Essay from the Basement During a Storm - Original date May 25, 2011

The sirens are blowing outside. I've gone to the basement of my workplace, St. Mary's Episcopal Church. It's a 153- year-old brick building in downtown Kansas City. We are having a wild day of storms here. One is directly overhead right now. For the last half hour the siren has wailed out its warning. We are all hypersensitive to the weather, with the deadly tornado earlier this week in Joplin.

Yesterday the weather experts warned that Kansas City could experience tornadoes today, developing from a eastward moving weather system that caused a deadly storm yesterday in Oklahoma. I watched today's weather develop from my second floor office window with a view to the south. The roof outside my office gives me a panoramic view of the city east and south. Minute-to-minute, block-by- block commentary from the new television in my office accompanied my real-world observations.

Last night I had spent some time considering where to go for shelter, should the weather turn bad during the workday. The church building has a basement. Most of it is barely below grade with lots of windows. All of it has thousands of pounds of bricks overhead.

The Joplin tornado was very unusual for many reasons and a lot has been written about it already. After reading those articles I know details about tornadoes, their genesis, structure and movement that I never knew before. I am no stranger to them. I've lived in a tornado-prone region for most of my life. My great grandfather, Joel Campbell Lyon, died a century ago when a tornado struck the log cabin where he lived in southern Indiana. I grew up in Hickman Mills, where a large and powerful tornado struck in May 1957. Although my family didn't move there until 1959 the tornado was a profound part of the culture of that neighborhood. When one of us meets someone else who grew up near there the first question asked is whether or not you witnessed the tornado.

When we moved to Kansas City from Des Moines, I didn't know what a tornado was. I became familiar with the routine of summer storms during my school years. A certain combination of heat and humidity, a hint from weather forecasters early in the day and the darkening sky in the afternoon or early evening prompted my mother to turn on the radio. The TV was already on, with local weather interrupting the program for brief updates. But the radio was battery operated and would keep us informed if the electric power went out. The wind grew stronger. Moms watched from the windows. Dads and some kids stood in their yards looking toward the southwest. When the rain and hail began the men stepped inside their opened garage doors and sent the kids inside. The open garages would provide ready access to the basement for neighbors running next door or across the street for shelter. Our houses were built frugally at the end of World War II and only a few of them had basements - ours didn't. When the sirens blew we headed across the street to the neighbors' basement. My mother would shout at us to put on our shoes, grab the radio and she and my father would push us out the front door and pull it shut behind them. The water table under the city of Joplin is very high. One of the reasons so many people died in the May 22 tornado is that very few homes there have shelter below ground.

I am thankful that all of our family's sojourns in the neighbors' basement ended with an all clear. The closest we came to danger was the tornado that struck Overland Park, Kansas in 1967. I heard my sister say "mom, it's a tornado" as she looked through the back door of our house. I ran out the front door and across the street without looking back. I think of friends and colleagues in the Joplin area whose lives have been changed in ways that I cannot imagine.

Today, I thought about those hasty trips to the basement as I made my way downstairs. My shoes were firmly on my feet although peep toes and kitten heels were probably not what my mother had in mind when she warned us to prepare for a possible walk over broken glass and debris. I realized that things had changed walking down two flights of stairs carrying a cell phone, laptop computer and the cordless handset of the church landline phone. As I sat on the basement floor, I exchanged a text message with my husband. My calls to him wouldn't go through - too many people trying to call. I posted a Facebook status along with a picture of the storm taken from the roof and retrieved a steady stream of comments from friends checking on each other. For all of our ability to communicate, we can't stop the wind blowing and the rain falling. Indeed, our heedlessness of the damage we cause to the enviornment likely has increased the violence of severe weather.

I see sunlight out the window. Time to gather the hardware and head upstairs. This storm is headed north and east. Others may be coming our way later today.

"A Year Goes by Like Nothing"

The title of this post is the tag line of a comic book series entitled "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers." I have no idea whether it is still in print. Three hippie roomates and a cat shared a run down house that would make Martha Stewart run screaming into the night. It was published only once a year, hence the phrase a year goes by like nothing.

I use that phrase with this posting because it has been a year since I posted anything on this blog; a really busy year. The demands of my work and family life have consumed nearly all of my creative energy. I like my work and family, but throughout the past year, I've frequently had ideas that I thought would be nice to write about, but little energy for the writing.

I have just reached the five year anniversary with my job. My work requires creativity, executive vision, managerial diligence and good secretarial skills. In addition to everything else, I am called upon to shovel snow, push a broom and water the garden on a regular basis. I like my work. In five years I've taken what was essentially a smoldering crater and turned it into a happy, productive and growing organization that may one day be financially self-sustaining.

During the last year my organization has done nearly $500,000 worth of renovation work. The day to day grind of having construction under foot, scheduling around it and dealing with the surprises it uncovers has been a real challenge, but it has been worthwhile. One of the things it has taught me is that the milestones in an organization like this one are most clearly visible when you look back on them. Miracles come about incrementally. When you're looking at the individual increments you have no idea that it's going to be something amazing once all of the increments have been realized.

I'm more patient than I was a year ago. I'm a lot more patient than I was five years ago.

Catching Up

I realize it's been a while since I've posted anything, but I didn't realize it had been since July. Usually summer is a slow time for me at work. This year it was anything but slow. Building renovations that didn't go as planned (what do you expect with a 120-year-old building) and special events going on made it impossible for me even to take all four weeks of my allotted vacation. I intended to take the last week of it between Christmas and New Year's Day, but a Christmas Eve blizzard put an end to that hope. We had more than two weeks of constant below freezing temperatures and several inches of snow on the ground (and the roof, which is what really kept me awake at night) for the entire time. It's melting now.

I did take a trip to Iowa at the end of August. It rained, which kept me off the tennis court, but allowed for some unplanned sightseeing at places I had never visited before or hadn't seen in a long time. A few pictures accompany this posting.

Last fall was equally crazy with fund raising, continuing work on the building and special events. I haven't had much of a break for more than a year and it's starting to wear on me - so much so that the day off scheduled for Monday - Martin Luther King Day has taken on an air of anticipation usually reserved for something with a bit more "once in a lifetime" character. Oh well - it's a worthy occasion to celebrate and I'll take my leisure when I can get it.

Moon Landing Anniversary

The reminiscences about the July 1969 moon landing started a couple of weeks ago. It got me thinking about that summer and my experience of those events. I was exactly a month shy of my 15th birthday on the day of the moon landing. There's a picture of me from that summer that I remember. It's a polaroid taken by my aunt in the back yard of her house. It's one of a tiny handful of pictures of me that I actually liked at the time it was taken. I thought it made me look good. I still do, but my camera-shyness pervades the frame. She's looking for the picture and if it's found, I'll post it.

We took it for a specific purpose. I was visiting my cousin in the town of Winterset, Iowa, to which I introduced you in a previous post. There was a film crew in town that summer making a movie called "Cold Turkey." It didn't get released until 1971, but they shot it that summer. I was thinking about showing up at a casting call for extras. I can't remember why I decided not to do it, but one of the requirements was a photo.

I asked my mom what she recalled about watching the moon landing, because I remember being in Winterset watching the television in the living room of my cousin's home. Well, what I really remember is the television being on, all of us being in the living room, but with the kids less eagerly engaged than our elders thought we ought to be. I remember my mom being mad at us for not paying enough attention to the telecast of the momentous events. Of course, for the kids, it was another space mission. We had already been watching them take off for eight years.

She remembers it differently. She thought we had watched coverage of the Apollo 11 mission on TV in Winterset, but that we had left to drive home to Kansas City on the afternoon of July 20. She recalls getting home just in time to see the landing on TV.

I've wondered what the counterpart to the moon landing is for my nieces and nephew whose ages range between 18 and 25. Maybe it's the Internet, but I think I'm looking for an event that can be marked at a particular point in time. Maybe they know.

My recall of that summer is of specific incidents and moments in time. I don't really remember the order in which things happened. Most of the memories have something to do with watching the movie get made. Many of the small towns in Iowa have an event they call "Crazy Days." There is often a parade, an ice cream social and sidewalk sales by the downtown merchants. Winterset still does it, I think.

The 1969 Crazy Days in Winterset had a parade with a costume contest. My cousin and I entered with an homage to the film. "Cold Turkey" is about a town whose entire population quits smoking at the same time. Our costumes were a cigarette and a match. I was the match. My hair was redder them and I teased and sprayed it into a point to look like the flame on a match. Then I constructed a tube made from posterboard and painted it tan. I climbed inside the tube in my swimsuit and I was dressed. My cousin used a posterboard to create a cigarette with a brown filter closest to her head and a red edge at the bottom to make it look like it was burning. She had to cut an eyehole in the posterboard to see out. She cut handholds in the sides of her costume. I'm not sure how I kept mine in place.

We didn't practice walking in the costumes. When we arrived at the staging area for the parade, we put them on and got in line and the march itself turned out to be a test of endurance. The bottom edges of the posterboard tubes raked the backs of my ankles as we walked. For some reason we had decided we would have to walk barefooted. It was really hot that day and our feet were miserable on the pavement. The costumes forced us to take tiny, quick steps instead of regular strides. My cousin nearly broke her neck trotting to keep up and with limited visibility.

The parade route took us around the square of Winterset - a leisurely walk of maybe 10 minutes duration under ordinary circumstances. When it was all over, our feet were fried and I had a noticeable sunburn on my face and shoulders. The scars from the scrapes on the backs of my legs took more than a year afterward to go away. A week later we were notifed that we had won second prize in the costume contest. I remember reading it in the local newspaper. The prize was money - maybe $5 for each of us.

The town of Winterset is deeply woven into my memories of summer. I remember a lot about how I felt at the time of those visits. It's interesting to me that a town where I spent, at the most, a few weeks out of every year is so evocative of time and place - like a song or a scent. Those summers created a memory that holds together 40 or more years later. I have visited Winterset the last two summers for vacation and it has changed remarkably little in that time. I spend a lot of time on those visits walking and bicycling around the town. The familiarity I used to have with it comes back after a little while, but it still looks different at least partly because my cousin and sister aren't there with me.

Midsummer

I don't remember liking summer all that much in the past. Maybe I liked it when I was a little kid, but I have very few clear memories of it. I'm someone who has never had much tolerance for sun exposure and those fun outdoor activities involving the water involved serious sunburn for me. I grew up at a time when there was no such thing as sunscreen. When I was in my teens I remember summer as a time of feeling stressed about looking fat in a swimsuit and my mom fussing at me not to stay out in the sun too long.

But one happy memory of summer has to do with the time I spent in two small towns in Iowa called Winterset and Indianola. I had family living there including a cousin close to my age. My sister and I would spend weeks at a time in one or the other of those two towns every summer. We had the run of the town on bicycles. It was a fascinating change for me to go from the suburbs of a good size city - Kansas City, to a town of fewer than 5,000 residents.

I've gone back to Winterset for vacation the last three years. My present job tends to be stressful and omnipresent and being able to go away on vacation has become very important to me. The town hasn't changed too much in appearance since I spent my summers there. It has a few more houses and maybe a few more people and some businesses whose products and services didn't even exist when I was a kid, but really, it's about the same.

If you ever read The Bridges of Madison County, Winterset is the town where that story takes place. It's also the birthplace of John Wayne. The small victorian cottage where he was born has been restored and it's a national historic site. The town has some beautifully preserved/ restored victorian residential architecture, a nice swimming pool and a downtown square that is mostly occupied. There are still a couple of stores there that were in business when I was a kid. The city government and business community have been smart about promoting the town as a tourist spot for readers of the novel and John Wayne fans.

Walking or cycling around Winterset or being at my aunt and uncle's home in Indianola are some of the most evocative experiences of my adult life. When I'm there I remember with crystal clarity what I felt like the summer of my eighteenth birthday - just out of high school, waiting for life to start happening. I remember the music that played on the radio when my cousin and sister and I sat out on the deck late at night talking and watching cars go by on the highway. We waited every night for my cousin's boyfriend to ride his motorcycle out highway 92 past her house listening to Alice Cooper sing "School's Out" and Derek and the Dominoes playing "Layla." I was not a carefree child or adolescent, so I won't tell you that those summers were idyllic, but the memory of them stays with me.

I made my reservation yesterday for a week-long stay in Winterset later this summer. I'll post some pictures and write more about it when I get there.

Many Hats

I'm working on several different projects right now, most connected with the historic church building which is the home of my congregation. It's on the National Register of Historic Places and was finished in 1888. The architect who designed it only designed two public buildings that are still standing west of the Mississippi River, so it's a distinctive and special building.

Today we had a photo shoot for a guidebook to be distributed to visitors to the building. A crew of eight people with lights, scaffolding and a generator were in the building from 6:30 am to 6:30 pm taking pictures. They started yesterday and will continue shooting for another two days. The pictures are spectacular. As soon as I receive the disk, I'll post some here.

We also had a crew working on the brick facade of the building and we have another group rehearsing a play that opens the first weekend in June. All the time this has been going on, I've been working on a major grant application for more funds to restore the building and keep up with my job as a parish priest.

My niece graduated from high school this week and her graduation party is at my home this weekend. In addition to work "at work" there's a lot going on at home - putting plants in pots, sealing the deck and assembling some new outdoor furniture along with the usual homekeeping work of cleaning and cooking.

It's a busy and productive time, but I frequently have the feeling of venturing into territory where I don't really know what I'm doing with serious consequences for making a mistake. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I'm navigating an unfamiliar city and trying not to get lost. The real problem is not having good information or skill in a particular area and not knowing where to go to get it or time to really learn it. One head can only wear so many hats.

A Great Trip

The week after Easter I went to Canada. I belong to a Canadian interfaith group whose annual meeting was held this year in Stratford. It's a very picturesque city, easily walkable with nice things to look at including a beautiful river, swans and ducks and cool architecture. Unfortunately, I hadn't quite figured out my new camera while I was there, so I only got one picture.

The meeting featured authors Ronald Wright and Nino Ricci. Ron Wright is a Canadian who writes about the United States. Hearing Canadians' comments about the US was really interesting. A couple of highlights:

• Fundamentalist Christianity is not a political or social factor in Canada. They think it's really strange.


• The standard medical and insurance industry scare responses to discussion of a single-payer health care system, e.g. the horror of "socialized medicine" provokes bemusement and ridicule. The question commonly asked is why, after all of the other western industrialized nations have been reasonably successful with it can anyone in the US believe they're getting away with the weird scare tactics; and more importantly, why would anyone in the US put up with the current godawful health care mess we have here.


• And, they're really envious of Barak Obama. Their guy is George W. Bush with a better command of the English language.

After my third visit there, I continue to love our neighbor to the north. My impression is that its citizens have, in general, a stronger sense of and commitment to the common good than we do in the US. They also have, in general, a stronger orientation toward civility in social and business interactions. And, they have much better public transit. I flew into Toronto and took the train to Stratford - a very comfortable journey that got me to my destination on both segments of the round trip on time and without incident. In both the cities I visited, Stratford and Toronto, bus and streetcar service was frequent, comfortable and on-time.

After my meeting ended in Stratford on Saturday afternoon, I joined friends for a farewell dinner at an Indian restaurant there. It was the best Indian food I've ever tasted. Then they put me on the train for Toronto where I stayed for three days.

I visited three churches during my stay in Toronto: St. Mary Magdalene Anglican in the "little Italy" area of the city, Holy Trinity Anglican downtown next to Eaton Center and St. Andrews Preabyterian on King Street in the financial district. I got pictures of the latter two.

I also visited the Hockey Hall of Fame, which was great and the Textile Museum of Canada, a long-awaited destination and one of the most amazing museums I've ever seen. I walked all over downtown Toronto. The weather was great except for one day which featured 40 degree temperatures a driving rain and umbrella slaughtering wind-gusts.

Memorable meals at Raja in Stratford and Nota Bene in Toronto.