Der Brucer sends his sympathies to all weathering the Los Angeles storms. Our house in Long Beach had a leaky roof, one which got worse and worse as the years went by. And repairs are a bitch.
Speaking of which...
My mother (no, the bitch was
NOT my mother, how dare you!!!) never really liked driving in bad weather, although through the years she had managed to get my sister (yeah, her,
SHE'S the...) and myself to school and back when the streets of Burbank were flooded. But this story takes place years later, when she and Dad had moved to Gold Rush country up in the Sierra Nevadas.
It was Christmas, the one holiday when the family would try to gather together. I had arranged to take the train up to Modesto, my driving days already long behind me, and my Dad was going to pick me up and drive us the rest of the way to the homestead. However, my sister (the you-know-what) was driving in from Oklahoma, where she was teaching, and managed to flip her car over, totalling her vehicle while remaining unscathed. It was up to Dad to drive to Arizona, where the flip had taken place. This meant that Mom would be picking me up in Modesto instead of Dad.
Well, it started to rain sometime during that trainride. It was coming down in torrants. It was also coming down heavily in Modesto, which is quite a ways north of Torrance, but that's ... sorry, got distracted there. Mom was waiting for me at the train station, and we quickly loaded my suitcases and the presents I was bringing into the car.
By this time, it was getting late, and of course there was no moonlight, couldn't have been with the cloud cover without which we wouldn't have had the rain. Mom stuck it out, managing the winding roads but taking it slowly. We couldn't see more than twenty feet ahead of the car at times. This turned out to be a good thing, because right as we went around this one bend in the road, she had to stop real quick!!!
There, in the middle of the road in the middle of the storm, stood a cow. A bovine. One of those things from which we get milk and hamburger.
Mom and I just sat there, stunned. The cow looked at us, not sure of what to do. Eventually, we both started laughing (Mom and I, not the cow; this was in California, not
France), and the cow finally decided to move out of our way.
We finally made it to the homestead, without any further incident. Dad and my sister arrived the next day, and it was Christmas like most any other. My sister took me aside once more, to tell me quite firmly that I should
never discuss my being gay with Mom or Dad because they would reject me, and Mom and Dad spent the rest of my visit wondering why I was so silent about talking about my life in SoCal. Which should suggest why I call my sister...well, never mind.
And that's my terrible weather story.
