The Neighborly Arc

When the first storm hit, we were gathered in the central hallway of a school building, away from the windows, students lounging against the lockers, already engaged in their phones and computers and speculations and chatter, while the male teachers tried to sneak looks at the maelstrom outside and the secretaries turned into moms, barking at students who dared to try to go outside. The teacher who walked outside and back to his office received their scorn: "Go ahead, but look at the example you're setting for them." No, it was not time for going solo. There was strength, at least emotional strength, in numbers, though none of us took it all quite that seriously until the skies cleared and we saw the trees on campus, on cars, across roadways, effective barriers. Our eyes took it in; our mouths began offering perceptions and stories as our shared experience leaped quickly into legend.

As the second storm hit, I was alone. My wife had run to the basement of a house with no electricity. I did the dumbest of things, standing by the window watching the storm. It was a hollow feeling, facing the torrent alone, but then she had grown up around tornadoes and knew to get to safety; I harbored that irrational desire, having never seen a tornado, to see one.

Then the sky cleared and we went to the mall because I needed a suit. It was normal out there, until I went into Best Buy, looking for a car charger for my phone. There, people huddled at the entrance, staring at a television, looking at a timeline of the exact minute the next storm would hit, and where. The trip home was a race against time. We arrived at the exact moment the weather guy said it would hit, but only a medium rain fell, so we rushed inside.

After the third storm, everyone came outside into the early evening sun. We walked next door to talk to our neighbors about their beautiful trees that had fallen that morning. From both directions, people walked the streets to inspect the damage, carrying glasses of wine and stories--what trees had come down, whose chainsaws we could hear, which way you could get out of the neighborhood, the gas main leaking a couple of streets over. The little girl next door picked her grandmother's flowers that had been beaten down and handed them out. People met each other for the first time. Teenaged children roved in innocent, barefooted gangs like it was summer and they were headed to the community pool. Cars stopped to chat. Everyone had stories about the size the hail that had landed in their yards. It felt like an impromptu block party. Then the wind began to sway the trees again and we went into our dark homes.

On the first full day we had no power, I went to school, seething with rage that school was being held. I thought it an insensitive, uninformed decision made by people who had not had a break in power the whole time and who had no idea what was out there in the city and beyond. But it turned, and it turned largely because my blogmate Billy pushed the idea that we, as a school, needed to be out helping those in need. And everyone embraced the idea, turning the day into a pleasant frenzy of phone calls and contacts and logistics and false starts and red tape that left us at the end with a loose plan to take 600 students to places all over the city the next day, armed with work gloves and trash bags and faculty with chainsaws and woodchippers. And it felt good to be a part of that.

On the first evening we had no power, we had a party. It started at my house, where I had bought ice that morning, knowing it would become scarce, and started grilling onions and mushrooms and hot dogs from a warm refrigerator. But the call came from across the street where they had lettuce going bad that would make a salad and a grill they could start up and wine and a fire in the pit, and we gathered in their backyard around a table. Friends came from other places, dropping in on their way to their own powerless houses, or just joining in because it was Thursday night, when we always got together, and though our regular establishment was closed, we would gather here instead. There were more stories from a day of aftermath and stories of what tomorrow would bring.


On the second day all of the schools were closed but ours (and one other), I saw the tornado I had thought I wanted to see. Well, not exactly. I saw where it had been. I saw where the ceiling insulation and roof tiles that scattered throughout our neighborhood had come from. I saw where the crumpled metal from an interstate barrier that sits up where I park my car had come from. I saw Tiftonia, where a tornado had torn through, ripping roofs off buildings and tearing up convenience store. And I saw it with a group of boys and other teachers as we spread out on the grounds of a recreation center to pick up debris. Boys serious, but having fun, boys trying out the playground they had come to clean up, boys taking on the challenge of flipping a section of bleachers back on its right side, and, most of all, a group of boys walking with certainty back to a bus, knowing that, together, they had left a place looking far better than when they arrived.

At 6:19AM the next morning, what sounded like a gunshot fired through my dreams, and suddenly the lights were on over my head. The moment I had waited for every minute for 48 hours came to fruition, and I eased back into sleep. At 8:30, I was walking my dog across the street when I saw two of my neighbors walking to their car.

What time did you get it? I yelled, as we walked towards each other.
Get what? they yelled back.
Your power.
Are you kidding? they yelled.
No. Mine came on about two hours ago.

You could see their shoulders sink. You could see the neighborliness slip away, a sudden rift between the have and the have-nots. It was back to who's got a new car or whose lawn looks better or who is having a party that whom wasn't invited to. I found myself fumbling, trying to explain how it didn't really do me much good, how I was sure theirs would come on soon, how I would hook up my modem so they could steal my wifi from across the street (an empty promise, as it turned out, since cable service is still out).

By the afternoon, another neighbor drove by as I was cutting my grass. "I am SOOOOO JEALOUSSS!" she yelled as she kept going down the street.

And today, things are normal. On my side of the street. Still no power across the way. Everyone talks of getting back to normal, but I wonder--normal is often closed doors and separate lives and waves from a car instead of conversation and isn't that too bad instead of let's go do something about it. They say there is a silver lining in every cloud. This time, in these clouds, it was just people. People together, people helping. It was good.

Flaky White Stuff

White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes (mp3)
Life is White - Big Star (mp3)

Sunday, my family spent more than $200 on clothing items, another $50 at Ace Hardware, and another $100 in groceries in spite of the fact that we’d been grocery shopping less than a week prior. My boss called me three different times. This is not usual on a Sunday.

Yesterday, My aunt and uncle rearranged their vacation and chose to remain with us longer than originally planned. Our friend who had to attend a relative’s funeral in Arizona is still out in Arizona. Almost a dozen people sent me pictures on my cell phone before noon, when most weeks I’m lucky to get two or three pics, and usually from just one or two specific people. Pics from school. Pics from Wal-Mart. Pics from driveways and living rooms.

My very selective Facebook friends (ha) posted at least a few hundred pictures yesterday. My friends don’t generally post many pictures.

Most unusually, I met four of my neighbors for the first time. We spent several hours sharing space with more than a dozen other children, teenagers and adults we hardly knew and hardly ever see.

All because it snowed.

Granted, Chattanooga didn’t just get a flurry. Most of the Southeast was slammed with a winter storm that woke us up Monday morning to more snow than we’ve seen in almost 20 years, since the freakish storm of March 1993. Perhaps the most astonishing part about this snow is how dead-on accurate the weather forecasts were. They’ve been spot-on all year regarding snow, actually.

Maybe you’re a person who has faith in weather forecasts. If you’re a person like that, you’re most definitely not from Chattanooga, because our particular geographical issues make us a damn tough place to predict weather. We know better. Weather forecasting might as well involve chicken blood or rolling dice.

Milk and bread jokes aside, what happened in our little neighborhood today, and what happened in neighborhoods all over the South, was something that just doesn’t happen much in our modern society. People actually hung out at length with their neighbors, and they did so outside and without the need for some party or BBQ or pre-determined Event. We shared sleds. We offered each other hot chocolate or other fun winter amenities. We took pictures of other families with their cameras and told stories while our children disappeared from view at moderate speeds.

One of my neighbors spent almost an hour shoveling the driveway of an elderly neighbor before ever even thinking of doing so for his own driveway. (In fact, I don’t know if he shoveled his own driveway at all today.) Two of us helped push the newspaper delivery dude down the road. Clearly the guy needed the money, because no other explanation fit his risking it with the piece of trash he drove.

Some rowdy teenage boys with awesome blade sleds, the kind of boys who tend to soar down a hill with reckless abandon and fail to think about small children or dogs who might get in their way, were nothing but polite and considerate. They offered their sleds to my daughters and several times shouted down as I was walking up to make sure the path was clear for them to be reckless and stupid.

It was the kind of neighborhood day people romanticize about, where everyone gets along, and no one talks about politics or broaches icky subjects like the NRA or traffic cameras. Everyone smiles at one another, because snow days are bigger than us in our little Dixieland and certainly bigger than our even littler neighborhood, and everyone around us has enough bread and milk and food, and we can all just smile and savor this rare occurrence together.

So we had that going for us. Which was nice.

Well Dang, Shoot Fire!

BB Gun - Roger Alan Wade (mp3)
Pistol Grip - The Blakes (mp3)

The wife and I aren't what you would call gun-huggin', Charlton Heston-lovin', Bible-thumpin' conservatives. We lean left. If politics were a football field, my ball is probably on the 35-yard-line of the Liberals.

When I was in high school, I started on the 20 of the Conservative side, but I've been plodding down the field in three yards and a cloud of dust for 20 years now. It's unlikely I'll ever make it into the Liberal Red Zone, if you will, and I'm positive I'll never actually score points for either team. If anything, I worry that I'll get penalized here and there for being offsides or a false start and end up creeping back towards midfield by the time I hit my 50s.

But when I see news stories like the one we watched this morning on Good Morning America (video here), I tend to wonder just how liberal someone has to be to fall on one side of this debate as compared to the other.

The story is about Joe Horn, a 61-year-old man from Houston who hit most every branch on the Ugly Tree on his way to earth. He has no previous record of combative behavior or violence that we know of. But the man sure talked tough to a 911 operator while he fidgeted and squirmed knowing two men had broken into his neighbor's house. And the longer he talked -- waiting for cops who apparently weren't coming anytime soon -- the more he compelled himself to go outside with his loaded shotgun and enforce justice. I honestly believe ol' Joe Horn meant every tough-talkin' word he said and simultaneously didn't really know he meant it. Like my college roommate who always told other obnoxious drunk guys that he wouldn't hesitate to kick their asses. He kinda meant it, but he didn't really intend to do it... unless they chose to cross that line he'd created in his own mind.

So this old guy shot and killed these two immigrant burglars. I think most of America -- let's just say 75% for argument's sake -- is mostly OK with this outcome. Burglars don't deserve to die, and the punishment didn't fit the crime, but as the saying so eloquently puts it, you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. And sometimes those fleas are 61 years old and carrying a loaded shotgun out their front door. My favorite part in the lead-in is where Diane Sawyer says the two burglars weren't armed. All they had were tire irons. And I'm like, Madame Sawyer, if two menacing black illegal immigrants headed your direction with tire irons, and you weren't standing inside an auto body shop but rather outside the house they just burgled, would you consider them armed and dangerous, or would you be expecting a hug and a pedicure?

I'm not one of those goombahs who believe Texas has the right idea in wanting every adult with a heartbeat to walk around armed and ready to pull a trigger. Further, I can't even envision a future scenario where I own a firearm that loads with anything but Nerf bullets or paintballs, so my sympathy for Joe Horn and his odd moment of vigilante justice isn't because I could be in his shoes, nor is it because I admire his state's aggressive self-defense laws. But. These two dudes broke into a house in broad daylight. What kind of world do we now live in where everyone cowers in a corner, takes no responsibility for their neighbors or their neighborhood, and just lets bad shit happen? That's the culture we've created, the rules we've apparently embraced.

My grandfather, a Baptist minister, would open his doors to transients, hobos, and Mormons. He set up places in his barn for people without shelter for the night, people who were passing through, places for them to sleep. Baptist preachers in the South weren't exactly raking in Jimmy Swaggart bling 60 years ago, so feeding others on top of a family of eight was nothing to sneeze at. "You never know when you might be entertaining angels," he was fond of saying.

My grandfather, although a preacher, wasn't doing anything most of his neighbors wouldn't have done. It wasn't being a preacher. It was being a decent human being in a different time, with different cultural expectations and rules. If you don't believe me, go watch that new Kit Kittridge movie! But if he caught one of those people trying to steal from him -- or, I suspect, from the neighbors -- I also suspect my grandfather would have shot them. Angels in disguise wouldn't steal or abuse their hospitality.

So now, we shut our doors. We don't know our neighbors. We donate to charities better than any other country, but we don't see if someone across the street needs help. Or better, we watch them squirm in their odd lives and talk about them at dinner with the other neighbors.

The Good Samaritan is a nice fairy tale and all, but the world's just too dangerous to open your home, your car, your illusion of safety. Better to write a check to Red Cross and help the poor bastards that way.  

"BB Gun" is from Roger Alan Wade's first album -- yes, he has two -- All Likkered Up. He performed this song many times at Bud's in Chattanooga. "Pistol Grip" is from the Blakes' first full-length album. Both are available on both iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.