[powerpress]<\/p>\n
Dozens of people have already been reported killed in tornados sweeping through Alabama today.<\/p>\n
I didn’t feel like playing Kogan’s “Kaddish” tonight. Instead, I improvised a sort of lullaby for those people; may they rest in peace.<\/p>\n
I lived in Iowa for a few years as a toddler\u2014old enough to get an annoying Iowa accent that faded when we moved to Montana, thank god, but young enough to be a bit hard pressed to remember now how it worked when we played one of the more popular kid games there: “Tornado.”<\/p>\n
The basic shape of it was that you’d be hanging around the yard doing normal kid stuff until someone shouted “Tornado!” Then everyone scurried to large objects (the camper was a favorite), grabbed hold of something, crouched low to the ground while holding on for dear life, and then peered up into the sky looking for funnel-shaped clouds.<\/p>\n
That’s it.\u00a0I don’t think anything happened after that.<\/p>\n
It was a weird game.<\/p>\n
But I guess it makes sense. When you live in a tornado belt, tornados slip into your consciousness, and if you’re a kid, you make a game out of it; you come to terms with it by making it normal, a game.<\/p>\n
But nothing prepares you for the real thing, when entire cities turn upside-down and inside-out, and minutes after you were watching a rerun on TV, you’re instead gaping at the news reports showing your grampa’s airplane hangar, or rather what’s left of what used to be the hangar where your grampa kept his airplane\u2026<\/p>\n
A kaddish for the dozens of people (probably more) who died in the tornados.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dozens of people have already been reported killed in tornados sweeping through Alabama today. I didn’t feel like playing Kogan’s “Kaddish” tonight. Instead, I improvised a sort of lullaby for those people and their loved ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,253],"tags":[443,444,445,442],"class_list":["post-2984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kaddish-in-two-part-harmony","category-podcasts","tag-alabama","tag-grampa","tag-hangar","tag-tornado"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2984"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2986,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions\/2986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}