Thunder rocks the house, a welcome feeling. A tension has built inside after the dim months of a Midwestern winter. The relief is like the song of the robin. The gods have had mercy on us poor sinners. Spring has arrived. What was skeletal and gray will soon turn green, the kind of green that aches the eyes and soothes the soul.
The thunderstorm came on us suddenly. We haven’t looked at the weather reports in days and had no idea it was coming. This is perhaps a luxury I’ve become accustomed to in the months I’ve been off work due to a shoulder injury. Before the surgery, I watched the news every morning. A postman needs to prepare for the day. Without that need, news of the weather passes unnoticed. What matters is when I step outside in the afternoon and see if I need a jacket or umbrella for my daily walk.
When I was a kid, darkening skies and looming horizons disappointed me. There would be no baseball games, playing in the woods, or riding bikes. I used to lay in the front yard, watching the western horizon, hoping, even praying that the gray and threatening clouds would pass. I watched the onset of a storm and stayed out, as if my presence would part the sky and press the storm other directions.
As I grew and gained some self-awareness, a thunderstorm thrilled me. It was a break in the routine. Confined inside, I was relegated to a house that grew dim. It soothed the part of me that likes the dark, that seeks refuge in reading and dillying about the house. The darkness and the dampening of the bright sun appealed to my inner depressive self. A storm meant melancholy, that sense of sad wistfulness that brought on reflection and time to think about the questions that haunted me. What is the meaning of this thing called life? What is my purpose? Did I need to have purpose? What was this god I was taught to pray to? Soon, I will be old. What was death and why did it have to be?
Since the end of the baseball games and romps on the playground, thunder came to mean time to shift thoughts from the worries and cares of the day to inner searching. I have never really known what I wanted to do in the sense of “someday you have to make something of yourself.” I only ever knew that I wanted to write. But writing was discouraged. Priests and nuns, preachers, parents, and relatives pooh-poohed my nascent efforts at crafting words on a page.
To my detriment, I listened to them and ignored my own better self. I wandered from job to job. I went to school and earned degrees that enriched my life but brought no remuneration. When I wrote, I kept my work to myself.
Then, came the thunderstorms that dimmed the shoddy and dilapidated apartments where I often found myself alone with my thoughts. Those days, I penned stories and poems, struggling to find my voice, whatever that is. Even then, faith in my writing was lacking. Nothing I could ever write would make a difference. I would gain no fame or money from my efforts. I shelved and threw away those pages.
When I was 22, I sold my meager possessions and hopped a plane for Germany to work in the vineyards. When I was well established, I took a room in the attic of a four-story school. It was just a bed and writing table. A free-standing wardrobe. A shower down the hall. The weather where I was living was much more moderate than here in the Midwest. It was spring.
I felt the storm before I heard it. I got up from the writing table and walked to the window across the small hallway. I looked out over the city of Trier and up Mosel Valley. Then, as I stood there, thunder echoed down the valley, one boom after another. I watched the storm roll between the steep inclines to the river. A curtain of rain approached, lightning and thunder leading the way. It was one of the most beautiful scenes I’d ever witnessed. I retired to the writing table, put a piece of paper in the old typewriter I bought off a kid for five marks and a hat. I began to write and wrote the whole day.
It was then that I started. Pages for myself alone, notes and journal entries, and letters. I still had no faith in my work and wouldn’t for a long time. But I had begun the writing and begun to take myself seriously.
Still, I wasn’t a writer, but a person who wrote. Only when the desire became too great to hold back, I began the process of becoming a writer. It’s not that I had any innate talent. But that became secondary to the training and ache of learning to turn desire into craft and craft into art. It was a long process and one that I see took me about twenty years to complete, to get to the point where I would put myself out there for rejection.
After the first few stings, I started to save those rejection letters. A long time passed before my first acceptance. It was a great day for me. I would be in print. Someone would read what I did. Whether they were enlightened a little or even enjoyed what they read wasn’t my business. It was my job to keep writing, putting my work out there. I began to collect the letters into a “rejection file.” The more rejections I received, the more the file became a measure of work accomplished.
I think about this, now with the storm full on us. The rejection file is long a thing of the past. The delayed and cancelled baseball games remind me how far I’ve come. Melancholy settles in. The thunderstorms of life have motivated me. They have helped me find myself and allowed me to ruminate not just on the big questions, which have become more mature and less urgent, but also on the course of life and where it all leads.
A sprinkling of ashes. A name that becomes anonymous.
There is more to write, more to reveal to myself and others. It will be for naught, as I will never be more and a less-than-minor literary figure. But this is not what writing is for. It’s how I keep track of myself. It’s the thunderstorm after a long winter that brings the green and soothes the soul.
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