The Possum Story Again

I washed a possum in the washing machine once. It wasn’t on purpose. I really don’t care how clean the neighborhood animals are. And I rarely invite them into my home for social functions. No, it was totally by accident. Years ago the house we lived in had the washer and dryer in the garage. And we lived close enough to a vacant field that we occasionally harbored wildlife. I guess I left the door to all the wrong things open. Our friend must have wandered into our garage, fallen in the washer and started on a good nap when I came to add a few clothes, shut the lid and start the machine.

No, I did not grab him and say, “looks like you need a dusting off old boy, hop in.”

And I certainly did not realize what had happened when I opened the machine the next morning. Half asleep, I reached out to move the wet clothes into the dryer. I was stopped by the strange odor. My clothes don’t normally come out of the washer smelling like the landfill. Then I saw what appeared to be either a very large rat or a very ugly cat. And a very dead one. After examining this sight for about a billionth of a nanosecond, I slammed the lid shut and went inside the house to write my husband a note. It read something to the effect that I loved him veryveryveryvery much and would do anything in the world for him and hoped he felt the same way about me because there was something dead in the washer and would he please get rid of it. Then I left for work.

I wasn’t a completely liberated woman at that stage of my life. God help me, I probably will never be that liberated. I’ve always agreed with the great television sage, Suzanne Sugarbaker from Designing Women, who decreed that “the man always has to kill the bug.”

When I talked to Beaven later that day, he assured me that the possum was gone from my life forever and went to heaven in a very clean condition. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

My brother was in the Navy on a nuclear submarine at that time. They were on a secret mission somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Each family member was allowed to send him two letters, which would be radioed to him. The rules were very strict: our message to him could be no more than 50 words and you couldn’t send any “coded” messages. This sounded simple but, actually, the 50 words was a real challenge. That’s not enough for a real story. But I wanted to use every word available and send a little bit of “home” to him. And to cap it all off, my life at that time was actually pretty boring. The most exciting thing that had happened to me in months had been Perfect Panty Day, when the youngest had finally gone all day with dry underwear. I couldn’t really expect Doss to get excited about that. Somewhere between “We’re all fine.” and “Take Care, We love you” I had to give him something interesting. So I included the sentence: “I washed a possum in the washer today.”

Somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, in the middle of the night, my brother was summoned brusquely from his bunk to see the Captain. I’m sure he was concerned and intimidated at the same time. The captain handed him the cable to read and demanded an explanation. “Allard, you know you can’t receive messages in code” My brother read the letter, threw back his head and laughed. “Captain, this isn’t a code, it’s just my sister. She probably DID wash a possum in the washer.”

Maybe in that quirky message I sent more of home to him than 50 words could say.

Growth

It’s time to gather all the Kleenex you used for the inauguration and clean up. Pack up all the good will and best wishes that floated around the room and store them away for the inevitable days to come when we can’t get our act together. But yesterday was just such a wonderful and historical time that I figure we all had fun no matter how you voted. I posed a short bonus “inaguration” paragraph a couple of days ago so if you missed it keep scrolling at the end of this post.

Now, a disclaimer of sorts. My posting today is unique in that I don’t think I have ever written about another person’s vulnerabilities with such poignant detail. I want my readers, especially the ones connected by our church website, to know that I am publishing this only after getting permission from the Walker family. Steve has read the following and gave me his OK.

If you read my blog last week, you’ll remember that our Parish Associate assigned the whole congregation to make a list of everywhere we saw God in the next week. His hint was for us to look for places where we found Growth.

So, here’s my list of where I saw God in the last week:

1. Everywhere
2. Everywhere else

I guess that’s a cop-out. But, as usual, God surprised me and the complete list would be too long so I’ll list my top choice of where I saw God at work. It was the culmination of several years condensed into one moment and one sentence.

We have a woman in our congregation who has Huntington’s Disease. The encyclopedia says it’s “a progressive, degenerative disease that causes certain nerve cells in your brain to waste away.” It’s also incurable. It has left her increasingly debilitated over the time I’ve known her. The most striking symptom is wildly uncontrolled jerky movements. So it’s a pretty hard condition to hide.

But when she and her husband first joined the church she was in the early stages of the disease; the unexplainable extra movements were hard to spot and she merely looked uncoordinated or like something was “off.” I noticed not many people struck up conversation with her during social times like the church picnic. I think we all knew something was wrong but we didn’t know what exactly it was. Consequently we didn’t know what to expect from a conversation and, sadly for us all, tried to avoid the whole issue by avoiding her. I’m embarrassed to admit this went on for a couple of years. We all sat around and wondered was there anyone at home inside this person. The only thing that can be said in our defense is that we’re just your average congregation of frightened and spiritually impaired sinners.

About a year ago her condition got bad enough that she needed almost constant care to help take care of herself as well as her two young children. One of the women in our church started spending the day with her and became her advocate within the church.

After a while people started asking Jan about her and Jan explained to us what was wrong but most important, Jan taught us how to be her friend. As the disease marched through Sherrie’s brain her speech became almost impossible to understand. Sherrie’s posture shrunk to state where her head hung low in a stare at the ground. But Jan was very clear that she understands everything that’s going on around her and is pretty sharp.

Jan gave us the gift of being able to Grow. We were each able to grow spiritually while we were growing a friendship with Sherrie.

With Jan’s help we started including Sherrie in our conversations and we even moved our Sunday School class downstairs so Sherrie didn’t have to walk up the stairs. By now, even walking was a problem for her. But through Jan’s mentoring, we have learned how to love Sherrie. I don’t phrase it like this because we aren’t normally loving people and had to be taught to love but because we needed to know the technicalities of the “how” part. Because of the way Huntington’s affects the brain Sherrie’s speech was sometimes difficult to understand and we didn’t know exactly how much information she was processing. Jan assured us that not only did she understand everything but Jan also told us what a high level of functioning Sherrie came from. She had held an executive level position in a big hospital system in Dallas. We came to realize that there was someone locked up inside this person, someone we all wished we had met in better times. So we started imagining her as that person and talking to her as that person.

The great difficulty with her speech meant that when she tried to talk, about the best she could do was simply one syllable repeated two or three times. Jan and Sherrie’s husband both coached us to be patient while Sherrie tried to take part in conversation. Jan noticed she had trouble reading but couldn’t hold the book still because of the constant jerky movements the disease caused. So Jan got books on tape. It has now become almost impossible for her to coordinate her body well enough to walk and she refuses to use a wheelchair. Jan showed us how to hold her hand as she walked–loosely enough that it didn’t appear we were helping her but firm enough to give her some balance.

As Sherrie’s body deteriorates we have grown in our love for her. The morning Clay gave me my assignment to list ways I saw God at work I left the sanctuary and went straight to Sunday School.

First, I have to tell you a little about our class. We are an all-female class of mostly menopausal chicks. So you can imagine we spend a great deal more time visiting each other than actual study of the bible. As a matter of fact, last week, after we had gone through the prayer list and spent some time planning a class party we then spent the rest of our hour discussing how we intended to redecorate our classroom and we never got around to any actual study. I suspect this happens in a lot of Sunday School classes like ours.

At the beginning of the class we always go over the list of people we need to pray for. The day of my assignment, one of the members of our class mentioned her husband’s numerous health problems. At the end of this long list of his problems, which I can’t discount—they are very real and serious problems; there was a pause in the conversation. Then out of the corner of the room, without lifting her head from her stare at the ground, Sherrie gave what amounted to a sermon in the longest sentence I’ve ever heard her say and this time she spoke as clear as a bell: “I will pray for him.”

The Huntington’s has robbed Sherrie of almost everything about her physical abilities but her spirit shines brightly through the darkness. The disease may rob her of every physical attribute she has but she will hold on to her relationship with God until the end.

We all grew a little that day. God had been at work in our midst.

Bonus Post

My friend Colleen O'Toole took this snap from her post in Edgemore, Maryland during a "slowdown" on Obama's train yesterday. Colleen worked with me in New Orleans at PDA. In January she went back to her favorite experience as a AmeriCorps volunteer, this time as a team leader. She is having the experience of a lifetime.

My other brush with people who are having a brush with fame is at the other end of the spectrum. Elizabeth, our eldest daughter, found out last week that George Bush will have an office in the building where she works.

On the theory that she might bump into him in the elevator I invite questions she could/should ask him in the elevator. Keep them short, it's only a five floor ride.

Limits

I got an assignment in church on Sunday, announced to the whole congregation, mind you, when the Parish Associate told us to start writing down all the ways we could see God at work in the coming week and that Jane would have her list on her blog. He even gave us hints on how to spot it: Growth. This kind of boxed me into a corner. Not that I ever doubted I would spot God at work in the coming week. But I already had my topic for this week figured out. And since it’s only Tuesday as I write this, I figure I still have half a week before I need to post my list. I can say, however, within 20 minutes of getting the assignment I started to see God all around me. And what a poet God is. No, no….you’ll have to wait until next week. Next week I will write about Growth but today I want to talk about the exact opposite: Limits.

I’ll do a disclaimer for today’s subject for all the wide-eyed optimists out there. I want to talk about death and dying today. Feel free to skip over today’s posting if you don’t want to think about it. I’m sure this phenomenon won’t ever happen to you.

When I hit 60 last year I referred to it as the first year of the last third of my life and a lot of people shuddered and told me to not think of it that way. But the math doesn’t lie. Most people, healthy, average people, die (oh, there’s that word) somewhere between 80 and 90. I’ve had relatives die before then but they weren’t healthy. And I have friends over 90 years old but I can assure you that they’re not average people.

There can be an upside to limits. With limits you pretty much know where you stand. I was doing the math with a friend who is the same age and we decided that most people live to be 85. The thought hit us both at the same time, “Then we still have 25 years to go!” We high-fived each other right there in the parking lot.

The simple truth is that there is a limit to how long I will breathe on this planet. Those who hold to the theory that we continue on in some other form after we stop breathing will say that we influence our friends and family long after we’re gone. But I’m not talking about that right now. I’m talking about my opportunities to be part of the action, the parade of life, to vote and to shop at Walmart.

It has started to slowly creep into my thoughts more and more. I can remember when I was about nine years old wondering if I would EVER be in the seventh grade. I remember wondering if I would still be alive when the year 2000 came. And a couple of years ago I was listening to two women discuss weight and the fact that they both still weighed what they did in high school. I thought to myself at the time that I would be happy if I could just lose down to what I weighed when I was nine months pregnant. It didn’t help to watch a bunch of old home movies with my granddaughters of when their mother was about 4 years old and I’m not sure they recognized me. I know I will never be that thin or that young again.

Time marches on. It takes no prisoners and early release is not the desired option.

The usual holiday weight has more endurance than I do and I’m tempted to surrender to it rather than go through the effort required to send it on its way. Rather than watch a bunch of exercise videos I always try to find something physical that I enjoy. Over the last few years I’ve hit the hurricane recovery circuit and did a fair job of losing weight and having fun at the same time. Two weeks ago we basically “camped out” inside a church building and slept on the floor. When I rolled out of my sleeping bag each morning and managed with some great effort to actually stand up, there were new pains in my feet that I had never felt before. And we didn’t even do anything that physically taxing. In fact, all I did was stand around and watch. But my feet aren’t even used to standing up that much anymore.

It’s more than the effect time has on my body that frustrates me. It’s the sheer “not being here” that pounds me to the ground. All the years I’ve known Beaven one of his favorite subjects has always been that someday they would discover a process to create nuclear fusion and all our energy problems would be solved. It’s a topic that creeps into many conversations we have. Not that we’re such eggheads that we sit around talking about nuclear fusion and such all the time. But his point was that new inventions come all the time and this one is inevitable. It’s only a matter of time. The other day we saw a show on TV that said they’re getting closer to it and may have the process in hand in fifty years. Just like Beaven said, it’s inevitable. But fifty years!! Too long for me. I most assuredly will not be here by then. I don’t have 50 years to wait. I don’t have it. My lifetime is limited.

Any calculation of putting in solar power or windmills tells us the payoff of the initial investment will come years from now but I don’t want to have to wait that long and it’s not because I’m spoiled by instant gratification. It’s because I want to be here to see it happen.

OK, I have lived to see things my parents never dreamed possible. I watched them land on the moon. Next week I’ll see something many people never thought they'd live to see when a black man is inaugurated as President. I know who Deep Throat was now. But I may never find out what happened to Jimmy Hoffa or Osama Bin Laden. Or if Britney Spears can stay clean. I just don’t have that kind of time left. And it's starting to drive me nuts.

I need to start working on my list of ways I’ve seen God at work. Maybe if I assemble a good long list I can present it at the gates of heaven and get a personal meeting with the Creator and ask to come back. Save me a place at dinner next to Elijah. I’ll bring him with me. I'm sure he'll want to come, too.

My "What I Did Over Christmas Break" paper

I’m back from a week in Port Arthur, Texas working on two houses damaged by Hurricane Ike. I’ve started the new year with a bazillion projects so I will get right to the topic.

Beaven and I had a blast. I don’t know about the two teenagers we took with us. We knew it would be a small trip when we ended up with only three kids but we told ourselves this would be an exploratory expedition to test the waters and go home to tell all their friends so we would take a huge group next year. Then one of the kids got strep throat and ended dropping out at the very last minute—too last minute to cancel the trip so it ended up being just Raelee and Mary and two old farts. You have to be impressed with them for nothing else than the mere fact that they were stuck with two old people they barely knew who were probably older than their grandparents.

We went through an organization called Southeast Texas Interfaith Organization (SETIO). The Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is still trying to get permits to move their stuff into the two camps they want to build. But we would have used SETIO anyway since they will let youth on their jobsites and PDA won’t.

SETIO arranged our work and the first morning we went to Rosie’s house. It’s actually her daughter’s house but the daughter works and Rosie doesn’t. We met her daughter, Lurleen, but Rosie was far more interesting. Even though Lurleen worked in the state prison as a secretary, Rosie still had better stories.

It's all about the stories anyway. I've watched folks come to the Gulf Coast for over three years now, helping recover from Katrina and now from Ike. They come with tools and energy, with ideas of rebuilding a whole house in a week. By Tuesday they realize they can't do it all in a week and by Friday they realize it never was about the building, anyway. It's always about meeting and talking to people. Listening to their stories of the storm and their life stories. There's something about the people who choose to live here on the edge of the land, whose neighbor is an occasionally angry ocean. They are a hearty bunch, filled with a great sense of humor and a sturdy sense of who they are and what it takes to live where they do. They understand the risks they take by living in hurricane-prone territory but they always think they're strong enough to handle whatever life gives them. Sometimes that's because they've had hard lives before and are used to it. Sometimes it's just because they are strong people.

Whoever they are and whatever they have to say, I always enjoy knowing them and hearing what they have to say. My life is always enriched by their entrance into it.

Port Arthur itself was protected by a great levee system but Bridge City, down the coast from there, took enough water to fill Rosie’s house to the ceiling.

By the time we got there, the house had been mucked and mostly gutted. Mucking is where you shovel out the four feet or so of wet mud filled with dead fish, live snakes, raw sewage and crude oil. Imagine our delight that we missed this stage. The next stage, gutting, involves pulling out the wet and moldy sheet rock and insulation on the walls and ceilings. This was right up our alley since it doesn’t involve any skill at all except a strong back.

The first thing Monday morning, Raelee and Mary started breaking up the ceramic tile floor tile floor to remove it. Then I got the phone call from our pastor who was visiting her mother in Houston. Anne wanted to work with us that day but I had told her to keep it a surprise for the girls. So I left to meet Anne at the town Walmart and when I got there I found this van in the parking lot and called Ann over to pose in front of it. I just couldn't resist.
This one will be framed I’m sure.

Anne and her family followed me back to the house to surprise the kids and we went back to work. Anne’s brother-in-law, Rich, helped Beaven pull the rest of the insulation from the ceiling. Raelee and Mary gave Susie's dogs a bath when they finished breaking up the kitchen tile. Anne’s mother, another Mary, worked with me to me wash dishes. This wasn’t just tidying up after dinner, this was dishes that ended up underneath waves of mud and muck. They all had to be washed before they could be stored. Rosie has a FEMA trailer for now and won’t have room for most of her stuff until after the house is rebuilt. So she was storing most of their things.

I have to say something about the FEMA homes now. They finally realized you can’t make people live in travel trailers for two or three years, especially the kind that has formaldehyde in them. So now they bring you what looks more like a small manufactured house. Both of the homeowners we worked for had handicapped trailers, which are bigger than the standard issue ones. Rosie’s trailer had two bedrooms but still not much floor space. This temporary housing is just a small increment better than the old style travel trailers but anything is better than those.

Rosie is dealing with a really bad back as a result of more than one car wreck. She used to drive an 18-wheeler with her husband and was in a lot of wrecks. This might indicate poor driving skills but we heard more about his poor skills as a husband than his driving. She told us she sent him packing as soon as the kids were grown because he was abusive to them all.

When we got there Monday morning she didn't move around much but just sat in her chair. She was very quiet and we could barely understand her because she spoke so softly. But after two days of getting to know us she ended up trading fruitcake recipes with Mary Clifton and telling the kids how to make tamales and how to skin an alligator. I think if we had encouraged her she would have had us all lined up making tamales. She told us stories of picking fruit and vegetables all over the south. Her family sometimes lived outdoors or in their cars. They sometimes cooked over an open fire on the ground. You can’t meet people like Rosie just anywhere. The kids in our church certainly aren’t apt to find women like her unless they venture outside their normal circles. But where else can you learn how to skin an alligator?

Monday evening, almost as though on schedule, Raelee sprained her ankle. This has become a tradition of sorts. She broke this ankle for the first time at summer camp a few years ago. Since then she’s broken it once more and sprained it countless times. This is the time I’m grateful to be working with kids in high school rather than elementary school. I knew that she knew far more about her ankle than I did so I just let her tell us what she needed to do. She knew the drill and we went through the steps of calling her mom, finding some ice and a wheelchair, buying a brace at Walmart and deciding what to do on Tuesday when we were scheduled to work all day at Rosie’s house.

So we decided to do our sightseeing Tuesday instead of Friday. We piled up in the van the next morning and drove down the coast. At Crystal Beach we found the devastation Ike left in his path. The roads were cleared but there was still cars piled up like toys on the beach. Some were buried in mud up to their windshields.
Some cars were were upside down and thrown about. We saw buildings battered and collapsed.
Then we saw the things that always startle me the most.

In the middle of gigantic upheaval there is always the flotsam and jetsam of life—the coffee cups and plates, mardis gras beads, baby dolls, clothing, mattresses: everyday items you find in every house- remnants of daily living. It was all tossed around like clothes in the drier. But there's always been one thing I couldn't get out of my mind. Where were the spoons, the most basic tool of living? I call this my “spoon obsession” and shared this idea with Mary, the teenager, not Mary Clifton the pastor’s mother. She understood what I was talking about and set about to find one. She found a softball and a plate but no spoon. Plastic spoons don’t count, I told her. Neither did the whole silverware drawer she showed me. My quest for one single spoon buried in the sand goes unfulfilled.

After giving the girls some time on the beach, Beaven took us all to Gaido’s Restaurant for dinner mostly because he was so relieved to see this venerated landmark still alive and kicking. They are famous to most Texans who have visited Galveston any time in their lives and our family always included a meal there whenever we came in the past. I think they may have been one of the first places to open after Ike. I bought a book about the storm and it shows Gaido’s serving food to the first responders. It offers white cotton tablecloths and an attentive and professional waiter who understands service. I could tell this guy had worked at Gaido's for decades.

Back at Rosie’s she kept us entertained with her stories but the girls were startled by how racist she was. She often used a racial slur and added “black” to the word. Maybe this was a common term for her. It just sounded redundant to me but it totally freaked the girls out, who could only refer to her language choice by its initials--the “BN” word. It turned out that her daughter was named after George Wallace’s wife because Rosie had campaigned for him the year she was born. The astounding thing was that, at the risk of racial profiling, Rosie appeared to be Hispanic. She had an accent and a general appearance of someone from Mexico. Her mother was from Brownsville but she said her grandmother was born in Mexico. You would think people who have been discriminated against for their race would be more tolerant toward others in the same boat.

She was still, in spite of her prejudices, a loving and generous woman. She gave us treats as well as some of food and clothing donated to her her after the storm. Sure, it was stuff she didn't want but she wanted to give us something. She was not a selfish person at all. She had stories everyone needs to hear. Especially the skinning an alligator story. You never know when you might need that information. But, by Wednesday afternoon, we finished what we could do at Rosie’s house. We exchanged addresses and promises to stay in touch.

Thursday morning we ended up at Butch and Bertie’s house in another part of Bridge City. There we found people as different from Rosie as night and day. Butch is a WWII veteran who loved to tell stories even though his voice was frail and whispery. He trailed a small oxygen tank behind him everywhere he went. After the war he worked as a welder at the Texaco oil refinery and the fumes he breathed left him with COPD that now requires the constant oxygen. But he couldn’t keep still when there was work to be done so one of our jobs was to keep him still. And that was probably the hardest job of all. Our job at their house was to move books. The house had been completely gutted except for the ceiling. They had only taken about 18 inches of water and were lucky in that their electricity was still working in the shell of a house. They had lived there 52 of the 58 years they’ve been married. So you could imagine they’ve collected a few “things.” But we still weren’t prepared for the amount of books Bertie has. About four rooms held stacks and stacks and stacks of books. For starters, she used to own a bookstore. “OK,” I thought, “this is her inventory.” But she told me these were just her own books that she has read or plans to read or even re-read. She was having trouble getting organized because the minute she saw a book she started thinking she might want to read it so she didn't want us to put that in the “throw” pile or even the “store” pile. I totally understood how she felt. I knew I would be doing the same thing with all of my books.
Bertie was also a multi-hobbied person, too. So it wasn’t just books—it was the genealogy papers, her mother's family photos, art supplies, the quilting books and her collections of tote bags, mugs and even a ballpoint pen collection. I lost track of her hobbies after a while.

Then we kept finding more and more piles of books. And in the middle of it all she told us she had already thrown away about a third of them--the ones with water damage. There were also Butch’s books, already separated out from hers and sent to the garage, mostly westerns and books on the war. I’ve never seen so many books on the war. I’ll bet he had every one ever published.

We didn’t stay very long at their house because we could see that neither Butch nor Bertie could rest as long as we were there. We finally got them to sit down and eat lunch with us on Thursday. By Friday, we were worn out ourselves. Raelee’s ankle was still swollen and my own ankle was starting to feel gimpy from standing so much. We stayed until lunch and then headed back home to Garland.

Through the marvel of electronics Raelee produced a power point presentation for Sunday morning by working a little on it each night back at the “camp/church.” It wasn’t hard to give her this responsibility since she knew more about it than I did. I’m starting to notice nowadays that some of this new stuff is easier for the kids to do than me.

Sunday morning we showed our slide presentation with a Casting Crowns song in the background. I tallied up the expenses and submitted them to the proper committee. And we’re starting to plan next year’s trip.

Come with us.