornadoes. But it does give me a certain kind of celebrity to have "survived" them in this island nation where weather conditions rarely combine favorably for tornado conditions. There have been more tornadoes in recent years, but they obviously haven't made much of an impact upon the public consciousness. My friend Alison, who moved to Evanston about 10 years ago, said the only tornado she'd ever heard of before leaving the U.K. was the one in The Wizard of Oz.
It's moments like these that remind me of the great cultural gap between the U.S. and the U.K. The backdrop of my mind, which I so take for granted in America since so many others share it, is often not the backdrop of theirs.
Hi Stephanie:
I lost your email but saw this blog and wanted to say hi.
Hope all is well with you.
Susan Swartz, Rush North Shore Medical Center, Skokie, IL