joplin tornado

call 417-624-1995 or 417-623-0400 to make a donation to the independent living center tornado relief account through southwest missouri bank.

or go to www.ilcenter.org to make a paypal donation.

today is my 8th wedding anniversary. yesterday was the sweetie's fortieth birthday. the day before that was the tornado. here is how it started. the seventy year old father calls, chatting about the storm, bragging about the hail battering the yard. i hear something muffled and he puts down the phone. i know he is standing out in the yard, getting the biggest hail to put in the freezer so he can show the grandsons. i am pretty sure this impish disregard for reason was something my own mother interpreted as badboy sassiness when she fell for him but i want to reach through the phone and shake him for going out there. he comes back to the phone, beaned more than once by the hail, then says he ought to go before the weather gets too bad. we are not the sort of people who stay on the phone during a storm. and there's a tornado watch, after all. but there are tornado watches all the time. they are boys crying wolf, making you hide in the basement or the bathtub or in the closet, foolish and stuffy. you come out feeling ripped off. tricked.

i wait. twenty or so minutes later he calls back, saying everything in a voice that tells me he is trying to make sure i don't worry in case he gets the wrong words out first. he says tornado. he tells me the sisters, sane women who live in houses with basements, are okay. he says he and mom are also okay because their windowless bathroom makes a mighty fine tornado shelter. i will tell you right now if a tornado is spinning smack over you nothing above ground makes a mighty fine tornado shelter but there is no telling him anything. he says watch the weather channel.

we watch most of the evening, the sweetie and me. image after image of a place i've never been in my life. i see the hospital where i wandered from room to room in my candy striper dress, filling water pitchers and changing towels. it is broken. it is all alone. there is nothing else. there is nothing anywhere. my lungs feel thick. i worry about strange things- tiny little fred 'n red's all alone there on main street, dogs who might wander over downed electrical wires. but they are all safe, the family. they are fine. dad tells me each time i talk to him like he isn't sure i'm convinced.

the sisters call and send texts. the baby sister's words are, simply, it is horrible here. the middle sister sends photos she's taken. they are exactly like every other photo i've seen of what used to be where i am from. it is awful to think of her there in the middle of so much emptiness. each photo comes with a word or two to help me decipher them. somewhere on 26th. the house alan was helping with. gas station at 20th and duquesne. dead cows in field behind the gas station. aunt mary's neighborhood. but i can't tell them apart. she ends with across the street is mostly untouched.

the family is out in the middle of things. to be sure, it is who they are. but the truth is, everyone in town who can help is out in the middle of things. because that is who they are, too. and i am here looking at photo after photo while my family is sifting through what is left of my aunt mary's house. while my sisters are trying to help the folks at their i.l.c., folks who have met with plenty of challenges already. some are dead or lost but more than forty are without anything but themselves. and i am still here, yelling at bored kids about langston hughes. about martin espada. about how important everything is.

but monday is my birthday (right. of course. memorial day) and i want something other than to share my birthday one more time with the war dead and the barbecues and sales. i want a toothbrush. i want soap. a laundry basket. towels. forks. i want a frame for a family photo. a stupid barbie. generally, i don't like to ask so directly, but this is what i can do and so here i am. folks have temporary shelter and clothing and food. there will be money down the road for rebuilding. but right now today this minute people in my town need shampoo. antacid. maybe a stuffed bear. they need what will make things seem a little closer to normal.

both my bossy sisters thank you. my ridiculous parents who will not listen to reason thank you. my strange little midwestern town thanks you. i thank you. this is the most important present i could ever get.

Tornado

The family is safe. More to come later.

marquis de lafayette

the boy puts his left hand around the right boot of the marquis de lafayette. he is careful not to catch his fingers in the spur just above the heel. his right hand grips the man's left boot. the boy leans back a bit, looks the whole situation over and shifts his left hand past the blade of a long sword so he's holding tight to the right ankle of the marquis with both hands. in one smooth movement he swings himself up onto the ledge and there he is standing right next to a man who was on the wild side of two revolutions. the boy leans away to look up at the marquis, who stands almost as tall as his horse, even with his hat off. the horse is a jokester, nibbling at the groom holding his reins. they are flatter in the background than the marquis and the boy scoots himself over past the flank of the horse and looks again at the man.

it is impossible to tell what the boy knows. that this man once owned slaves but recognized that a real democracy couldn't abide that sort of ugliness. that he was a pal of our very first president and used that connection to push for abolition of slavery when we were just a baby country. that he was born french but fought here as a general and didn't even ask for money. nobody paid him to help bring this revolution around or think so much about democracy and freedom and all that.

but it is clear the boy knows something. he arranges himself in the tableau a few ways, finally settling on a pose like the marquis himself, hand on hip, sword tipped to the ground. he looks like a little boy watching his daddy shave. he moves his hand twice to get it just right on his hip, hovers his empty sword hand around until something clicks and he knows his imaginary sword tip is resting just in front of his foot.

the bronze is slippery wet from a week of rain but nobody tells him to get down off that statue before he breaks his neck. he would not hear them anyway. he shifts the weight of the sword in his hand and surveys from his vantage point a harbor the rest of us can't even see.

fourth floor raccoon

apologies for the poor picture quality. it was 6 am. it was raining. i was confused.

the fourth floor fire escape landing on the building across the courtyard is pretty high up. four floors up, in fact. below it is the third floor fire escape landing and then down below that the second. there are the usual steps connecting each. on the fourth floor landing there's a ladder with rails like the ones you see down into swimming pools. it climbs up the side of the building and over onto the top. then down below it on the second floor, there's that ladder that might be spring loaded, that hangs between the second floor and the third on normal days, but in case of a fire will drop down and allow folks on the second floor landing to climb down to safety. this is not unusual at all. this is how fire escapes work. our own fire escape faces the one across the courtyard and works just the same way. anyone in the building can get out of the building and climb down. marauding evildoers in the courtyard have no good way to climb up without making a racket that would wake the dead.

unless you are the sort of marauding evildoer who lurks in alleyways and behind garbage cans at night. the sort of evildoer who wears a mask so no one will recognize you. a smaller than person sized evildoer, noiseless on the rungs of that lower ladder. that's right. this morning i open the kitchen window and look across the gray fog and rain to see something moving on the far fire escape and it is not a squirrel or a pigeon. there is a mangy raccoon on the fire escape. right up there on the fourth floor landing, pawing in the ashy remains of a fire escape grill, digging through the pots of dirt i know the folks living in that apartment just put out there with anxious seeds. suddenly the giant holes rooted into my beet seedlings make sense.

but wait, you say. how could a stubby raccoon reach up and grab a rung on that fire escape if it's so far up a regular human can't do it? how can a waddly beast glide up the brick face of a four story apartment? well, i don't know, but i can tell you city raccoons aren't like their rural kin. they are wily like squirrels and rats and pigeons. they know things other raccoons don't know. there's a good chance the across the way neighbors on the first floor weren't thinking of raccoons when they hung that pretty red hammock, one side attached to a tree, the other to the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder. but raccoons are thinking of everything. they are thinking all the time. they are city animals. it is only a matter of time before they learn to use laptops and iphones. and then they will be in line in front of you ordering venti decaf double iced macchiatos with extra whipped cream and a shot of caramel.

brooklyn back yard, a children's story

for the small folks i know who make me laugh with their own
wild tales and, on occasion, their stories of traveling dogs.

if you are the sort of person who keeps a dog lying around the house, sooner or later that dog will roll right over on the couch beside where you are sitting and he will look up at you. if he is a low, long dog, there will be a great deal of stretching and yawning and paw waving. but eventually he will get around to saying, while he looks up at you, "let's go out in the yard and play".

now, if you live in just about most of the united states, what you will do is saunter over to what you've always known to be the back door of your house. it's that one usually pretty near the kitchen and when you open it you will gesture out magnanimously into the yard beyond. you will say to the dog, "help yourself, pal". and you will head back toward the couch and your book or the t.v. or some chips and guacamole, maybe with a little limeade. but the dog will insist that you get out there, too, and you'll drag a tennis ball or a frisbee out there and you'll toss whatever it is in lackluster arcs across the grass your dad makes you mow with the push mower even though he's the one who mowed over your mom's rose bushes or peonies or blue flags or whatever it was this year, reckless and inattentive himself on his fancy riding mower. maybe one of those fat bees over visiting the peach tree will hum by you.

but this is not what happens at all if you live in brooklyn. first of all, if you live in brooklyn you probably don't even have a back door. maybe you have a fire escape off your kitchen and you can sit there summer evenings slurping the cool out of the sky while the guy a few buildings down sits in his back window or maybe on his fire escape trying to sound, with a second-hand trumpet, like miles davis. you might even have a tray of tomatoes growing out there but you can't just open up the window and tell the dog to help himself to the fire escape. not in brooklyn.

in brooklyn you have to get ready. you get the harness and the leash and you get the little baggies for carrying poop (the dog's, not your own) and the toy for the dog. maybe you put on a nice hat for yourself or some sun glasses. then you go sixteen steps down, around the landing, another sixteen steps, then out onto the stoop. you are not yet there, but you can smell the green of your back yard from where you are and you can see it if you look just left, up the hopscotched sidewalk. you walk eight, nine, ten small buildings with their stoops lolling like dog tongues and then one big corner building down. you cross the street. there are old ladies selling helados from freezers on wheels. there are men in straw hats selling cold drinks and warm pretzels.

there are horses on the horse path. there are ducks in the duck pond. actually, the ducks are everywhere, waddling and paddling and quacking, sometimes in a big hurry but mostly not. your back yard is so big, if you live in brooklyn, that you can stand in the middle and see just your yard. your back yard is so big it may be raining over on one side while sun shines down on folks barbecuing on the other side.

if you live in brooklyn your back yard has at least two waterfalls, although they will stop falling temporarily if you have a citywide blackout. you can get a pedal boat and swanpaddle your way across glassy water with fat fish all under your waves. you can stare at turtles loaded onto logs, piled up on top of each other like acrobatic hamburgers toasting in the sun.

if you live in brooklyn you can walk your dog over bridges and then back under them again, through arched tunnels made of ancient brick and weathered wood and oxidized metal. if you're walking under there with someone who likes to howl, maybe that person will howl over at your dog and your dog will howl right back, echoing all watery and blue under the arched roof. maybe not. there's no way to know in advance.

your back yard will have a little cottage or two in it if you live in brooklyn. depending on the time of year there will be tall blue irises standing around outside. there will be sweet williams, violets, lilacs, purple insinuating itself into everything. there will be at least one mansion in your back yard, a decent sized brick one, probably. it will be slathered in tulips during springtime and will be decorated with icicles in winter like the kind you see on buildings on dinner plates.

there is a carousel in your back yard, a famous one from 1912 that lived in coney island a while. there's a zoo with real live sea lions and kangaroos, but only if you live in brooklyn. how many other people do you know with sea lions and kangaroos in their own back yards? because i will tell you now most folks' back yards are nowhere near zoned for that. did i mention the peacocks and peahens? well, they're there, too, howling like mad cats, shimmering like mirages at noon.

if you live in brooklyn walking through your back yard means walking across a revolutionary war battlefield. there were hessians in your back yard once and george washington was there, but that was a long time ago. yes, i do mean that george washington. your back yard will be full of architecture that somebody was thinking about during the civil war. that far back. back when streetlamps had feet with claws at the bottom.

if you live in brooklyn there is no way to explain how lucky you are to have the kind of back yard you have, and if you have a certain kind of parents they will tell you it is unkind to gloat about your good fortune when there are so many out there who do not have what you have. but you probably already know you can't help it.

the best you can do is try to remember where you keep half the stuff you have in your yard so when the folks you love stop by, you can share a little of that good fortune with them.