Month: April 2012

The Day Alabama Almost Died by Gary Furr Remembering April 27, 2011

Video still suspended on the internet, weathermen almost screaming fear and warning,

Maps lit up with horrible storms, bright, rotating monsters

And the skycams filming it

Dark rumbling cone of cloud, wider and firmer, roaring down,

Swallowing places we all recognized, this street corner, that road, this hospital and the University itself

Gobbled into darkness

We sat watching helplessly in what passes for our safe place

Terrified for people we know and can’t call or get to

Just sat there, watching, listening, praying in a basement or a closet

Now it lives on YouTube and in children’s nightmares

Fear comes out of nowhere, rumbling into a sunny place and wipes it out

We still remember .  How can you forget 63 tornadoes,

Taking down a state a town at a time?  Houses blown apart, unglued matchsticks

Flying everywhere.  That was the picture everyone shared

But it’s the million snapshots, most of them not taken

Sagging shoulders of an old man and his wife looking at the wreckage of sixty years

A family crying over photographs and precious pets and dead neighbors

Burying the body of a son or a mother or a friend

Who committed no crime against nature that took their life.

The foolish weakness of our lives pitted against something so vast that we shrank away

Our hearts melted, our schedules crashed, our computers went dead with no grid to hook to

Agendas changed, all the foolishness swept away into immediate priority

Only holding the people we love, finding the body of a lost daughter

Feeding a neighbor who was hungry and broke

Losing a job that blew away in a second.  Going to church when it mattered

Listening for God when God seemed gone

Oh, we remember a million snapshots, of a child calling, “I’m okay,” of a house that used to be

Where a neighbor and his wife died, their bodies snapped like twigs and tossed into an undignified heap

Diapers and receipts and toys and furniture, curtains and unrecognizable slivers, trashbags and deck chairs

Wood and metal and rope and canvas, slung in no pattern, no priority and with no respect for their value

Gone, gone, gone, a house, a town, a store where we shopped, a friend we knew,

A way of life we lived, a sense of safety with which we deluded ourselves

But some things still didn’t blow away—faith and hope and love survived

Love for strangers fired up strong and woke us up to one another.

But we stood for a moment, blown away like the pieces of our lives and our world

Dazed, disbelief, daunted, discouraged, disheartened, darkened in soul

For just a moment, to take it in.  We will never forget if we rebuild it all again

What happened that April day, when Alabama almost died.

     

“Blue Like Jazz”: Not Your Father’s Evangelical Movie

 “Blue Like Jazz” arrived at selected theaters this past week, an odd stepchild among usual movie fare of aliens, vampires, and things that go boom.  Derived from Donald Miller’s book by the same name, “Blue Like Jazz” is a story of life and faith during a young man’s first year of college.  Don, the main character, is son of a bible believing single mother who wants to protect her son and an atheist  father who is emotionally disconnected, mostly absent, and religiously hostile.

Donald’s Dad wangles an acceptance from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a school filled with intellectually brilliant and morally unfettered not-quite-adults.  After struggling with it, he heads to Reed and Portland instead of the Baptist college his mother wants him to attend.  Soon life is filled with Political Correctness, drugs, booze and moral haze.   The professors challenge every aspect of life, and students engage in protest and outrageousness as an extracurricular activity.

From that point we follow Don as he struggles with the pain of the life he has left behind but the faith that won’t leave him alone.  He is ashamed of that identity, and tries to fit in, but never really does.  The church is an ambiguous presence throughout the movie.  The childhood church that Don leaves behind is a stereotype of tacky children’s sermons and fear of the world.  The youth pastor is glib, a know-it-all, self-assured, and, it turns out, secretly sleeping with Don’s mother, which brings a crisis into his life later in the story. Continue reading “Blue Like Jazz”: Not Your Father’s Evangelical Movie

Those Two Little Words

There are two little magic words that can open any door with ease

one little word is “Thanks” and the other little word is please

Since we now have a thirteen month old GC (I’ll just abbrieviate “Grandchild” so I can resist declining into obnoxia braggadocci , which can be fatal to the hearer), I travel more than I normally do.  And I am having to watch all sorts of media and sing songs that were long forgotten.  My wife’s fav is “A helper I will be, a helper I will be, stop what you’re doing and clean up nice-ly” to the tune of “Farmer in the Dell”.  We have a luscious video of our GC slinging toys down as fast as her Mom can pick them up while Mom sings (in vain) “A helper I will be…” Continue reading Those Two Little Words

To Kill A Mockingbird…50 years later

Here in Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird is one of our great treasures.  You can still go to Monroeville, Alabama and see a live re-enactment of the story every year by the local citizenry.  You start out in the yard, then move inside the courthouse, and it is eerily reminiscent of the movie because Hollywood built a replica of it for the film.  When I went with friends a few years back, I felt a flash of shame and pain when the n-word was uttered while African American locals up in the balcony were in our presence.  I was embarrassed.  So we’ve made some progress, I guess.  As a child in North Carolina the word was uttered around me thoughtlessly, as a part of an unquestioned culture of resentment and vulnerable entitlement. Continue reading To Kill A Mockingbird…50 years later