The Fourth Conversation - Tornadoes

My conversation with Bandar was certainly different than normal this week. We always have our conversations early Tuesday afternoon, and this week was no different. I was walking over to meet Bandar when it started raining and I watched the sky start to look a little intimidating. Earlier that day I had heard the bad weather sirens go off and ever since I had been keenly aware of the possibility of a tornado.

For me, a tornado is almost exciting. I've never actually seen a tornado or even hardly been in close proximity to one. In sixth grade my class and I spent the afternoon huddled in of our school's interior hallways because the sky had turned a lovely shade of pea green and there were tornado warnings, but nothing came of it. It occurred to me after moving down to Texas, that now I was in tornado alley. My chance to actually see a tornado could come. It's a silly, boy-ish desire, but one I never really gave up.

I began to tell Bandar all this, about the weather and what might happen, but he stopped me and asked, "A tornado?" I thought that perhaps he didn't know the word, so I began to explain it as I do when I use a word he's unfamiliar with. He stopped me again; he knew what a tornado was, he was just concerned because he walked from his house to campus and didn't particularly want to walk back during a tornado.

We moved on to other conversation topics, but Bandar remained ever aware of the weather happening just outside the window. He seemed to only be pulled away from the changing storm conditions once, when we were talking about the word "colleague". Bandar mentioned that he had just learned the word today and enjoyed how it sounded, but was bothered by the spelling. I agreed wholeheartedly, saying that I can't ever remember how the e's, a's, and u's go either. But then he baffled me by asking about the silent "d" in the word.

For a moment, I was incredibly confused. I played back what he said several times over in my mind, thinking maybe I had misheard him. I mean, I know quite well that there's no silent "d" in the word colleague. English doesn't make much sense sometimes, but it's not that inane. I'm sure I looked very puzzled for a few seconds before saying that I really didn't think there was d in the word at all.

Bandar insisted, and he pulled out his notebook of words, flipped to the back page and pointed to the word as he wrote it down. For a moment, it looked exactly right to me. Where in the world was he finding this "d"? And then suddenly I realized that the way he wrote it had the "o" and the "l" bunched up next to each other in such a way to look like a "d". I explained the issue and we laughed.

And at that point the weather was getting bad enough that we cut out conversation a bit short and Bandar headed home. As I left myself, I hoped that he would make it safely and avoid whatever nasty weather was headed this way. I didn't really want to see a tornado after all, I decided, I just wanted everyone to stay safe. And fortunately, they did.