Carmen Salvino, Garth Brooks and storms: Ramble with the Lady

My wife hates Garth Brooks and all that he represents in modern music.

Thought of her and Brooks as we set off this morning.

Lady, our family’s mutt, and I rambled off way too early because I knew storms were coming. So lightning flashed as we came off the front porch.

And I immediately thought of Brooks “Thunder Rolls.’’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdsJI8Wc2D4

It is not my favorite Brooks’ song, but it is the one that came to mind.

I guess I could have gone to “That Summer,’’ which I think is a more interesting song as an adolescent male fantasy. That term–“adolescent male fantasy’’–might be a redundancy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czeWJIvxwDA

Men think of fantasies naturally enough and most of us aren’t far removed from our adolescent days.

Enough of pop music and male fantasies.

I did not expect to roust or see anything in wildlife in the darkness, which only deepened even darker after each bright stark lighting from the flashes to the west and southwest.

But Lady flushed the first rabbit in the yard behind the bus barn downtown, then nearly caught another rabbit just sitting in the parking lot of the garage next to the bus barn.

The storms were coming from the southwest, but the wind was from east-southeast, so the comforting smells of the chef-cook, who runs a food truck for migrant and nursery workers, prepping meat fillings for tacos and burritos wafted over us as we passed the fire house.

Lady took care of business quickly enough–the storm probably excited her, too–that I cut short the ramble to make sure not to get caught in any rain.

But I rambled long enough to get in my exercise.

The morning rambles do have a couple practical purposes for me. One is just for general health issues. The year after I quit smoking (19 years, 9 months and 6 days ago, but who is counting) I put on 50 pounds in the matter of months. I am not big enough to handle putting on 50 pounds.

Carmen Salvino saw me covering a Beat The Champs taping and said I had to watch my weight and proceeded to give me a lecture. He is a health nut.

Salvino, the Hall-of-Fame bowler from Chicago, and I are oddly enough, relatively close for being a reporter and an athlete. Most years I get a phone call from Salvino at Christmas and we talk about our families. One of the hardest calls I made in my life was getting comment from Salvino on Dick Weber’s death. He had not heard until I called and there was an anguish spiked in his voice that came up from his heart.

The other practical reason for the rambles is to get in my arm and back exercises. About 17 or 18 years ago or so, on my way to cover the Class AA state championship in baseball at the Kane County Cougars park, a roofing truck came across all four lanes of Route 31 and hit me head-on.

I was OK, other than months later I figured out when the seat belt caught me it wrenched my neck and back from the force of the wreck. My doctor, one of the more practical family doctors, thought I could handle it if I did a regular set of exercises for my upper body of various wind mills and such stretching.

So I do all that while we ramble. And it works.

I also look kind of weird windmilling, so I usually wait until I am on the non-populated portions of the rambles to do my arm exercises.

As we circled around on the shortened ramble, I noticed it was so early the chef/cook had not even lifted the flaps on his food truck yet to start loading.

The lightning appeared to be drifting north of us.

Back home, the whiteness of busted-nose Frenchie caught my eye in my wife’s front flower garden. Frenchie, named for a late neighbor of French descent who originally owned him, is a cement dog with his snout busted. Not sure how my wife got it, but I had to arrange the heavy bugger in her garden.

Taking the picture of “Frenchie in the Flowers’’ added flashes that seemed to mesh perfectly with the lightning flashes.

Lady sat patiently and waited, accepting my oddness.

The rain started as I finished typing. The darkness lingered as the kids began getting up for school.