ONE THOUSAND WORDS ABOUT A PICTURE

Sept 4, 1979. The map on the front paper of the Charleston newspaper looked like a game board. Hurricane David was moving across the Caribbean, and curved black arrows predicted the storm’s path. The Dominican Republic was the probable target. Charleston was not part of the picture.

            I took my morning coffee, a cane pole, and a carton of worms down to the dock. I thought catching panfish might help my hangover.

            My cousin Noochie was raking pine straw out of the volleyball court. Noochie, a trial lawyer, could make a phrase like gimme all your threes sound authoritative. “That hurricane is going to hit us!” he boomed richly.

I shrugged and went fishing.

            That night David slid his marker across the Dominican Republic. Several thousand people drowned. The morning newspaper showed him aiming for Miami, 600 miles south of Charleston. I skipped the fishing while the day got brilliantly hot.

            Cousin Bilbo walked over from the other house with his wife’s Ad Lib set. Ad Lib is a game with letters on dice. You roll the dice, turn over a small glass timer, and make as many words as you can. Bilbo wanted to check the timers of both sets against each other. “Did you see the papers? That hurricane is coming here!”.

Patty, my sister, was studying a parlay card. Parlay cards cost five dollars each. If you pick ten winners of football games according to point spreads printed on the cards, you win one hundred dollars. “Yep,” Patty said, “We’re due.”

            Two days later, Charleston was part of the picture. David bounced off Florida and headed straight toward us. The twenty-five members of my extended family secured the beach houses as best we could and returned to our homes in town.

            When I woke up early Tuesday, the rain and wind had arrived. The eye of the hurricane was scheduled around seven p.m., but, mid-morning, three tiny twisters rolled up the Wappoo River. For an hour the air turned yellow.

            I taped the windows, then went to the crowded grocery store for staples. Mother baked a ham. Patty got out the oil lamps, flashlights, and candles. My friend Wright arrived, carrying cameras and an electric popcorn popper. “Apocalypse soon,” she sang.

            “This is real life,” I grumbled but didn’t mean it.

My family has always loved games. When I was 16 years old and first left home, I was full of contempt for their easygoing, storytelling ways. When I returned at the age of 33 my mother only said, “I guess we learned a lot while you were gone.”

            In college, logic and drinking were my favorite games. Philosophy classes taught me that abstract reasoning was as hopeless as winning at solitaire. When I wasn’t drunk, I spent my free time attempting to quantify the letters-to-the-editor from the local newspaper into the equations of logic. This confrontation with irrationality helped me relax.

            In philosophy class I learned that Immanuel Kant’s habits were so precise his neighbors could set their watches by his daily walks. I soon lost interest in philosophy. If Kant was so rigid, he had to be leaving out a great deal. I lived in an alcohol-infused world of dreams and confusions, and logic was like a Band-Aid on my burgeoning mind.

            Looking back, I understand that I saw the connection between Kant’s life and his work as more important that the work itself. I still hold this view. Abstractions are just twigs floating on the mind’s river. Metaphor is the hand thrust into the water, trying to catch living fish. Metaphor is the passageway between fantasy and logic, the doorway through the images. Metaphor can take you someplace new.

            My sister fingered the baked ham dreamily. “Maybe it will be worse than when Gracie hit. It could be worse than Camille. We might even spend the night on the roof.”

            The wind built. The power went off. The phones died. It rained thickly. I drank gin and ate ham while the others played Ad Lib, Spite and Malice, and Hearts. We listened to a transistor radio. David would hit at high tide. “Charleston might wash away,” my mother said, shaking the dice.

            Around five o’clock we heard a loud whirring sound rumbling above the wind. Through the taped windows we watched a large tree in the backyard pull free of the earth and lie down on its side.

            Carefully Mother discarded. “Might have been another twister.”

            Wright and I squeezed out onto the back porch, a capsule inside the wind and rain. I kept struggling to the violent edge and letting the wind blow me back.

            Wright, protecting her lens with her hand, continued taking pictures.

            “I can do around the world with a yo-yo!” I shouted, but the wind erased my voice. “I can do more than one hundred with a fly-bat!” I was hollering as loud as I could. “I can do jacks from one to ten without a mistake! I play good marbles!”

            What are you saying?” Wright shouted. “I can’t hear you!”

            I leaned my fear over the railing, my face drenched with tears. I screamed, “I can wiggle my ears!”

            David hit Savannah, an hour south, and held there. The wind began to limp. The rain slowed. Charleston was the woman in the circus the knife thrower barely misses.

            The power remained off. Patty and Mother were playing duplicate Ad Lib by kerosene lamp. The dark leaned over us.

            “It could have been worse,” Mother said.

            “David was a dud,” Patty muttered.

            “It’s all in the game,” Wright said.

            Patty asked Wright why she kept taking photographs, and Wright said that a picture is worth a thousand words.

            I wasn’t afraid anymore, just bored and quite drunk. I started thinking it might be amusing to write a piece containing exactly one thousand words. It would be a technical challenge, like mastering a trick pool shot, or convincing people you’re smart. This piece contains one thousand words, but so what?