So, this time three weeks ago, I didn't know something was going to change the landscape of Jeph's home town, and the landscape of his heart and mind. It also changed the landscape of the hearts and minds of many of his friends.
I saw a couple of posts on Facebook yesterday talking about a new found pride in talking about Joplin as your place of birth and the place you grew up. There was at least one person who pointed out the fact that many people who grew up and away from Joplin cared very little about the town and would have been the least likely to call it home again. I know in a recent blog, I alluded to that fact a little more gently.
Everyone talks about things that change us in our lives, but I don't think many of us talk about events more major than marriage, having children or losing our parents. Those are all big events, too, but I'm going to be honest, in our household, and many households of Joplin residents and ex-pats of Joplin, those kinds of events just almost register now.
I am always happy and envious of people who can reflect on their childhoods and think of very few remarkable events. I always think that it would be awesome to think about the years you spent growing up and not be able to say very much about them. To me, that must be what it means to have a normal childhood--nothing too fantastic, and nothing tragically horrible.
I think living that kind of childhood is good and bad. The good of it is having the safety and security in your life to try things, and become what you choose to be with only the fears you create for yourself. The bad of it is that you never have to face fear inflicted upon you by other people and events--things you don't create and can't control. In that safe place, the adversities you face are tiny blips on the road map of life--a lost job, a bad break up, a car wreck you walk away from. You get a false sense that you are a grown up and you can cope with most things--because the things you have to cope with are things that don't grab your heart like a snow globe and shake.
Most of the people I know who grew up in Joplin had that kind of benign, simple, uneventful childhood. I think that's why it was so easy to grow up and away from the place they called home. There was no source of magical bliss that pulled them back, and no horrible tragedy that drove them away.
I think the reason this happens is because life happens. People aspire to greater, bigger things, and hopefully achieve some of them. They create new homes and families for themselves that are different from the ones they grew up with. I think we'd all be hard pressed to think of anyone they know who has said 'I want to live the exact life my parents did, and raise my family exactly the same way.' I can't think of anyone myself. That desire for "difference" can easily translate to 'I would never live in insert hometown here.'
I don't think that's always a true "bashing" of whatever that hometown is, I think it's a rejection of an idea. I don't even necessarily think that rejection of an idea is a rejection of the love our parents were able to give us. Even if your mom and dad never beat you, maybe you wanted something more from them than you got and that's what you want to give in your own life. There's nothing inherently wrong in wanting different or better--our parents often said that they wanted better for us than what they were raised with.
So, sorry guys, you know what that means? In our quest to become something other, we essentially declare ourselves to be the same thing.
What does it say about people that the most powerful and destructive tornado has changed hearts and minds? I think it says we are all human.
I think it says that sometimes we don't know how much something means to us until it isn't there anymore. I don't think it says that people who have been away for ten or more years and have no desire to move back are now "Johnny come latelys." I think it says that we never actually achieve that status of "grown up." Being "grown up" is a myth. Being "grown up" must mean we have learned everything we were supposed to in our lives. It's an end of a journey, not a destination along the way. So, if being "grown up" means the end of something, then it must equate to a death. Maybe that's why so many people say they never want to achieve the status.
The impact of 200 mile per hour winds means that events take place throughout our lives that continue to shape who we are. They change us. They change what matters to us. Many of us don't even expect it. Still fewer know how to cope with it.
Joplin may not be your home. You may never have lived there, and you may never want to live there. But the thing many ex-pats and people who care understand is that Joplin is someone's home. It continues to be home for many who haven't lived there in years. It continues to be home even as you stand in the middle of the disaster zone and see nothing physical in which a person can inhabit.
There are pieces of rubble as big as cars everywhere. And there are pieces of rubble small enough to live in hearts that never had open doors before. In the corners of those newly opened hearts, Joplin finds itself home.
http://youtu.be/VIZXeP5Wzew
No comments:
Post a Comment