Saturday night, it stormed in Houston. The weather
service had predicted it for days, although without enough specificity to make
plans around the weather. The storm’s timing remained in question right up until
Saturday. And Houston’s enormous footprint made that even more tenuous—what part of Houston’s
skies you lived under would make all the difference in how bad the storm hit
you.
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t make much difference to us, all
snug and cozy in our little ranch house. We’d sit in the living room, reading
or watching TV or just visiting, and enjoy the lightshow outside the three
large windows by the deck. Our only fear would be loss of power, a regular occurrence
during thunderstorms.
But this Saturday, things were dicier. We had tickets to
the Houston Ballet. As season subscribers, our tickets and our seats are assigned
long before the performances, sometimes to our surprise when we try to schedule
something else on the calendar. Occasionally, we had to exchange tickets to
another evening, but it couldn’t be a last minute event because our regular
performance happens on the last Saturday of the two-week run.
We had no choice but to brave this weather if we wanted
to see our performance on Saturday. Complicating the equation, we knew the
program and it wasn’t a favorite of ours. The ballet, Sylvia, is a complex
story of ancient Greece with three female leads: Artemis, Psyche, and Sylvia in
three convoluted love stories that intertwined.
We had already seen Sylvia twice—it’s opening season in 2019 and a few years later when the company reprised it. Why they felt compelled to perform it a third
time was beyond us. Of course, the company returned to well-loved canons of
ballet like Swan Lake and Coppelia
regularly. The Nutcracker ran every year for a month at a time. But Sylvia is
no Swan Lake, IMHO.
We attend all performances unless we absolutely can’t and
then lucky friends get our tickets. We go even if it’s not our favorite,
because the dancing is always excellent and it’s a chance to see different
performers tackle new roles. We were going to Sylvia Saturday night if the
storm didn’t make it impossible. If fact, we planned to leave early, just in
case.
Late afternoon, the storm came through Cypress, our
northwest Houston area. Winds whipped anything not tied down around the yard;
lighting strike after lightning strike pierced the sky overhead; thunder boomed
right on top of us. We held our breath, so to speak, but surprisingly, we didn’t
go dark. As things settled into rain, not storm, we decided we could go out
safely.
I had planned an early, simple dinner and by 5:30 pm we
were finished and changing into good clothes. We left around 6, certainly early
enough because the performance started at 7:30 and the drive usually took about
40 minutes. Steady rain beat down, but not the downpour we had experienced
earlier. All seemed well.
A note about highways here: the lane markings are abysmal,
even during daylight hours with no rain. Driving them in rain was challenging.
Using the drivers ahead helped some, but with twisting roads, we were both tense
and watching traffic like hawks. About 15 minutes into the drive, the skies
opened, thunder and lightning exploded above us, and the highway all but
disappeared. Drivers in front of us turned on their flashers which, combined
with the windshield wipers at top speed, reduced visibility to almost nothing.
It was, frankly, terrifying. We couldn’t even tell how
far we had driven because we couldn’t see the buildings along the side of the
road. I had a moment of clarity, realizing that we were risking our lives
driving to a performance we didn’t even care about. “We don’t have to go to the
performance, Michael. Let’s just get off the highway and go home.” He kept driving
and I kept quiet for a few more tense minutes.
The rain let up a bit and then poured down on us again in
a deluge. “Seriously, let’s just turn around,” I tried again. Holding the
steering wheel in a death grip, Michael finally said, “It’ll be more dangerous
to exit than to keep going.” We were coming up to a long, high flyover with no
way to exit and I just swallowed and said okay.
We did make it to the performance. We parked in a
ridiculously expensive garage so that we would have underground access to the
theater ($18 versus our usual $12 and walk a block outdoors). And we got there
with 15 minutes to spare. Not bad.
We watched the first act. It was a trial for me because I
had trouble seeing clearly. I had brought my small binoculars, but the action
was wide-ranging and not conducive to viewing through a narrow field of vision.
Michael’s view, he told me at intermission, was obscured by BIG hair in front
of him. (BIG hair is still a Texas peril, even today.)
We looked at each other quietly. One of us, or maybe both
of us, said, “We could leave.” We let that marinate a minute. Yes, we could
leave. It was a revelation. Just because we bought tickets last March for this performance,
this March did not require us to stay if we weren’t enjoying it. Intermission wasn’t
over. We gathered our things and strolled out, pleased to be leaving.
The weather had improved during our hour indoors and we
got home without the clutching fear we had arrived with. In the house, I
suggested we have a treat of cantaloupe and vanilla ice cream. “I’ll fix the
cantaloupe and you can get the ice cream ready,” I suggested. “Sounds like a
deal,” Michael answered. Dessert was delicious and well-deserved.
Have something delicious tonight yourself!!
Ciao
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment