"Remember, Dad, when I was a boy?" he continued. "How the two of us would stretch out on the floor and listen to the thunder? How you'd laugh to keep me from being afraid?"

"I remember," I said, trying to ignore the lump in my throat.

"I wish I were there now to listen with you," he said softly.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I got my tape recorder, my large umbrella and a wooden chair. "I'm going to record our son some thunder," I told Pat.

"Bob, the neighbors will think you're crazy."

"David won't," I said, and went outside.

With lightning flickering across the sky like a fireworks display, I sat in the driving rain beneath my umbrella and recorded half an hour of the finest Mississippi thunder a lonesome man could ever want to hear. The next day I mailed the tape to David with a single line: "A special gift."

Three weeks later David called again. This time he was his old self. "Dad," he said, "you won't believe what I did last night. I invited some friends over to my quarters for a thunder party. When we heard the tape, we all reacted the same way. Instant silence, followed by a few minutes of sadness. But once we realized we were listening to the sounds of home, we felt better and enjoyed a great party, like we'd been relieved of a heavy burden. I can't tell you how much that tape meant to me," he continued. "I can make it now. Thanks, Dad! It really was a special gift."

It also became a special gift for Pat and me. For the next eight months, while David was in Korea, we found ourselves looking forward to thunderstorms. Rather than feeling depressed on gloomy days, we came to regard the storms as special. Each rumble seemed to tie us closer to a son so far from home.

And even though it thunders in Minnesota, where David is now instructing Army aviators, the gift of thunder has become a tradition for us. It lets us know that no matter where in the world we may be, we're linked together as a family.