The town that always had "A great big well-come for you."
The town was on my route home; it was my rest stop of choice. I spent many-an-hour in Davis Park, resting, smoking, eating, playing on the playground, changing diapers...I wonder if the park is still there?
Unlike ratings-starved media freaks, I'm not going to poke around Greensburg for a while. Someday yet this month, I'll pass through (or around, if it's still an issue) and I'll rubberneck like everyone else. For now, however, I'm going to leave those folk alone. Later, like I did after Andover and Hoisington, I'll rally up some student volunteers and we'll help where needed. For now, people need to find their own way a little.
Sure, the logistics of power, water, and policing are important. I know the government support and the well-meaning (though still rubbernecking, on volunteer vacation, disaster tourism) will be there to pick up and clean up and overall, provide. I know this because a tornado grazed our farmstead when I was a kid. A flood forced me to evacuate (though only for a day or two) when I lived in Arkansas City. Help will come. It is needed and even...well-come.
However, people need their space, too. Grieving over loss of one's home is not that different from grieving the loss of a family member. People appreciate the acquaintances and well-wishers from the community-at-large, but the first need family and friends. They will need to sort among the scattered waste with their own neighbors, sometimes chuckling over the fence that once separated what was once their respective properties. Homeowners will find their lots, and local folk (not national guardsmen with bulldozers) will return the barbecue grill the tornado 'borrowed' and did not return from 'cross town. People need to touch the remains of the foundation of the house their grandpa built. They need space and time to find their own stuff (artifacts, tokens, talismans, touchstones). They need to hold that horseshoe that hung over the back porch door, knock some mud off it, and pocket it for later.
I heard they're taking odds inVegas on whether or not Greensburg will rebuild. Here's an inside scoop for you gamblers: rebuild is a sure bet. The people of Greensburg are KANSANS. Tornado alley is populated with hearty folk.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Monday, May 07, 2007
Worms and Suds
Maybe it's due to end-of-term grading loads...maybe I'm really losing my mind and just finally starting to notice...but lately the world around me has offered some startling new degree of Presence, if not Insight. It's as if, suddenly, seeing a tree bud up close is somehow bringing me full circle from, "Oh, it's Spring." to the botanical comprehension of it all, then again through some cycle-of-life insight, and back again to just marveling at nature. (Likely this makes no sense to anyone but myself; that's why I'm sharing it.)
Example: this very morning, about 5am...it was STILL raining when I came in to work. Like always, I stopped at the back door of the building, fished out my key, and then--I noticed an earthworm. Yes, they come out when it's raining (something I'm now inspired to really grasp), but this particular worm had 'wormed' its way to the doormat of the college. (It is finals week, remember, and maybe I was lost in thought there about the mental state of worms and students, how this very worm (eager beaver) was waiting at the gates of higher learning, "First one here!"--but that did not last long.) That fleeting thought fled when I noticed something much more interesting...
The doormat is of the variety that features many, many little rubber 'nubbies' or thick hairs. They are about the diameter of a pencil lead, and they are less-than a 1/2 inch tall. The worm was working its way across the doormat, shimmying through these nubbies. Most of its body, then, was in a perfectly straight line; however, sometime prior to my arrival, something had compelled the worm to make a right hand turn, continue an inch or so, then a left turn, and it was in the process of another right. (I had never seen a worm do such a thing, something that seemed strikingly symetrical for a worm. If you can imagine, it created something of a question mark by design.)
Of course, the nubbies had guided the worm in forming such straight lines, but I will always wonder if the worm was raising a question. Was it just making its way through an unnecessarily complicated route? (It could have shot straight across the mat, after all, or just never bothered to go there in the first place!) Was it sending me a sign? Did the nubbies feel good, rubbing along its sides, or did the worm find them laborious and bothersome? Do I sometimes, like this worm, get so confounded by the nubbies that I cannot take my naturally wormy course?
Previously, maybe a week ago, I was driving across Wichita early one morning when I spied a white blob ahead, just over the hill. As I approached, it was becoming clear to me the blob was not simply a trash bag, as I had first assumed. Since I was going 45 or so, I closed on it rapidly. The few other vehicles on this same course had either stopped or swerved or taken some other detour when their drivers realized the blob was as big as a freight car...however, I did not waiver. In the instant I knew it to be suds, bubbles, what-have-you...I forged on through. (I drive a pickup, and thus, my untoward mentality.) It was great fun to plow through the foam, to look in my rear view mirror at how the blob had scattered in my wake. (The source of the blob, I also came to note, was some prankster dumping detergent in the waterfall element outside some swank housing development.)
The blob of bubbles, the wall of suds, gained almost metaphysical proportion to me. I had persisted. I had burst through...when others had been wary, I was bold. Of course, this is silly, but then, charging through an opaque obstruction is also both silly and dangerous...I am just noting that such a thing had never crossed my path before, in nigh 40 years of driving. It still strikes me as something beyond peculiar, something...meaningful...but I've not yet figured it out. Like the lifespan of a bubble, whatever I should have taken with me from that instant just seems to have popped. Thus, I have had an epiphany with no piff. Something happened, but I do not know what it was (?)
These are but two of somewhere near a dozen "twilight zone" observations I've had in the last two weeks. Am I losing my mind? Opening my mind?...or am I just dazed and overworked?
We'll see.
Example: this very morning, about 5am...it was STILL raining when I came in to work. Like always, I stopped at the back door of the building, fished out my key, and then--I noticed an earthworm. Yes, they come out when it's raining (something I'm now inspired to really grasp), but this particular worm had 'wormed' its way to the doormat of the college. (It is finals week, remember, and maybe I was lost in thought there about the mental state of worms and students, how this very worm (eager beaver) was waiting at the gates of higher learning, "First one here!"--but that did not last long.) That fleeting thought fled when I noticed something much more interesting...
The doormat is of the variety that features many, many little rubber 'nubbies' or thick hairs. They are about the diameter of a pencil lead, and they are less-than a 1/2 inch tall. The worm was working its way across the doormat, shimmying through these nubbies. Most of its body, then, was in a perfectly straight line; however, sometime prior to my arrival, something had compelled the worm to make a right hand turn, continue an inch or so, then a left turn, and it was in the process of another right. (I had never seen a worm do such a thing, something that seemed strikingly symetrical for a worm. If you can imagine, it created something of a question mark by design.)
Of course, the nubbies had guided the worm in forming such straight lines, but I will always wonder if the worm was raising a question. Was it just making its way through an unnecessarily complicated route? (It could have shot straight across the mat, after all, or just never bothered to go there in the first place!) Was it sending me a sign? Did the nubbies feel good, rubbing along its sides, or did the worm find them laborious and bothersome? Do I sometimes, like this worm, get so confounded by the nubbies that I cannot take my naturally wormy course?
Previously, maybe a week ago, I was driving across Wichita early one morning when I spied a white blob ahead, just over the hill. As I approached, it was becoming clear to me the blob was not simply a trash bag, as I had first assumed. Since I was going 45 or so, I closed on it rapidly. The few other vehicles on this same course had either stopped or swerved or taken some other detour when their drivers realized the blob was as big as a freight car...however, I did not waiver. In the instant I knew it to be suds, bubbles, what-have-you...I forged on through. (I drive a pickup, and thus, my untoward mentality.) It was great fun to plow through the foam, to look in my rear view mirror at how the blob had scattered in my wake. (The source of the blob, I also came to note, was some prankster dumping detergent in the waterfall element outside some swank housing development.)
The blob of bubbles, the wall of suds, gained almost metaphysical proportion to me. I had persisted. I had burst through...when others had been wary, I was bold. Of course, this is silly, but then, charging through an opaque obstruction is also both silly and dangerous...I am just noting that such a thing had never crossed my path before, in nigh 40 years of driving. It still strikes me as something beyond peculiar, something...meaningful...but I've not yet figured it out. Like the lifespan of a bubble, whatever I should have taken with me from that instant just seems to have popped. Thus, I have had an epiphany with no piff. Something happened, but I do not know what it was (?)
These are but two of somewhere near a dozen "twilight zone" observations I've had in the last two weeks. Am I losing my mind? Opening my mind?...or am I just dazed and overworked?
We'll see.
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