My friend, Brenda, about whom I’ve written before, sent me some old photos from the early 1990s and brought back a ton of memories.
I lived in an apartment complex when I was working at The Houston Post. It was just a normal complex probably built in the 1950s. There was a pool in the courtyard and lots of banana trees and lush tropical plants.
All of the apartments were fairly standard oneand two-bedroom spaces, but there was one referred to as “the penthouse” on the second floor which had been made out of two apartments. I knew the guy who lived there so I’d seen the inside and it was really nice compared to the others. It even had a dishwasher, which none of the others had.
The guy who lived in the penthouse decided to move out and I signed up for it and got it. Mind you, it was the early 1990s and I believe the rent for “the penthouse” was $500 per month if I remember correctly. I had just gotten promoted to supervisor at The Post so I could afford it at the time.
My grandfather Cooke died in 1991, and Kathy and the girls moved into his house shortly after that. My grandparents had a rarely used formal living room with lots of breakable things in it. Kennedy’s birth was announced at my grandfather’s funeral so both the girls were very young and none of the furniture needed to be around babies.
Anyway, I ended up getting all the formal furniture and breakables out of the house including the formal dining room furniture which is now in Mom and Dad’s house. And it all looked so good in my new apartment.
So I’m at work one day and got a call from one of my neighbors that a tornado had just landed on the apartment complex and that I’d better come home right away. I was totally freaked out. I had a friend staying with me at the time and I was worried about him and about possibly being homeless.
God, and possibly my grandparents, work in mysterious ways. The roof of my apartment had been completely torn off in the bedroom and hallway. The only place where the roof stayed on was in the living room where all of my new furniture was.
The kitchen got a little bit torn up. I remember the refrigerator was not very tall and there was just enough space on top of it below the ceiling to put the microwave. That fridge and microwave saved the kitchen. The largest ceiling beam that ran through the middle of the apartment landed on the microwave and didn’t go anywhere.
You know how they always tell you to go into the bathroom when there is a tornado? Well my bathroom had a huge skylight in it and it fell into the bathroom along with all of the roof from the bedroom. If my friend had gone in there, which was his plan, he’d have been killed.
As it turned out he didn’t make it in time to go into the bathroom so he pulled the door open and stood between the door and the wall while the roof came off over his head. A lucky move.
I was afraid he had gone into the bathroom and was dead, because I couldn’t even get into the bathroom and he wasn’t in the apartment. I finally went outside and there he was on the other side of a huge puddle of water with electric wires in it. I was so relieved to see him alive.
The furniture, that I’m sure my grandmother picked out, was completely untouched. She had what had to have been one of the first sectional sofas. It was in three pieces, half-moon shaped and covered in shiny gold silk. There were also two dark green velvet slipper chairs with fringe on the bottom, and an antique glass topped coffee table with all of her breakable knick knacks sitting on it. And, of course, there was the dining room furniture.
So someone was looking out for me that day and I think it was my grandparents.
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