The Flamingo Has Landed

I’m here at last. I arrived at the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance camp in Gautier, Mississippi about 4pm yesterday. I don’t have any pictures yet, mostly because I’ve been getting everything unpacked and set up. If I had any pictures to show you today it would be a picture of my co-manager pumping water out of the camp when I drove in yesterday afternoon. The water in our little low spot here in Gautier was almost up to the pod floors. This is about 3 or 4 inches because the pods are already set on top of 2X4 platforms.

For those not into disaster lingo, pods are the very special kind of tent that the PDA bought for all the camps. They’re made of corrugated plastic and have their pluses and minuses. One tiny minus is that they disintegrated after six months or so from exposure to the sun. But the manufacturer replaced those with a newer model that doesn’t fall apart and the new ones seem to be working out OK. The great benefit is that they can be heated in the winter and cooled in the summer—if you’re not too picky.

But what a difference I found this morning with the water pumped out and the sun shining! We’re on the edge of town and next to a pasture with cows grazing. And it really is nice outside right now. On the other side of the camp is a parking lot for FEMA trailers and there’s considerable traffic of trailers coming in and going out so it’s not totally wilderness. And about a block away is Interstate 10 so there’s more traffic noise than mooing.

The first thing I did this morning was run over a water pipe with my car. In my defense I was driving exactly where Mical, the co-manager told me to drive. And, no, that’s not a typo. Mical spells his name that way. He pronounces it Michael but his parents must have had a good imagination when it came to names. I’m not sure Mical really trusted me when I told him I could fix the broken pipe but he played along with me and got all the tools and supplies out for me then went off to mess with the water pump. I was really glad of the time a couple of years ago when I threw a fit with Beaven to show me how to work with PVC because, with his training, I knew exactly how to fix the pipe. And it hasn’t leaked yet so I must have done it right. PVC is about the most “female friendly” of household skills, mostly because the pipe is so light-weight that I never have any problem carrying it, cutting or holding it. It’s just the easiest thing in the world to work with. Except that now I have purple stains on my fingers from the PVC primer chemical. But, around here, purple fingers are almost as much a badge of honor as a purple finger after an election in Afghanistan.

However, I’m afraid that was the extent of showing off any skills for me today. I was handed a blackberry phone and I’m still a little afraid of it. It’s got e-mail inside it and all sorts of other mysterious stuff. The whole deal sounds very complicated but I figure I’ll eventually learn how to work it. How hard can it be to answer the phone?

The next thing will be to get me set up in the office on the computer. I need a password first and the previous manager changed hers then forgot it or something. So we’re going to have to talk to an actual real live IT person to get me up and running. But the phone number I call tells me my call is important to them and they’ll answer me when they get good and ready, etc. So I put that on the list of things to do tomorrow.

We’re not having a group until Friday, I think. So I’ll have a little time to learn these things.

I have a trailer about the size of the standard FEMA trailer. It fits me perfectly with not an inch to spare. But I don’t know how you could ever put more than one person inside one –especially to live for any amount of time. And I know that whole families of four or more have been living inside trailers the size of mine for over two years now. When I went to undress last night I had to step into the kitchen to take my jeans off. I’m not kidding. But it’s a coziness that suits me. It reminds me of Thoreau’s instructions to “Simplify.” I have room enough for a bed but nothing else in the bedroom. I have room enough in the kitchen to make coffee and eat cereal but not much else. I have a shower but Mical has already told me none of the managers use the shower in their trailer. The shower trailers outside in camp have more room and more hot water. There is a kitchen table to hold this computer and a small TV hooked up to cable. Life isn’t bad at all. I have exactly what I need.

It reminds me of the Children’s Story I told a couple of Sundays ago from Isaiah 65-“Before they call I will answer.” God had provided me with exactly what I needed before I even knew what I needed.

God is good-- All the time.

Pictures next week, I promise. OK, here's one of my plumbing job. I couldn't resist.

Lift, Slide

We’re back from two glorious weeks in Europe: London, Scotland, Florence and Rome. Except for having my pocket picked and spending about twice as much money as we expected, everything was as wonderful as we wanted it to be.

Technically, I can’t say for sure that my pocket was picked. I guess I could have just dropped my wallet and not noticed. And it really wasn't my pocket, it was my backpack. But this much I know for sure: I had my wallet out when I was buying a coke in a crowded MacDonald’s at the Pisa train station. I put it back in my backpack that was the last I saw of it.

It’s hard to believe that anyone is skilled enough to unzip my backpack and retrieve the wallet without me knowing it, especially when I could never find anything in it without taking it off my back, holding it down with one foot while unzipping it and rummaging through it up to both elbows. There were times I even had to stick my head inside to see what I was looking for. If anybody was able to quietly pick my wallet out of the chaos within then I have to be impressed at their talent.

The only consolation was that Beaven, in his best OCD fashion, had Xeroxed everything we had in our wallets before we left home. So all we had to do was make a few phone calls to report the cards as stolen. To his credit, he didn’t even gloat and do the whole end of the world scenario. And since I lost the cards about mid-way through the trip and we reported it so quickly, one credit card company had the replacement card waiting for me in the mail when I got home.

But you didn’t come here today to hear me whine about my stupidity. Europe was great. We kept moving constantly in order to cover so much territory is just two weeks. The thing an American gets blown away by in a visit to Europe is how old Europe is. You would be looking at some Renaissance artwork and suddenly realize that when the guy was painting this picture Columbus hadn’t even discovered our continent. Then we kept bumping into stuff that was built before Christ. The most astounding moment was standing in the middle of the vast St Peter’s Basilica. This building is so big and so grand that Michelangelo’s magnificent work, the Pieta, is tucked away in a corner almost like furniture at a rummage sale except that it sits behind bullet proof glass. I stood in awe looking up at an inscription carved in the dome of St Peters so high over us that the latin words were carved in characters seven feet tall so they could be read from below: “Tu es Petra”. I remembered the words of Christ to his disciple: “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.” And here I was standing inside the most magnificent of the churches built upon that rock.


I was totally respectful in St Peters after upsetting Elizabeth by quietly breaking rules in a couple of museums that didn’t allow pictures. I’m not sure what came over me. The places were so crowded with people that I think I was overcome by the possibility of how easy it would be to take pictures without anyone knowing it, especially if you turned your flash off. I felt pretty sure the rule had two main reasons; namely that the flash could harm the artwork and what a circus it would become if anyone could take as many pictures as they wanted. I remember a few years ago in the Louvre watching folks take each others’ pictures in front of the Mona Lisa. I really doubted people were looking at the painting as much as they just wanted their picture taken in front of it. It sort of disrespected the art. The only way to prevent this flurry of flashes is to outlaw photos of any sort. But the two I share with you today, I took very carefully without a flash and being extremely quiet about it. All you had to do was pretend you were looking at the your camera, thinking of something else besides what you were doing, like maybe your next gelato. Carefully turn the flash off, double check that it’s definitely off, triple check once more then hold the camera nonchalantly by your side and aim. All the while Elizabeth was hissing at me in shock, “Mother, what are you doing? Are you taking pictures? You can't do that, it's illegal. It's against the rules!! You are breaking the rules.”

In two week’s time we ate more pizza, pasta and desserts than we normally do in three months. We became intimate friends with the tube system in London and Rome. We learned to navigate Florence’s confusing streets. Veterans Day is a whole other thing when celebrated in a city like London who was bombed into smithereens during WWII. Everyone on the streets was wearing bright red and green poppies on their lapels. You could get one of the poppies anywhere with a small donation to the veterans causes. Elizabeth and I both bought one and wore them with pride. Heeding Rick Steves’ advice, we became temporary locals.

The oldness of Europe vividly intrudes in your life every time you’re presented with a set of stairs. And that’s often. While they usually have an escalator in the subways going fifty feet up to the next level there’s still plenty of steps when you’re only going up one flight of 10 feet or so. The Spanish Steps in Rome have even become a tourist attraction in themselves, though they’re not any more beautiful or graceful than the others. I can’t figure out just why they’re famous.

I am a big fan of stairs. I find staircases some of the most dramatic and graceful things around. I've been hooked on staircases ever since Rhett Butler carried Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs in Gone with the Wind. I love walking stairs. I love the feel of the banister in my hand and the heft of the lift in my thighs. Maybe it's the idea of going higher. Except that I'm scared of heights. So, maybe it's just the concept of getting somewhere.

I would love to see a coffee table book of just stairs; a book that would show them in all their grandeur. I know just which stairs I’d like to see in the book: the staircase in Gone With the Wind, for starters. But I’d also include the ones in Dallas Hall at SMU as well as the ones going to the basement in Perkins Chapel there, the stairs at the Louvre, the worn out steps in the Coliseum in Rome, the small pine stairs in the University of Virginia's Rotunda; I never forget a staircase. There are also great stairs that aren’t so much pretty as they are memorable: the stone stairways in the Tower of London where imprisoned Kings and Queens climbed and descended, the narrow marble steps inside the tower in Pisa, carved from the same Carrerra marble as Michelangelo used for the David. But I fear that the book wouldn't be enough to satisfy me. Stairs were meant to be climbed. It's the experience of the thing not merely looking at them in a book.

Stairs can be brutal, especially when you’re tired and worn out. I have a couple of friends whose knees are bad and each time I was tempted to grumble about the particular stairs we were fighting in the subway I thought of how lucky I am that I can even do this. Then I worried about how much longer I would be able to climb myself.

I also understand stairs now from a builders point of view. In the last few years Beaven and I have built a few stairs here at our house and a couple more on mission trips. I’ve conquered the trick of using a carpenters square to create stairs out of raw lumber and now I can not only do it but I understand how it works. I know stairs well enough now that while I climbed I found myself analyzing how high a rise and how long a run and calculating in my head how many steps this required. I noticed that some of the steps in Europe have a steeper rise than the usual seven inches.

I don’t know if it’s Beaven or just Europe but it seemed like we spent our whole two weeks on one staircase or another. When he would blithely explain that all we had to do to get from A to B was a few transfers on the tube he didn’t go on to explain that it meant going down three flights of stairs to reach the train platform then up the stairs where we would transfer to another train, then down again --up and down, up and down. London was just one big up and down to me. When you add the necessity of climbing a few icons just so you can say you did it (St Paul's Cathedral Dome in London, the tower in Pisa to name a couple) it all became a drudge of just putting one foot in front of the other. Climbing to the dome of St Paul's I counted steps to break the monotony and to double check their figures. As I counted I fell into a rhythm: lifting my foot and sliding it forward to establish a firm footing then transfer my weight to this foot, lifting the other foot and slide it ahead. Lift, slide. Lift, slide. Lift, Slide.

In between the cathedral and coliseum moments of our lives there are uncountable and ordinary days of just lift and slide. Though we don’t always enjoy them and they are mostly a pain in the butt, they’re necessary to get us where we’re going.

I’m going on to the next step in my life next week. I leave on Monday to begin work as a co-manager of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance volunteer village in Gautier, Mississippi. I don’t know at this point for sure how long I’ll be gone-- more than likely about four months. It’s exciting on one hand to embark on this adventure, one I am certain I will walk hand in hand with God, but also one I know will unavoidably include a lot of lift and slide and it won't all be elegant. I'm sure most of it , in fact, will be ordinary steps with a higher rise than I want. But I'm going to try to hold God's hand while I climb. I'm sure the lift and slide of life is easier when you’re holding God’s hand.

Check back next Wednesday and travel with me on the journey.