"As omens go, that's not the greatest."
I said those words the summer before, as I watched a black widow arise from behind a shelf in the backyard night to terminate a moth that had found its way into her web.
"But I'm not a moth," I said. And that was true enough.
Another summer night, July 14th, 2014: driving down to Albuquerque to spend the anniversary of my father's death with my family, approaching Santo Domingo, NM (interestingly exactly the place I normally stop for gas), I got hit by a thunderstorm so fierce I could barely see. The wipers, metronoming prestissimo, did nothing, and I crawled those last couple of miles, up the off-ramp, and then under the roof covering the pumps at Pueblo Gas, and from there as the rain came down in sheets and lightning lit up the night I called my wife.