As I write this, a storm is raging outside. The thunder is shaking the cheap glass in the apartment windows. The flashes of lightning strobing as they interplay with the flashes of the interior lights as they struggle to remain on, the power coming and going. Laptops are good to have at times like this.

I love storms. The forces of the Earth doing what they will, unknowing and uncaring of human concerns, or even of human existence. These storms have happened long before any of us came into being, and will continue happening long after we are gone. That thought pleases me for some reason I can not quite identify.

Of course, the storms here are not like the storms, quite, that occurred where I grew up. Here, storms are more rare, and they are fierce, yes, but they come quick and they go quick. Even now the power outside is moving on, fading here, taking even the rain with it. By contrast, where I grew up the storms were as fierce, but moved slowly, taking their time as they danced above the puny humans below.

I inherited my love of storms from my father. When a storm came, he and I would repair to the back porch, safe from the rain but with a mostly clear view of the sky behind our little house. The family dog, Snoopy (so-called not because he was a beagle, but because he was black and white), would be permitted to join us on the porch from his usual domain within the backyard, as storms frightened him deeply. But lying next to me on the padded bench, he knew he was safe. Sitting there with my father on the porch he had built, I knew I was safe too. And so we would enjoy the storm, the wind whipping along, the flash and the noise. Storms were one of the very, very few things my father and I ever shared, so even then I knew that this was a special thing, and that I should remember it.

Snoopy has long since passed away, of course.

More recently so has my father.

It took me a year to mention on this little blog of nothing in nowhere of mine, that my friend John had died. It has been more than that since my father died, but I am not exact in the time frame. This is not my being circumspect as is my normal wont, but because my mind will not categorize the fact. I track things in time fairly well, knowing my graduation dates, my job start and stop dates, the date for most significant events in my life and even the hour for some of them. I think in numbers, in almost all things.

Not in this. I can’t. The elapsed time escapes even rough precision. I can’t remember exactly the date it happened. I have to look it up each time. It is something my mind does not wish to have within it.

I could write about my father, or my relationship with him, but neither one were terribly unusual, and it would bore any reader and frankly I consider those things too precious to share with any one of you on this benighted planet.

So I sit here in my little room, with the lights in and out flashing and flickering, and I miss my dog and I miss my father.

And I know that when I go, there will be no one who will miss me, at all, at all.

The storms will still move across the face of the Earth.