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At the end of a hot, muggy southern Michigan May day, I pulled my truck into the Coca Cola warehouse lot and glanced up at sky blue everywhere but over downtown Kalamazoo where a black thunderhead passed over as they tended to do on hot, muggy spring afternoons.  The only thought I had concerned turning in my paperwork at the front office, and then getting in my little red VW to drive home to the half a Queen Anne we rented on Elm Street just to the west of downtown.  I could not get the car onto Elm and had to park a couple of blocks from the house because of the downed trees and wires.  Being then a former firefighter, I clicked into search and rescue mode and hiked over and around debris to the house; Lauren wasn’t there and the house stood intact, so I drove to Bronson Hospital by a roundabout route because downtown looked impassable.  The tornado had jumped Elm Street leaving little damage other than trees, then tore through downtown, taking the roof off a school (the kids were gone for the day), tearing up more trees in the downtown park, blowing the side out of one five story building, and missing the hospital by one block. . . .