Stormy Monday

I got the paper around 8 a.m. and it seemed OK outside.

I looked outside when I got out of the shower around 8:20, and it was dark.

Little G had thought it would be fun to watch me shower, and I didn’t disappoint him by spitting water against the glass door, inches from his face.

“Doesn’t look good out there,” I told him when I looked out the window. “Hopefully Daddy can get his bike to the station before the rain hits.”

I dressed and rejoined the fam downstairs. Little G was perched at the bay window. Thunder could be heard in the distance.

“Doesn’t look good out there,” he told me.

I left a few minutes early to beat the rain. I passed a pair of power-walking ladies. “Good luck!” they said.

I passed a woman walking her dog who I knew by sight. “Don’t know if you’re gonna make it!” she said.

The dark clouds seemed to break as I headed east toward the fire station, whose trucks suddenly started zipping out of the station and heading up Chelsea.

The sky darkened again as I headed north on Elwood, a giant stretch of angry black-and-blue creasing the gray sky.

I thought of snapping a pic of this unique cloud pattern, like a rip through the sky, but figured I could use every second I had to get to the station dry.

Indeed, just as I pulled into the station lot, the rain started to fall, peppering the tarp covering the new Hawthorne station clock. I locked the bike under the overpass and the skies opened up. Thunder, lightning, thewayyoulovemeisfrightening, etc.

A man and woman, dressed properly for work, discussed the storm as we boarded.

“The umbrella doesn’t do a thing when it’s like this,” the woman said.

The man agreed.

“See the sky before it hit?” said the man as he took off a suit jacket to reveal colorful suspenders. “It was green where the sky was split….Tornado color.”

The man and woman discussed the Great Tornado of 2006, which sliced right through Hawthorne–you can still see the tree damage along 9A by Applebee’s and the diner–and put little Hawthorne on the map, at least for a few days.

The man likened the sky to a Mark Rothko painting.

A tiny Hispanic kid stared at the storm out the window, his young mother next to him.

As the train approached North White Plains, he spied the trains parked in the railyard.

“The trains, Mama, the trains!” he said, reminding me of Tattoo and Fantasy Island. “The trains!”

The doors opened at North White just as a giant flash of lightning lit up the outdoors, and a frightful thunderclap followed.

That kept the kid good and quiet the rest of the way.