Vintage Post: Your Silence Makes More Noise Than Thunder

Originally posted July 26, 2006.

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when i was a kid, a littler one, i lived in a place called texas where there was thunderstorms all the time. and they always came at night, and it was so loud. so so loud. id get up and go to my moms room and tell her i was scared. sometimes she let me sleep in the bed with her and sometimes she didnt. when she didnt she told me that it was just thunder and that it was nothing to get scared of and that i should go back to sleep and not be scared. but i always was still, until it stopped anyway. when i went back to my room those times i would lie there and shut my eyes tight because it seemed to help me be less afraid. like maybe the things or monsters that had to be there making the noise was not going to come find me if my eyes were shut tight.

When I was a little older I remember we were like at my grandma’s house once and my uncle told his daughter/my cousin named Lauren that thunder was just angels bowling, and she went around telling everyone that. “It’s the angels.” That’s all she said. So you had to like ask someone for the rest of the story if you wanted to even know what she was even talking about. My uncle thought it was a pretty funny joke, and he followed her around laughing every time she said that to someone. So like… well obviously I didn’t believe that. I mean. Duh, it was science related. I didn’t know how but it just was. It was something to do with lightning, or something. Something going on in the clouds. Whatever, who cares, it was just noise anyway, it didn’t do anything to you, only little kids got scared of thunder, not me.

When we moved to Colorado there weren’t as many storms. I actually don’t remember any real thunderstorms until recently – and by recently I mean in the past few years. It’s possible that I just wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t think so. Now, every time there’s a thunderstorm, it seems like a novelty, like something magical, like a surprise from God. “Here, people of Colorado, here is a thunderstorm – do you know what it’s like?” There is a thunderstorm happening right now. I was walking downstairs in our strangely darkened house and I heard the crashing that I used to be afraid of. I laughed to myself, thinking of how I would get up in the middle of the night and run into my parents’ room, expecting protection from – what, exactly? I suppose I thought that the noise had to be coming from something, and whatever that thing was, I wanted to be kept safe from it. And then I thought of all the things people tell their children about thunder and lightning so they won’t be afraid of it – it’s angels bowling, it’s God taking a picture, etc., etc.

Then I went outside and stood on the porch and listened to it.

Thunder is absolutely terrifying. It is what emphasizes frightening moments in movies, it accents dreariness and gloom and mediocrity. It scares children from their beds and has kept me up at night as a “young adult” just by making noise – irritatingly frustrating. Yet it is gorgeous. It is fantastical. It is grand, it is beautiful, it is astonishing and glorious. It is resplendent with the work of God. And we ignore it whenever we hear it because we’re not kids anymore, because we don’t get scared of the sounds God created anymore. Because… because we know that if we type in three words on Google we will come up with the answer to What Is Thunder and that would be that. The wonder is gone. The reason to be scared is gone – it’s just the sound of intense heat, that’s all. “Thunder is the loud noise that occurs when atmospheric gases are suddenly heated by a discharge of lightning.” Ho hum, routine, rain, lightning, thunder, all naturally occuring things that we are used to. Just another day living on Planet Earth.

But think about what people thought thunder was before they knew about Science. It really WAS angels bowling. It was Thor, it was Zeus. It was mysterious, it was frightening. Was someone angry? Were two giants fighting, throwing rocks at each other? Was it the sound of God laughing? I was trying to decide what lightning could have been, too – in more modern terms, maybe the lightning is the flash of a giant, incomprehensible digital camera, and the thunder was God’s laughing at how the picture turned out. Because obviously it would show nothing. Not even a make-believe heavenly angel camera would be able to capture the look of God. In fact maybe the thunder is the camera imploding.

No one drove by while I was standing on the porch but I was thinking that if they had they would have just gone along with their day with the noisy thunder in the background, maybe turning up the radio to drown it out. Who wants to listen to that, anyway? Stupid nature, getting in the way of my music.

To stand outside and hear it, listen to it, nothing separating you from the sky, where it lives, is to feel awestruck and small, unimportant and insignificant. The Creator is there.

thun·der. n.
The sound of God, echoing across the sky, over the clouds, behind the rain.

Vintage Blog Post: Pippin the Mouse-Slayer

So I’ve had a blog since, I don’t know, 2003 sometime. I’ve deleted the old ones for the most part but I saved all the good posts before doing that, and so I’ve decided to start reposting some of them for the heck of it. I mean, why not show everyone I was a better writer in high school than I am now? Or at least a better blogger. I had more interesting stories then, I suppose. Like this one, for starters, which was originally posted on October 22, 2004.

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This morning I went to my friend Melissa’s house to work on a project for school. My parents went to Cave of the Winds for the day, so my sister was home by herself. When I got home around 1, the first thing my sister tells me is, “Pippin caught another mouse, only this one wasn’t dead, so I called Mom and she told me to put a trash can over it and put tins on top of it so that Pippin can’t get at it anymore, and then let you put it in the trash when you got home.”

The first thing I say is, “IT ISN’T DEAD?”

“Well, it wasn’t, probably it is now, since it was just lying there twitching earlier.”

So we go down into the basement, and sure enough, there is the trash can, upside down, with three tins of stuff on top of it. I asked my sister, “are you sure it’s dead?”

“Well, it probably is dead.”

“Okay.” So I take the tins off, and am about to lift the trash can… then, “Okay, I can’t do this. You do it. What if it’s still alive?”

“IT’S NOT ALIVE!”

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll lift up the trash can, and you will take the dustpan and sweep it into there and we will put it in the trash, and it will be gone. Okay?”

What I learned today is that I am a wimp. I never thought I would be the kind of person who stands on a chair screaming about a tiny little mouse running around. But even though I know the mouse can’t really do anything to me besides leave poop everywhere, I still screamed when I lifted the trash can up a couple of inches and my sister said “OH MY GOSH, IT’S STILL ALIVE!”

Yeah. So the trash can goes back on the ground and I stand on the stairs, staring at it. FYI the stairs are probably… oh… at least 10 feet away from where the trash can was.

Finding a dead mouse is one thing. That is just gross and weird, because it’s dead. Finding a live one is really scary and disturbing. What are you supposed to do with a live mouse that you have trapped under a trash can? Here were the options my sister and I discussed:

a) Leave it there until our parents got home.
b) Somehow get it and put it outside.
c) Get it and throw it over the fence into someone else’s yard for them to deal with.
d) Get Pippin and make him kill it and throw it away before he starts feasting on its head.

The problem with A is that they told us to take care of it. The problem with B is that we were both too chicken to attempt it, and if we put it outside, it probably could just come inside again. C didn’t really have a problem, but again, we didn’t know how to get the mouse outside in the first place. So, we got Pippin.

Here is Pippin’s “killing strategy:”
1. Look at the mouse for a long time.
2. After a long time, look at it some more.
3. Touch it.
4. Look at it, again.
5. When the mouse finally realizes that Pippin isn’t doing anything but looking at him and starts running away, jump on it and carry it around in his mouth.
6. Put it on the ground in front of him and look at it.
7. Look at me and Katie.
8. Mouse starts running again while he is looking at us, we start shouting “PIPPIN GET IT GET IT IT’S RUNNING AWAY,” chases it around the basement and grabs it again.
9. Look at it.
10. Bat at it like it’s a toy mouse.
11. Grab it in his mouth and take it under the treadmill, where we can’t see it and don’t know if it’s dead or not. (Which it wasn’t.)
12. Repeat the first three steps four more times.

What I ended up doing was forcing my sister to get the mouse on the dustpan and put it in the trash. We put it in one of the really huge black plastic trash bags. I put a twisty on it and then put it in the Waste Management (the official trash haulers for the Colorado Avalanche) trash can in the garage. I felt sort of bad, since it wasn’t dead, not even after all the trauma it went through, because it was kind of cute from my vantage point on the stairs when it was running frantically away from the jaws of gruesome death. But we said a few words, which mostly was “he was a good mousie.”

Anyway. Just another joy of having a cat. At least I didn’t have to deal with his barf everywhere like last time. Oh yeah, I guess I should have updated on that situation: a couple hours later after finding the decapitated mouse, I went down into the basement again and there was barf ALL OVER THE PLACE. Well, just on the chair and on the floor. But I have never seen that much cat barf at once.

My dad brought home a glue trap, so that the mouse gets stuck in the glue and then we can just get rid of it that way. They weren’t falling for the live trap, so here we are. The original idea was to trap them and then put them out in the greenbelt, because, well, putting a mouse in the trash just seems heartless, right? But after the experiences of the past two days, I have this to say: the mouse deserves it. In the words of my good friend Jessica Gibbs, after she told me that they trapped a mommy mouse that had had babies in their house and then got rid of all the babies, too: “That’ll teach them not to come inside our house. They need to learn that this is a house of DEATH.”