Wailing Teenage Puritans

I am sitting here with, to paraphrase Ogden Nash, the damnedest cold man ever had, with a head that is pounding like drums along the Mohawk and a nose that is running like the river Styx. I blame it on the wind.

Not only has the howling gale caused me to string all those peculiar metaphors into one sentence but it has also activated whatever it is that causes the physical symptoms of living death.

I suppose I could live with death OK but I’m also haunted by a sense of the supernatural. Wind has ghostly qualities, snapping trees as it does and blowing down power lines and causing garbage cans to clatter down the street. The clattering is all the more scary when one realizes the cans are plastic.

I’m already a kind of spooky guy, as you might have guessed, and when the wind howls through the night I get even spookier. Not that I begin growing hair on my palms or anything like that. I just get, well, uneasy.

It is worse this time because when the wind started Sunday night I was in the dreaded San Fernando Valley and I had just seen “The Crucible.”

For those who, due to problems of good taste, have not seen it, the film concerns a situation in Salem 300 years ago in which certain young girls accuse about half the population of being witches.

Naturally, since the girls claim to be cursed by these witches, there is a lot of screaming going on, more like wailing, I would say, and that’s exactly what the wind sounded like: wailing teenage Puritans.

*

When we went into the movie it was pleasant outside. That is not to say it was exactly balmy, but the temperature was probably in the low 70s and the sky was a cerulean blue. I even remarked to my wife, Cinelli, how lovely it was and she said, “Since when do you like lovely?”

That’s true, I like things a little unlovely, which is probably why God made me a newspaper columnist, but that isn’t the point. The point is, it was nice outside when we entered the movie, but two hours later it had changed.

It was dark because, of course, it was later. But also the temperature had dropped 20 degrees and the wind was wailing exactly the way Wynona Ryder had been wailing in “The Crucible.”

“Don’t get weird on me,” Cinelli said when I began comparing the sound of the gale to the screaming girlish Puritans.

“It’s just that everything is kind of strange and Chris Carterish,” I said, hunching into the wind as we walked to the car.

“You do anything to embarrass me,” she said, “and I take a taxi home.”

“Join me in prayer,” I said, dropping to my knees right there on Ventura Boulevard, “and we’ll drive old Satan away.”

“That does it,” she said.

“OK, no prayers . . . but how about a verse of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’?”

*

I don’t mean to make light of the wind because I realize how much damage it can cause. During the last storm it blew down all the pepper trees on a street in Woodland Hills and you had to be George of the Jungle to get through, swinging from fallen limb to fallen limb.

On the way home we drove slowly to avoid all kinds of debris in the road and I could feel our little Nissan Altima, a modest but useful car, being pushed from side to side as though we were a plaything of the devil.

The wind was at full force by then, not only strong but colder than hell, and KFWB was saying that it was expected to get into the 30s that night in the Valley. I turned the radio down once because I thought I could hear Wynona howling “Helustedafterme . . .” in what she considered to be, for acting purposes, an anguished Puritan voice.

Cinelli sensed that I was listening to the wind and wanted to know if I was hearing the devil whistle “Colonel Bogie’s March,” which was popular when I was a Marine, but I didn’t answer. Making fun of the Corps is a mortal sin.

We had just about reached home when craaaaaash! down went a tree not 100 yards in front of us, completely blocking the street. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to cross myself. I just took another road home . . . fast.

We called 911 to report the fallen tree and the operator said OK, uh-huh, and stuff like that. Then we went to bed and listened to the wind howl all night and to trees thump-thumping against the house, but we wouldn’t let the devil in, or the wailing Puritans either.

They got even though by cursing me with a head cold. I’m trying to decide now whether to call a doctor or an exorcist, but meanwhile I think I’ll just lie low. Our lights are flickering like crazy, and I think it’s Wynona.

Al Martinez can be reached online at [email protected]