in the wind and rain

Hurricane Ike has finally brought a little relief from the humidity and high temperatures in Central Texas. It's early yet, we haven't seen any of the major storm activity here. In fact, out my window I see the sun shining and butterflies dancing around the flowering fruit tree in the neighbor's yard. There's a nice breeze through the house without all the fans on high, so there's relief. But you never know what the wind's gonna blow into town.

Yesterday, I got a call from my eldest sister, R, saying that she and her boyfriend and son and an undisclosed number of "dogs" were on the road having been evacuated from their home on the coast near where Galveston Bay meets the Houston Ship Channel. They had been on the road for hours already looking for a large town with hotel availability when B, the boyfriend, said, "Where does your brother live?" I was fine with having them pop in, but our apartment is small and I didn't think we could host (or even greet) all those people and all those dogs, so I called M and asked if I could meet them at their house.

As it turned out, M&J had J's sister K's ex-boyfriend T's Airstream in the driveway waiting for friends from down near Corpus Christi, but when Ike decided to head more northerly, they chose not to make the trip. J is a tinkerer and was proud that he had been able to get the a/c working in the Airstream, so I think he was quite happy to have people staying in it.

I went to H.E.B., got a case of beer and headed to M&J's to have one before my family arrived. Little P had a friend (whose name I missed) over, and then L&S -- M&J's friends they met because their daughters are in school together -- showed up with I (their daughter), who has been calling me "uncle jaybird" like Little P always has (which I love), and they had more beer, and so it turned out to be a regular old beer-drinking Friday night at M&J's.

The dogs numbered three, "all angels," R assured me on the phone, and they were fine. Bones, M&J's dog was ecstatic to have in specie guests, and didn't care that all three of the dogs had their hair raised and teeth bared for the first half hour, he just wanted to play! Eventually, the two younger dogs allowed Bones to kiss and sniff on them and even wagged their tails a little bit.

My sister was so grateful to have a place to be and turned in rather early; the rest of us sat in front of the big screen TV watching the silly CNN weathermen in their L.L. Bean jackets standing on the coast of Galveston Bay alternately over-dramatizing the wind and rain and "complaining" that the winds weren't really all that strong. I could only take a little bit of that and found myself in a jump roping competition with I and her mother (those girls are very competitive) which made my head throb, partly from the beer and partly from the weather.

M talked to her mother every couple of hours. Her mother kept saying, "I don't think we're gonna get any rain from this," and after several hours and several beers, M changed her tune to sound a little more like her mother's, which I chided her for.

My mother had called me earlier in the day to say she wasn't leaving her home, which is less than 10 miles from where my sister was mandatorily evacuated, and just 7.5 miles from the Houston Ship Channel. "After I sat on the highway for 12 hours that last time, I said, 'Never again!'" My stepdad took off the day before for the country house, but she is stubborn, by hers and everyone's admission.

B and D talked to her on the phone a couple of times last night and she was still there, still fine, though her 93-year-old father -- who was supposed to be picked up from his house closer to the bay and delivered to her house -- hadn't shown up yet. But he's pretty stubborn, too. (There is plenty of 8mm footage my grandfather and grandmother took from the Galveston Wall back in the day when they heard of a hurricane brewing and would drive to the water's edge to film it!)

I tried to call my mom at 7:30 this morning, but the telephone was out of order, not surprisingly. At 8:15, the radar showed a big red color-enhanced dot of wind and rain right over my mom's neighborhood. I guess we'll just have to see. I'm expecting to get a call any minute now from M or J, or even B to say they're up and ready for breakfast. I sure am. I don't know what the day holds. I certainly hope it won't require me to sit with family and friends while storms rage around us.

It's a little disheartening being around my nephew, who just recently returned from a Christian finishing school in California. But what bums me out the most is something that I struggled with growing up, and it is sad to see that it still exists in this family, and that is the idea that animals are disposable. They have three dogs, "angels all," though my sister and her boyfriend, D's guardians for now, have said that he can get a pit bull when he gets rid of one of the other dogs. So he's always trying to get somebody to take one of the dogs, while at the same times saying this one has Down's Syndrome or that one is worthless or whatever. I guess, in essence, they aren't cool enough for the image he obviously would like to project.

I can't say much more on this subject except to say that I know where this is coming from, and there is nothing I can do about it. I feel for the dogs, I feel for my sister's kids, I feel for my sister.

P.S. I wrote this entry for the most part before I met M&J and my family for breakfast, and now I'm back and it's 2:15 and we've gotten some breezes and have overcast skies, but still no rain. WTF?

P.P.S. My stepdad didn't actually leave my mother to fend for herself, I found out over lunch. Silly me, I called their land line and not her cell phone. Oh, well; reports are that they're fine except for a couple of leaks in the roof. They got rain, so where's ours?