One Day Goodbye Will be Farewell

"Hey, Dorothy!"
This is how I greeted my friend Michele when I finally reached her. She rode out an EF5 tornado last Sunday in a basement with her mother & neighbor. At first, I could only hear anger & frustration in her voice--and emergency vehicle sirens in the background--but later, the laughter & kindness that I love about her rose to the surface and I felt a few knots in my back unravel.

It seems, although the storm didn't hit me directly, it was still close enough to peel layers off me--like a clown's handkerchief sucked into the sky, every scene of wreckage tugging out a memory sewn onto another, and another.

My childhood was spent as part of my vagabond parents' luggage, criss-crossing the country, enrolled in at least fifteen schools outside of Missouri. I was a carnival kid in Georgia, I lived in an orchard camp in California, and one May Sunday in 1980, morning turned to night, as ash blanketed my church in Yakima, WA. I don't regret any of the poverty and instability now, but when my parents finally settled down in Joplin for three whole years (!!), I soaked the place up. I'm sure something could be said about the developmental stage my prepubescent brain was in at the time, but I became content with most of what the place had to offer, as long as it was also offering a home and familiar faces.

After a divorce and a couple more disastrous blasts of wanderlust on my mother's part, I decided to finish out high school living with my grandparents. I know that this early rootlessness is partly the reason I never shared my classmates' drive to quit Joplin as soon as possible. My rose-tinted philosophy was that we had to make the change we wanted to see happen; that if all the cool people were to move away, their ideas and potential go with them, and the town is a poorer place for it. Of course, I was naive--I was a teenager. But I was also right. I'm glad to say that, over the years, some of those cool people have moved back and they are making Joplin better every day. I am proud to have friends who are artists, educators, social workers, musicians, people in the medical & legal fields, etc., who have chosen to make their homes in Joplin and use their talents to shape it's character and spitshine it's history.

Last Sunday, when I brought up the Weather Channel site and saw the Dresden that 26th & Maiden Lane had become, my brain solidified. Surely, some malicious hacker had Photoshopped St. John's (where I once worked for eight years) into old tsunami footage, because I didn't recognize a damned thing. It was a moment of "fight or flight", in which I could do neither. As far as I knew, I was looking at a detail representing the whole town, a fractal repeating endlessly in all directions. I felt like my whole world was under that pile of junk and stripped trees. The nerd in me likens it to being in space and seeing Earth explode.

Amazingly, every one I know in Joplin is still alive. Over the past three years, I've become pretty nonchalant about death. It happens to us all at some point, and the important thing is that our loved ones know what they mean to us, right? But this week has trained a ginormous cartoon spotlight on that subject and all I can do is stand frozen, mid-tiptoe, in my striped pajamas & burglar mask, whispering "I love you...I love you..."

Saying it isn't enough. It's something that should be demonstrated every day. And I'm finding it hard to perform that kind of magic from 300 miles away, with a more-than-full-time job and crazy gas prices. How can I be a part of someone's life if I've never met their spouse and/or children? When does the term "friend" slip into "acquaintance"? Frankly, it's unacceptable.

My homesickness precedes the tornado. But the response to the disaster shows me a community spirit I didn't know existed. A level of caring that seems incongruous to the blinkered rush & casual abruptness that passes for civility. I want to be a part of that. My mountains are molehills, and I'm ready to knock them down so I can be a part of that. I won't go into the story of how I ended up in Lawrence, KS. If you're reading this, you likely already know. Suffice to say, it was love that influenced my move away from Joplin, and it's love that is going to bring me back.