Munsey Avenue
When I was three years old, my family’s house was struck by lightning. My parents and I were at the supermarket checkout counter when the boom came, one big clap and a bang, like an explosion from above.
That one musta got somethin’, the cashier probably said, because that’s what Mainers always say when they hear something like that.
My father paid the bill and carried our bags to the car while my mother walked me across the rain-soaked parking lot. Jagged white lines flashed overhead, over the rooftops and the church steeple, beyond the clock tower. The air smelled sharp and metallic. The sky looked like a fresh bruise. We braced ourselves for every rumble.
Like most kids, I’d been taught how to count the seconds between lightning and thunder, how to tell if the storm was coming or going. If the numbers got smaller, the storm was getting closer. Bigger, and it was moving away. That summer of 1977, I could already count. I knew the alphabet and how to write my name. I loved Wonder Woman and the color pink, I talked to just about anyone. Later on, at Christmastime, I’d sit on Santa’s lap at Wilsons department store and ask him for a Barbie doll. And daddy? Daddy wants a six-pack.
The boom we heard at the checkout counter could have been anyone’s house. Storms like that came often and quick, with winds and rain and sometimes even hail. But this time the house was ours, something we learned only as my father rounded the corner from High Street to Munsey Avenue to find bright red fire engines blocking the road. He stopped the car and jumped out. What the hell’s happenin’ here, he probably said, because that’s what Mainers always say when they see something like that.
As one of the firemen pointed up the street, I watched my father’s face go pale. I watched his brown eyes go wide. His three younger siblings, all teenagers, lived with us back then, after their mother died of a pulmonary embolism and my father took on their guardianship. Just one month after I was born, he became a father to us all, even though he was only twenty-two years old.
Then my father did something I’d never seen him do. He broke into a sprint, a strange sight, his arms and legs pumping and pushing up Munsey Avenue, though to me it felt more like slow motion, like that dream you have where you are running, running, running but never getting anywhere.
The boom we heard? That was lightning hitting a tree in our yard, then surging into the barn and through a light switch to the house, where it struck a water pipe near the ceiling. The pipe broke and flooded the kitchen. The strike left a twelve-inch hole in the side of the barn. It stripped all the bark off the tree and blasted rock and dirt into the neighbor’s yard.
But of course I didn’t know any of that yet. I just knew my daddy was running. My daddy was scared. And if he was scared, then I was scared too.
Something about the way he looked then, in that moment he began to run, hardened inside my chest, like a forever bruise, right there in the space next to my heart. For years, I would study his face for clues on what to think, how to feel, and when to worry. Was his brow tight? Were his lips curled under? Was the afraid or angry? Happy or sad? His feelings became my feelings. His mood, my mood. I grew up watching him unplug the toaster and the coffee machine every time he left the house, hoping lightning wouldn’t strike twice. As an adult, I unplugged the toaster too. I rounded the corner of every street I ever lived on half expecting to see firetrucks blocking the road.
Next thing I knew, I was on the other side of Munsey Avenue at my friend Alan’s house, watching things unfold from his family’s enclosed front porch. A month earlier, I knocked on their door to borrow a plastic shovel, but Alan’s mother said no. I wasn’t trustworthy. I’d lost too many shovels already. Her words stung. But on this day, after my house was struck by lightning, Alan’s mother said nothing. She was kind, and Alan sat close. He and I counted the seconds between lightning and thunder until we had no more numbers left to count. Rain streaked the porch windows, blurring our view, but I could make out the shapes of several people, all men, standing in a circle in the middle of the road.
One of them was my father, arms folded across his chest. My mother must have been inside, tending to the water soaking our kitchen floor. My aunts and my uncle were inside too, all of them fine, all of them safe. The house was fine as well, the damage nothing serious. A hole in the barn. A tree stripped of its bark. A water pipe in need of replacing. But of course I didn’t know any of that yet. I just knew my father was still, his face was slack, and his arms remained tightly folded, in the same place where my heart still ached.
