Aunt Micheline: A Hurricane Story

This morning I am remembering my Aunt Micheline. The French war bride was in her upper eighties, frail, and living alone in an apartment on Beach Boulevard in Biloxi when Katrina hit. She was evacuated to temporary housing for many weeks, and finally returned to her apartment to find the landlord of the senior citizens’ complex had piled her furniture and possessions high in the middle of the living room to rip the bottom section of drywall from the walls to check for mold. The furniture shifted; she was injured, hospitalized, and died. She was a fatality of Katrina.

Especially for medically vulnerable populations, not nearly all fatalities of hurricanes are immediate drownings. The stress of persistent displacement and lack of access to compensations they have developed in their daily residences make them especially likely to have cumulative, subtle, negative effects.

There are many lessons from her story. I’d like to whisper her name in the President’s ear, and encourage him to be more sensitive in his discussion of Puerto Rico’s reported fatality numbers. But I’d also like to encourage family members, neighbors, and organizations with resources to maintain contact with elderly residents on the East Coast after this weather event is over. Because with a hurricane, it’s not over when it’s over.

God bless them, and the National Guard, first responders, linemen, and volunteers who will work tirelessly to restore those communities over the weeks to come.

Chuckles the Clown and God's Family

Proverbs 14:13 says, “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.” Sometimes things aren’t as emotionally cut and dried as they would seem. And it is a great truth that often when circumstances dictate we need self-control the most, composure eludes us.

Last week, millions of Americans memorialized Mary Tyler Moore on social media, recounting the reasons we loved her. “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” a classic episode from the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” ranked in the top 100 TV episodes of all time, was re-posted countless times. You may have seen it: Producer Mary Richards repeatedly scolds co-workers from the WJN newsroom for relentlessly joking about how colleague Chuckles the Clown, has died—dressed as Peter Peanut, he was attacked by a rogue elephant, who attempted to “shell him.”

At the funeral, Mary finally shames her colleagues into a semblance of decorum—only to be humiliated as she herself unsuccessfully suppresses laughter throughout the eulogy. The minister, sympathetic to her plight, encourages her to laugh freely, as an homage to the entertainer's body of work. He invokes Chuckles' motto: “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants…” Released from her predicament, Mary promptly dissolves into uncontrollable weeping. Some days, in the pursuit of dignity, you just can’t win.

Yesterday’s sermon was about the importance of grieving with the heartbroken—a timely topic, given the week’s loss of Moore, and the internet's preoccupation with the existential issues surrounding mourning Chuckles appropriately. The worship leader queued up a list of venerable hits to underscore the minister’s topic. “Sing to Me of Heaven,” “To Canaan’s Land I’m on My Way,” “I Will Rise,” and the ever-popular “No Tears in Heaven.”

I was appropriately engaged; that is, until I cast my eyes heavenward to find the lyrics to “God’s Family” on the screen. My husband Dan has a twisted gift—a compulsion, really—for corrupting song lyrics. The congregation sang in solidarity:

...And sometimes we laugh together
Sometimes we cry
Sometimes we share together
Heartaches and sighs...

In my head forever, however, is the Revised Daniel Version, somehow more apropos to a sermon on potluck fellowship than grief:

...And sometimes we laugh together
Sometimes we cry
Sometimes we share together
Drumsticks and thighs…

Mortified, I bit my lip, much as Mary Richards had done, as the congregation pondered how blessed those who mourn actually are. I was only marginally successful. Had the song leader made eye contact, he would have seen a face frozen in a crazed, tight smile—my attempt to stave off an outright guffaw, which might not have been well-received by the elderly couple seated in front of us. It was exhausting. And annoying. Once you’ve heard it, however, you can never unhear it.

So Chuckles 2.0 has permanently ruined “God’s Family,” among other hymns, for me. But he does make me laugh, and if the price I pay is being sidelined from singing “God’s Family” occasionally, I suspect God will not judge me harshly for it.

Perhaps dignity is overrated, anyway. After all, it was God's own man in Ecclesiastes who wrote,

“A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance 

...a little seltzer down your pants…”

Or something like that. 

The Teacher and the Exile

Geraldine Farmer was a teacher.

She taught in schools with farm families and with students from rural poverty.  She taught in the Knoxville public schools while Dad did doctoral work at the University of Tennessee, and she taught at a school where many parents were highly-educated scientists at the atomic facility at Oak Ridge. For most of her career, however, she taught 6th grade at Forest Hills Elementary School, a "baby boom" school built in the mid-1960s in Florence, Alabama.

Mom loved helping children learn, and she was distressed by waste in all its manifestations. Years later, as she reflected on her career, she recalled often saying hello to a boy who had been consigned to the hallway outside a fifth grade classroom. To Mom, that desk in the hallway represented unrealized potential with red hair. A young man wasn't learning, and his classroom had a boy-shaped hole in it. The next fall he appeared on her roster.  On the first day of school, she brought him out in the hall and told him, "You won't spend this year in the hallway. You'll stay in here with the rest of us, and we'll work hard, and we're all going to learn together, and I wanted you to know that." He was a good student, and when she reminisced, she was especially proud of him.

The day after Mom died, my brother received this email from a red-haired attorney:

... If she was as good a mom as she was a teacher then you were truly blessed beyond measure. I've told you this before, but Mrs. Farmer was the very best teacher I ever had.  And I had some great ones … Sixth grade was a turning point in my life. I'm convinced God placed her in my path and I'm forever grateful for that Angel being there to lift me when I needed it. She was the perfect combination of love, discipline, knowledge, humor when appropriate and no-nonsense when it was time to buckle down. Her personal investment and interest in me seemed (and I'm sure was) genuine... I am forever grateful and appreciative for the tremendous and life-long impact Mrs. Farmer had on me… She truly earned her wings well before entering Heaven. 

Today's teachers are no longer allowed to relegate students to hallways for long periods of time. The challenge for each of us, however, is to identify whether we may have mentally or emotionally exiled someone. Students need to feel that we believe they have something to offer, that our classroom communities are enriched by their contributions, and that we care enough to persist with them when they seem difficult.  I'm a teacher too.  If you teach, join me this week in honoring a teacher who made a difference — by doing a personal classroom audit for that "out of sight, out of mind" student on whom we may have given up hope without fully realizing it.  Then pull the exile back into the circle.

Concerning the Incident en Route to the Scottish Highlands

It's axiomatic: often the journey we get is not the one we planned. As many friends and family know, Dan, Claire, and I experienced a recent detour of our own,  on a highway in the Scottish Highlands.  Some of you have asked, "When are you going to write the story?" I've been reluctant.  By now,  I could have dashed off a tidy, inspirational post about blessings and mercies we experienced at each juncture of our odyssey, and there were certainly many.  But I am still unsettled. As the American spinal surgeon who saw me at the first possible opportunity after I arrived back in the states said, "I don't know you, Mrs. Summers, but you have a trauma face." I was taken aback, but it was almost a relief for him to say it, and for me to acknowledge that I did feel damaged, in a way. My "trauma face" gets better each day, but I've felt the need for events to marinate before fully laying claim to those final lessons. That's for another time.  This post is for those who wanted to know what actually happened.

We departed Friday from Little Rock, excited to be in the cheap seats, headed for a two-week excursion to the UK and Normandy. We landed in Dublin, made a short hop to Edinburgh, and arrived at breakfast to check into our hotel and begin touring.  As a history teacher, two particular areas of interest to me are The Great War and the Protestant Reformation.  I had promised to live tweet the best photos for my sweet students.  We were thrilled.

Our first day was spent on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, one of the historically great intellectual centers of Europe. We toured Edinburgh Castle with its deep history, then walked across the courtyard for a reverential visit to the Great War Memorial— heavy with the memory of Scots from all regiments lost between 1914-1918—painstakingly recorded on plaques, in handwritten, leather bound rosters, in stained glass, on carved inscriptions on stone walls.  I marveled at the attention the architect had employed to design the complicated space with balance and dignity.

As we enjoyed the views from the castle battlements, I imagined the Bronze Age warriors who had originally fortified that majestic high ground so very long ago, realizing that they were profoundly different than the more recent 16th century House of Stuart faces more familiar to Americans from portraits in history books and from movies. Around us, guards wore kilts, and dignitaries — women in suits and hats and men in kilts — participated in an event on the castle grounds.  The view was stunning, but Edinburgh Castle had been sited for defense rather than for its vista. It was more stronghold than palace.

We ate obligatory fish and chips at Deacon Brodie's Tavern, toured a museum of Scottish authors, where Claire and I agreed Robert Burns was a fine specimen of Scottish manhood, and toured the High Kirk of St. Giles, the heart of the Scottish Reformation, from which John Knox waged his passionate campaign for Reformed doctrine for Scotland, resulting in the establishment of Presbyterianism as her state church.  We viewed the Chapel of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, Scotland's most exalted order of chivalry.  I could have spent the day sitting in St. Giles, reading every word and studying every symbol, but indulging my narrow interest in the Reformation would have been tedious for Dan and Claire when there was so much more to see, so we moved on.

Back at the hotel, exhausted from an all-night flight and anticipating an early morning call to pick up our rental car at the train station the next morning, we fell into bed and awoke the following morning, refreshed and anticipating for a day trip to Glencoe and Ft. William in the Highlands.

After a short taxi ride to the train station, we picked up an immaculate, never-before-rented black Mercedes, a last-minute upgrade. Dan decided an automatic was a good idea since he was driving in the UK for the first time, and the Mercedes was available. Claire was extremely concerned that she not spill her coffee in it. Dan's opposite-side driving skills were admirable, and since we come from Conway, the roundabout capital of Arkansas, the Scottish roundabouts were easy. As we left the urban highway for the narrow, winding road to the Highlands, the Scottish countryside opened before us.

The landscape was primeval.  The mist hung in the lush valleys, and stately evergreens towered beside the roadway.  Stunning.  We passed charming villages with stone walls and thatched cottages with blooming flowers.  The day was filled with promise — until we rounded a blind curve where a cyclist climbed slowly uphill toward us in the narrow right-hand lane.  A silver Volvo rounded the curve behind him, slowing to avoid the cyclist, and the red car who followed closely behind the Volvo rounded the corner but could not stop, rear-ending and propelling him across the center line and into our car, striking us head-on on the driver's side.  Airbags deployed all around, smoke filled the cabin, and Dan could not see to steer.  We left the roadway and ran headlong off-road into a tree on the passenger side of the car, where I was seated. A Jeep coming down the hill behind us crashed into the other wreckage.  The cyclist vanished like a vapor into the peacefulness of the countryside.

We sat in silence, thankful to be alive, yet trying to comprehend our situation. Cars stopped, doors slammed, people milled about, talking to one another, talking on phones. Thanks to the solid construction of the Mercedes, none of us lost consciousness; we were thankful to be able to ask, "Are you OK?" Claire, who had been almost asleep, knew she had hurt her ankle, but seemed otherwise all right.  Dan seemed to be intact. I had a deep, dull pain low in my spine, and I knew something was very wrong. I wiggled everything, and all my parts responded, but I knew I could not get out of the car. Another traveler appeared at my door.  "I'm a doctor. Are you injured?"  I told him it was my back.  "Can you move?" He assessed me for a minute and said they would probably send a helicopter for me.  He continued his triage.

In a few minutes two police officers in yellow slickers appeared, then an ambulance.  They cut the airbags away with a knife.  An EMT with dark, close-cropped hair offered me morphine and was surprised when I declined, a noble gesture I later regretted when I was given only ibuprofen instead. Removing me from the car was awkward, but they carefully stabilized me on a backboard with a collar and some kind of giant bubble wrap snugged firmly around me for what was to be a 90 minute drive to a hospital in the town of Larbert.  As they loaded us in the ambulance, the EMT said, "I'm going to give you a mask with some gas, and you can breathe deeply if you want it. The gas is what they use when you have your babies." I said, "We don't have gas for babies in the states; we have it at the dentist."  He shook his head, incredulous.  I dragged deeply on the nitrous and drifted into blissful suspended animation, vaguely aware of the sympathetic EMT narrating the drive for Dan and Claire.

When we arrived an hour and a half later at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, I was frustrated and annoyed when they disconnected the gas and I came back to reality.  They did my intake at the "A & E"  (Accident and Emergency.)  I endured the first of many "log rolls," the preferred method for making transfers from surface to surface for patients with spinal injuries, when they moved me to do a CT scan.  It required six people, three on either side of me.  I came to appreciate the expertise of those with a steady hand and a firm grasp; nevertheless, it terrified me every time I was painfully heaved like a giant passive stick of wood.  I was moved to a ward with a number of other patients, where Scottish nurses spoke softly to me and explained what was happening. I took the first of countless pills lying flat of my back, drinking tepid water from a bendy straw. I prayed not to choke. That first night in the ward, a patient with dementia cried out a thousand times in the night, "I've got to go to the toilet.  Help me! I need to go to the toilet."  I was on morphine by now, and even in my pharmacological stupor, I realized that she was probably not in her right mind.  Or was she?  Why was no one helping her?  It was an endless night.

When you have a spinal injury, the ceiling is the only thing you can see, at least at first.  Funny what one remembers.  I've always felt stained drop-in ceiling panels reflect something fundamental about the attention to detail of a business establishment.  No doubt that sounds up-tight, elitist, and very American.  In the midst of our calamity, however,  I noted that the ceilings at the Forth Valley Hospital in Larbert were pristine — they seemed the cleanest, whitest I had ever seen, and this was a bizarre comfort to me.

Internet access was uneven, and the family decided that Facebook was our best method of communicating.  The next afternoon, Harding professor Mike Wood saw a post about our accident. A blessing:  Dr. Wood was ten minutes from the Forth Valley Hospital, staying at a guesthouse with a group of Harding College of Education students who were student teaching in Scotland. Mike came to the hospital and picked Claire up, arranged her lodging for a night, and took care of her.  Such a comfort to me to hear a voice from home and to know we could trust him with Claire, who was sore and had a sprained ankle.

The next day, they told us I had an unstable L2 injury that would require surgery.  They announced with pride and confidence that they were waiting for an ambulance to transport me to Glasgow, where I would be admitted to the Queen Elizabeth National Spinal Injuries Unit of Southern General Hospital, NHS Scotland's spinal injuries treatment center. Dan took the train back to Edinburgh to get our things from the hotel and move to Glasgow to be with me, and Dr. Wood put Claire on a train for Glasgow. I stared at the perfect ceiling and waited to be log-rolled onto a backboard and into yet another ambulance.  I finally arrived at Edenhall Ward in Glasgow about eleven o'clock that night.

A ginger-haired nurse with an intoxicating voice and an air of complete and serene competence gently explained that they had been waiting for me, that I was in good hands, and they were a team of specialists who knew how to help me. I was with Scotland's best unit to treat my kind of injury. They log-rolled me from the gurney onto a bed designed for patients with spinal injuries, infinitely more comfortable than my previous one, and took care of preparing me for surgery.  I had felt I was free falling, and somehow, when I arrived at Edenhall Ward, I felt someone had caught me at last.

On the day when I found myself flat of my back — literally — thousands of miles from home, alive but broken on the side of a highway at the mercy of the kindness, expertise, and professionalism of strangers, I was challenged to follow some advice I had dispensed all year with my students at our Christian school. As we had prayed for the needs of CCS families, I had frequently reminded them that in our hardest time, whatever it is, we should also remember to ask God to teach us the lessons He would have us to learn from that circumstance. And I did ask for the lessons.

Yet if fear is evidence of doubt, then I doubted, because I was afraid. I recalled the man's "I believe; help my unbelief!" encounter with Christ as I prayed for strength, for relief, for healing from the One by whose authority I was created, for the skill and professionalism of the surgeons, for Dan and Claire, for my daughter Emma, who was traveling so far away in Greece, for my parents and Dan's parents, whom I knew were undone with worry about us.  The nurse gave me pain meds, I stared at the ceiling above my bed in Edenhall Ward, noticing it was not stained, and drifted off to sleep.

"Saving Mr. Banks" and the Invisible Backpack

Watching the bittersweet "Saving Mr. Banks" today,  I once again considered Faulkner's great truth: The past is never dead. It's not even past.

The film contrasts writer P. L. Travers' memories of life with her alcoholic father, whom she idolized, with scenes revealing her controlling inflexibility when dealing with Walt Disney. Her father's relentless self-destruction brought her mother to suicidal despair — until an aunt arrived, with umbrella and carpetbag, to help set things right for her impoverished family. The aunt, however, could not perform a miracle.  Travers' father died in his bed from a combination of alcoholism and illness, his memory an enduring scar on her psyche.

Back in Beverly Hills, a frustrated Disney, baffled at her insulting irrationality while negotiating the rights to Mary Poppins, gradually comes to understand that, in Mary Poppins, Travers preserves the wounded story of her childhood, re-envisioned with a happier ending. The prospect of her pain on display as a technicolor Disney parade set to music is intolerable.  Outwardly she is a grouchy, controlling, misanthrope. Inside, Travers is the powerless child of an alcoholic.          

At a funeral earlier this week, I observed as revelations from another long-past childhood suddenly illuminated an individual's difficult behavior. The new perspective demanded grace where before there had been judgment. Sometimes when logic fails, history makes all clear.

My written philosophy of education addresses the "invisible backpack" each child carries to school, and how, for some, it is filled with love and support — while for others it is packed at home with a dark and heavy load. We each carry our backpack with us as long as we live. It's a truth I have learned with my head, but I have to remind my heart again and again.

In the end, "Saving Mr. Banks" accomplishes what the very best storytelling does: it reminds us of something essential about being human. The past is never dead. It's not even past. Every interaction contains more of mystery than certainty; a fact that merits a gracious spirit of humility from each of us.

Welcome, Holy Child

On a recent Sunday afternoon, from my vantage on Sue's sofa in her joyously festooned den, I reveled in the comforting rise and fall of familiar women's voices. I admired golfing Santas frozen in mid-swing on her mantel. I squinted as I nursed my punch, recalling how I shed my glasses as a nearsighted girl to enhance the holiday haze of our tree as the console stereo in our rarely-used living room played "Many Moods of Christmas," some 40 years ago.

Sue's living room does not fall into the "rarely used" category. Today, it was filled with grandmothers, mothers and daughters, some balancing babies in their laps, assembled ritually in Sunday clothes to give Mandy a proper sendoff on the grand adventure of motherhood. The centerpiece was graced with poinsettias, snowmen and baby shoes. Guests arrived with all manner of lovingly-wrapped offerings to celebrate the new child and adorn his surroundings. Christmas and babies: my favorite things in one afternoon. Lovely. What a welcome for this boy!

I considered the things Mandy will soon know. I was happy for her to join the throng of women since Eve who understand what it is like to joyfully participate in the act of creation and to love someone so completely -- then to carry inside the bittersweet understanding that she cannot protect her child perfectly. I thought how this child will teach Mandy selflessness, joy, longsuffering, humility, sacrifice, and love. I considered how her world will revolve around him, and I acknowledged, just for a moment, that he will have the power to break her heart in ways she could never foresee.

Driving home, I pushed a CD player button and listened to a selection from my current holiday collection. No "Many Moods of Christmas" this time, but the random choice suited my mood and the day. It was Amy Grant, singing a welcome for another boy:

Welcome to Our World   by Chris Rice

Tears are falling, hearts are breaking

How we need to hear from God.

You've been promised; we've been waiting --

Welcome, holy child.

Hope that you don't mind our manger;

How I wish we would have known!

But, long-awaited holy stranger,

Make yourself at home.

Bring your peace into our violence;

Bid our hungry souls be filled.

Word, now breaking Heaven's silence

Welcome to our world.

Fragile fingers sent to heal us,

Tender brow prepared for thorns,

Tiny heart whose blood will save us

Unto us is born.

So, wrap our injured flesh around you;

Breathe our air, and walk our sod.

Rob our sin, and make us holy

Perfect son of God.

Welcome to our world.

My husband Dan is fond of saying that parents will always love their children more than children can possibly love them back, because a child can't comprehend the secret ingredient in love -- sacrifice: the all-encompassing anticipation, the planning, the prayers said before there is a hint of swelling in Mom's belly, the anxiety, the constant preoccupation with ordering the world to best accommodate the comfort, safety, and best interests of the child. Undoubtedly, God refers to Himself as our Father rather than merely our Creator because it’s the closest way for our earthbound brains to wrap around His sacrifice and grief. He loved us even before creation, and He watched, brokenhearted, as we chose paths that took us away from Him.

As Creator, Jesus loved each of us completely. As Father, His heart was broken to watch us lose ourselves in Satan's lies. As Redeemer, He was willing to be human and hurting -- the eternal squeezed into the finite, God with a dirty diaper or an empty tummy, the omnipotent one submissive even with the cross before Him -- to draw us near to Him again.

So tonight, with my own family asleep and our holiday lights silently glowing, I rejoice with Mandy at the coming of her precious son Jacob, and I quietly celebrate that other child whose birth the world remembers during this season: the One who taught us selflessness, joy, longsuffering, humility, sacrifice, and love. I recall how my sin breaks His heart, and I resolve to keep the lessons of His life and sacrifice ever present with me. Welcome, Holy Child.

By way of disclosure, this essay was originally published in Christian Woman magazine several years back, the year the intrepid Jake Tatom was born.  

A Tale of Two Emmas, and of Hurricane Sandy

The hardest things in life reveal who we are and what is really important.  No great revelation there.  In Sandy's aftermath, we are besieged with heart rending stories of people doing what some people do under stress -- trading our daily pettiness for some truly meaningful selflessness.  No doubt some of these people look at themselves every day with some level of disgust, thinking they should be better, or more noble, or more patient, as we all do. Caught in a sticky web of circumstance, however, some people find a reservoir of strength unapparent in their daily lives.  Sometimes a reporter happens by and catches it and millions of people get to participate in that moment.

One such story is this week's tale of the evacuation of NYU Langone Medical Center.  The hospital basement generators failed during the storm, and administrators made the difficult decision to evacuate the entire hospital population, including those most vulnerable -- premature babies, swaddled and wearing little striped caps, with all the trappings of the NICU--ventilators and monitors and feeding tubes. The image of one fragile preemie, Emma Sophia, being carried down 15 fights of stairs in the arms of a nurse who ventilated her with a bag as she descended, caught in my throat.

Seventeen years ago that very night at another hospital far away, our family had a storm of our own.  We delivered our own preemie -- another Emma, in fact, who came into the world unexpectedly two and a half months early with a crowd of anxious people standing in the wings cheering her on. At 2 pounds, 13 ounces, she surely needed some cheering. And praying. And some complicated medical support and expertise, offered by kind and intent professionals wearing scrubs who ministered both to her and to us.

Premature birth is traumatic, and it has a long recovery period both for the infant and the parents.  We have expectations of how things will be, and when they turn out much differently, it changes us.  Emma Sophia's mother was already emotionally impaired by the premature birth; to hear that her tiny child was being moved during the storm of the century without her there to oversee the process -- well, I could not imagine her despair.  My mother's heart broke as she related her story on CNN.

Natural disasters reveal what a thin veneer civilization really is. The material trappings of safety and security are so easily damaged and torn, and the choices and actions of a single person become proportionately more significant. So what is the takeaway from my retelling of the story of Sandy and the two Emmas? Not much wisdom here, except to say that perhaps it's good for humankind to be reminded not to build our lives around expectations of comfort and convenience.

Garrison Keillor tells a story about how students at Lake Wobegon Elementary were assigned a "storm home," in the event a blizzard occurred and students were unable to get back to their parents.  A safe harbor, as it were. He related how as a child he had taken great comfort in imagining his "storm family" and how kind they would be to him. It's good to be reminded that on any given day, our actions could mean everything to someone else, when our stuff can be wiped out by fire and rain.

Heroism as a word is virtually meaningless from overuse in modern society. Give me kindness over heroism any day. I recall so very clearly moments in which our own emotional tempest of our Emma's premature birth was placed in stark contrast to the kindness of those who just wanted to make something easier for us. I will never forget those people.  Let's remember that when it comes down to it, looking not just to our own interests -- but to the interests of others -- transforms the broken world we live in at its most broken moments.