It was a thundery day today in Rainforest City, with drenching noisy storms moving between intervals of steamy pearl-grey light. Thunder echoed in the mist, and lightning blazed in the sky well into the evening. I was pleased and satisfied, enjoying my favorite type of weather. But it wasn't always my favorite type of weather.

Up until my twentieth year, all the way through my childhood and into my young adulthood, I was terrified of thunderstorms. When the lightning lit the horizon, I felt dread and horror. As a child I dashed into my parents' room during a thundery night; the storms were especially scary at night. I pushed my head into my pillow and covered my ears, wrapped my blanket over my eyes so I wouldn't see that terrible lightning. At summer sleep-away camp I made a fool of myself with my whimpering during storms.

But I remember a single moment when my terror of thunderstorms turned to tolerance, and then appreciation. It was in 1973, when I had a summer job at the Moog Synthesizer factory outside of Buffalo, NY. (I wrote about this in my essay series "Growing up With Electronic Music," which I placed as a link in an early entry on this Weblog.) Buffalo's lakeside, flat geography engenders lots of thunderstorms, including unusual ones in the morning, where the sky turns red and the storms begin their eastward journey across New York State.

Buffalo had a classical music station, WBFO (which now plays only jazz). I listened to my favorite music on that station while I lived with my host family: a Moog engineer, his wife and their three lively children. One morning, the sky out the window turned that ominous red, and I heard the sound of thunder. I felt the old terror coming at me, and I decided to switch on the radio to try to drown out the sound. WBFO was playing Saint-Saens' Symphony no. 3, the "Organ Symphony." If any piece of music could match a thunderstorm, this is it, a bombastic, driving musical pile-up with really thunderous organ chords. The symphony lasted as long as the thunderstorm, or vice versa, and after that, my storm fear was gone. Somehow, Saint-Saens had not only taken it away, but taken it into the symphony. Now, whenever I hear that symphony, I think of thunderstorms! I have enjoyed thunderstorms ever since, from Buffalo storms which come in from Lake Erie across the flat land, to East Coast storms which gather over the woods and hills, and one memorable one in Iowa when I truly thought the world was going to explode.

Posted at 3:02 am | link