I’m almost certainly off to see the Wizard

One in 60,000. Those are the odds a tornado will suck me away to Oz, or — far more likely in the real world — the afterlife. Those aren’t bad odds; I should be sleeping soundly at night, secure in the knowledge I’m far more likely to die of a heart attack (1 in 5), a random accident (1 in 36) or even electrocution (1 in 5,000, unless I try to install my own lighting fixtures, in which case the odds rise considerably).

Yet I’m not worried about my heart, falling off a ladder, or frying myself while attempting to remove a recalcitrant bagel from a toaster with a butter knife.

I am worried about tornadoes. Because of my new residence and my personal history. 

I’m moving this week, one poorly-packed box at a time, from my beloved lake house to Lori’s place, the Little House on the Prairie. It’s a nice enough home, but it is located directly in the middle of nowhere and has no basement.

There’s nothing surrounding this house but open fields, acres and acres of ‘em. You couldn’t plan a more enticing tornado magnet without actually drawing a bullseye on the place and opening a trailer park next door.

One in 60,000; those are the odds. That’s according to insurance company actuarial tables, the sort they use to determine how badly they’re going to gouge you in premiums. 

I should say, one is 60,000 are the odds for you and any normal person. The odds are higher for me. I don’t know if it’s because a deity hates me, I have bad karma, or whether there’s some sort of tornado-attracting pheromone I unconsciously exude in moments of stress, but tornadoes seem determined to get me.

They’ve tried. Three times so far.

The first attempt occurred when I was only an infant. My grandmother managed to get me into the root cellar scant moments before a funnel cloud swept her house into oblivion. The same thing happened again just a half-dozen years later.

Then when I was in my teens, while camping in Illinois, a tornado nearly dropped a cow on me. The airborne bovine missed my tent (in which I was, at the time, sleeping) by about three feet. I woke the next morning with a deceased, inverted cow reposing legs-up within touching distance of my sleeping bag.

So you can see that one in 60,000 thing doesn’t apply to me. You can also understand, I suppose, why I’m so nervous about moving to a basement-less home in the middle of tornado alley.

It’s just a matter of time.

But as John Denver said, “My bags are packed, I’m ready to go…” There’s no turning back now; my landlady at the lake house has already lined up a new tenant.

So, like a condemned man walking that last mile to the electric chair, I go to meet my fate. I hope the tornado, when it eventually comes — and it will come, make no mistake — spares Lori. Her only crime is loving a tornado-magnet like me. 

There’s no reason the poor kid should have to share in my tempestuous doom.

Mike Taylor's paperback, "Looking at the Pint Half Full," is available at Robbins Book List in Greenville and in Kindle format from Amazon.com.