Kirkepiscatoid

Yesterday I swung by a friend's house that got plastered in the tornado (well, what was left of it, anyway) after work, and had a little "happy hour", as best as you can call it that, and shot some pictures. I was incredibly impressed by this particular window. Notice how the blinds were literally sucked out the window when the tornado hit and bowed outward. It always amazes me what gets "sucked in" and what gets "blown out." This is the side that the tornado actually hit, and it sucked everything in the house into it. The back side of the house literally exploded. The other amazing thing was that a queen size mattress was sucked through a small window!

My friends and I had a good visit. It is interesting. Their house was pretty much totaled. Yet, other than the initial shock and the pain of the cleanup, they are more worried about others than themselves. They are of an age and income level that they are comfortable knowing the insurance company will write a check, it won't be what the house is worth, but it will be ok, they'll rebuild, and trust their own income generating potential. They are far more concerned about the young families that have been displaced, or the people in Novinger, MO, who came out from under a flood last year and now a tornado. They were far more concerned about their teenaged daughter who was home alone when it hit, the stress this has caused her.

But it is interesting how age and experience and a different income level makes a tragedy "doable" more quickly. The things we have lived through change us; if we let them, for the good. I know the husband in this family had many many bad experiences in his youth. He lived with various relatives as he was growing up. In some ways, he and his brother "reared themselves." Learning to love and give did not come easy for him. Things that some children receive in their growing up and families take for granted, were "learned experiences" for him, sometimes not even learned until well into adulthood.

Now he is finding himself as "the rock" in this family in the middle of this. That's probably why he and I have been friends for many years. I often was "the rock" in my family, too. Even though he and his wife are basically doing okay with all this, it still wears on everyone in his family. We were chatting off to the side and he looked at me and said, "You know, I'm doing ok, but I'm not sure how long my sense of humor will hold out. God, this is going to be such a hassle getting this place torn down and rebuilt."

I just looked at him and said, "You know, pal, you and me, our sense of humor somehow ALWAYS holds out. We don't know any way BUT for it to hold out. Trust it. It's gotten us through every shitty thing we ever went through. If we didn't have it, we'd implode and explode like this house."

I have figured out one important thing in life. The "real rocks" of this world are always people who never think they are good enough to be a rock.