Now, after crying and aching and laughing and gasping at the movie, I am wondering afresh – in somewhat hushed, don’t-kill-me-tones, if you made me choose, which medium I prefer: Books or Film. When I look at my bookshelf or the recommend-shelf on Goodreads (and in my sidebar), I know there isn’t any question. I love words.

But then I watch the sweeping cinematography of an epic movie or want to wear the fashions or eat the food in a particularly rich and visceral scene, and I think it might be film.

I like books that talk about movies and movies that talk about books. I like books made into movies. I like stacks and stacks of both inside my home.

I don’t have to choose, right? After all, they both have words. They both tell stories. They have both enriched my world and made me want to be a part of the enriching.

Right now I’m revising a novel that celebrates storytelling and story-living and this passion for the business of the first. And I’m desperate to finish it but more importantly to finish it well. And so although I’m writing every night and filled with intense pleasure  when that’s the case and vague despondency when it’s not, I’m also taking breaks to read beautiful things and watch beautiful films and remember why I’m doing this in the first place and attempt to learn the best and brightest ways to do it. It’s not my only job, but it’s my favorite one (second to Being Mama) – this writing and consuming-to-learn. And this weekend, that job brought me The Help, which I can’t recommend enough, along with these wise words someone gave to accompany it: I wonder what our generation believes (a la separate-but-equal) that will one day embarrass our children.

You see what I mean about enrichment? What a wonderful challenge to take away from a theater.

I had to beg Michael (my Michael) to stay on them; he could only take so much. If I’d had the remote though, I never would have turned. I felt like I was sharing a moment, albeit a sad one, with the world.

It’s unfair that our friends and spouses and grandfathers and baby nieces die every day without nearly enough people memorializing their contribution to the earth. Although Jackson was more visible, you’d be hard pressed to prove to me that his life actually mattered more than any of the others. But when the world gets caught up in a moment like this, I am more than willing to be swept up right along with them.

Did you ever see the Blossom episode where her boyfriend dumped her? She was very sad, tragically so – at least her dad and brothers thought she was. Yet she didn’t cry. Finally they made her watch The Way We Were. She watched the whole thing quietly, stoically. And when the credits rolled, she collapsed on her father and cried and cried and cried. They all took turns holding her. While she cried. I’ll never forget that scene.

That’s one way to look at moments like this. Much of the world has at least noticed Michael Jackson’s death. Many are in true, intense mourning for it. And perhaps when we embrace that – just go with it in a way, if we can find any reason to care at all – then all that grieving can make up for all the losses in our own lives that simply weren’t noticed enough. 

Don’t think of it as just another channel playing Thriller. Think of it as the whole world validating how simply awful death is, how completely unfair, how sad, and how for every person, their contributions shine the most, and their death is almost always too soon.

I’ve never been afraid of storms – I rather like them, never having seen a tornado or its damage up close. But I may have changed a little now. It’s raining with lightening, thunder, and flooding today, and I feel more conscious of severe weather than ever before, and I feel so sad for the houses that no longer have their roofs today.

I was in Wal-Mart when the tornado came through. If you don’t live nearby you won’t know that Wal-Mart is in the north part of town, and “the north part of town” is exactly where the tornado was headed and where it eventually hit. They ushered us to the back of the store, but I wasn’t sure why. No part of the store seemed any safer to me than any other. Drew was with me and felt quite sure we were going to die. I know this, because he kept saying it. He even wrote it on a piece of paper, not being familiar I guess with the power of positive thinking. I only felt truly terrified when the lights flickered, which only lasted a few moments. In those moments, though, I did feel actual terror. It seemed so ludicrous that after everything I’d been through I might die in Wal-Mart during a tornado, but a part of me knew it wasn’t ludicrous at all. It happens. People lost their homes, and three people lost their lives, one of whom I had known – though not well. 

I don’t know if I can truly say that I have lived through a tornado. The tragedy was so close – the whole town is only about three* miles long, and the tornado was one half-mile in width. But I didn’t happen to be in that particular half. I was sitting on the floor in the baby department of a Wal-Mart with Drew while Michael was almost on the other end of town in our basement with John, Jake, and the dog. We were sadly confused that we might lose each other that way. Then the lights flickered. Soon after, a woman walked by with a name tag and an industrial sized flashlight (turned off – what with the lights being on and all) and told us we were free to go. I went home to Michael, and we ate burritos.

But you can bet I spent the next day watching news conferences and intense video of the storm. I waited anxiously with the rest of the county for the victim’s names to be released. I called the Red Cross and put our names on the list of volunteers. I thought of the fragility of life and the places I never again want to find  myself in the middle of a tornado and who might edit my journals for posterity as well as how exactly I’ve presented myself online since that’s the only living publication of my thoughts and worldview. When the names were released, I cried.

It’s very unsettling for a tragedy to be near you but not quite yours. I think I can work through this one better if I just go ahead and claim it. 

A tornado ripped through my town. But my family and I survived it.

(*updated from six)

 I never did it before because, frankly – twitter, facebook, the blog – it can all get very repetitive. And I figure if you’ve read me here, you’ve read me enough. But some people might be more into one than the other, so I thought I should at least put it up there. Besides, with twitter you only get one-hundred-forty characters of a person at a time. Which might be preferable. You never know. 

Twitter is like facebook with status updates ONLY. You just go to it whenever you want, and answer the question “What are you doing?” Although, really, people would rather hear something along the lines of, “What are you thinking about?”, “What cool thing have you seen lately?”, or “Make me laugh.”

As a writer, I really like the challenge of saying something in 140 characters or less. I also like the discipline of trying to say things of actual interest. You can say, “I’m eating lunch.” But really? I mean, at least tell us that a pickle just fell in your lap.

To give you an idea, I wanted to present some of my favorite tweets (that’s what they’re called). First up: My sis. Felicity joined fairly recently, and she quickly noticed that certain members of the fam kept tweeting their progress in a certain exercise program, P90X. The tweet would start with what day they were on and proceed with how much they sweat and how much they hurt. So Felic had these two tweets that made my day:

Day 0 of P90X – it was awesome. I feel great. Ate ice cream for lunch.

Day -2 of P90X. Again, this is really going well. I accidentally walked the dog last night but I got back on track with pizza for breakfast.

Dr. Frank Maurio‘s bio says he is New York’s Psychologist to the Celebrities. He must have started following me when I tweeted about wanting to be the new castmember in Ocean’s 14 or something. His posts are little words of affirmation, which you’d think would be annoying. No sir. I ADORE them. He doesn’t tweet every minute of the day, which is nice. But just once every day or two, he zings you with something like this:

There is a responsibility that is uniquely yours in terms of allowing yourself to be your very best. Take a chance and go for the prize. 

And I gotta say, even though I got all swept up in the Ashton Kutcher race to beat CNN to one million followers (power to the people and all that), my favorite celebrity on twitter is a musician: John Mayer. You can count on him for laughs like this one, which he tweeted shortly after the donations for mosquito nets (to prevent malaria) had reached 300,000:

Is now not a good time to announce that I’ve bought 300,000 tiny scissors for mosquitoes? 

But besides the (admittedly irreverent) humor, you get little gems about songwriting like this:

Rare, but when you write a song and record it within 6 hours, you sort of listen to it as a gift. Like getting to know a different you. 

And I really liked the time that he said something about Thursdays giving him a false sense of Fridays, and later I saw this in response to the person who said, “You’re John Mayer, EVERY DAY is Friday:

I am a member of society like anyone else. I take my cues from the vibe at large.

And you know what? I believed him. Because that’s what twitter does – it connects you. It decreases every degree of separation to one. It makes you realize that what you have to say in 140 characters at any given moment of the day is every bit as noteworthy as what anyone else has to say. We’re all just trying to be the best version of ourselves. And we all need Fridays.

So, yea, I’m feeling kind of – well, not concerned – but interested – in the state of our intelligence. Because I know I’m not alone. I also know that at least I’m smarter than Kelly Pickler, who didn’t know if France was a country or not, and the teen Miss America contestant who stumbled over basic geography in a question about why American kids don’t know enough about geography and, seriously, most of the people interviewed by Jay Leno on the street outside of Universal Studios. I mean, that segment is just really, really sad.

Michael and I were talking about the economy today and various executive orders signed last week and the Climate Change formerly known as global warming. And of course, I eventually ran out of things I knew for sure and things of which I even had an educated opinion. That doesn’t take long for me when it comes to current events. I’ve paid more attention to the current presidency in two days than I ever paid attention before. I think it was the fingers-in-the-ears philosophy. If I don’t know it, it can’t scare me, la la la. I think I got that from a movie too. And I quote:

There’s always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser or a Corillian Death Ray or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they. . . Do . . . Not. . . . Know about it.

It was other people’s words that actually moved me more. It is impossible not to feel proud of my country when I hear someone like Donna Brazile say that Barack Obama will be inaugurated on steps that were built by slaves, men who probably never could have imagined that a black man would ever be taking the oath of office on the structure they built. I feel very moved by that just as I feel moved by the hope our president-elect has inspired in people across our nation and the world.

But there was one person I was worried about today. This is my sweet John Michael. You may know him as my oldest, the boy whose birthday I call the anniversary of my motherhood. The one who thinks donuts are too sticky and who once ironed a pair of shorts. And he believed in McCain. He got this passion all on his own. As you know, I wrestled with my voting decision almost up until the moment I walked into the booth, so I certainly wasn’t feeding him any propaganda. Michael decided a bit earlier than me, but was hardly campaigning for any candidate either. John heard about the candidates at school and made his choice. Some of my readers won’t understand this, but we’re talking about a 9-year-old boy who just received his first hunting rifle for his birthday, so gun control issues were important to him. The second issue, I’m not sure where it came from – but put them together and he believed that Obama meant to take our guns away and make boys and girls go to separate schools. I can’t think for the life of me where that second idea came from, and I’ve assured him it’s untrue – as is the first.

Still, though, like my 7-year-old, they just had a fixed idea that as Drew put it, “John McCain just seems wiser.” So when John came to me this morning and asked excitedly, “Who won?”, all that hope talk and look-how-far-we’ve come stuff went right out of my head as my heart ached for a little boy who can’t even vote but had learned to care. I was so proud of him for forming his own opinion and for standing by it despite plenty of voices around him suggesting otherwise. And I was sad for him.

So, Mr. Obama, you move me. You’ve raised a lot of hopes in this country and abroad. But I’m afraid there’s a very big task ahead of you for my heart. I’m so proud of my little guy for embracing so thoroughly the beauty of the country in which he was so very lucky to be born. Please don’t let him down. In four years, I hope he’s more proud of it still.

Each morning I drop off my third-grader at Ray Miller Elementary then turn right on Jamison to take my second-grader to the primary school. Today I was so excited to vote that I turned left on Jamison instead, which was the direction for my voting place. He was wrapped up in a toy and didn’t notice either.

Pretty soon, though, he asked me a question, and the sound
of his voice scared me half to death. So I whipped the car around in someone else’s voting location and got him to school on time.

I took my camera, because I was hoping there would be a big, dramatic line at the polls with “America the Beautiful” playing in the background in sort of a movie motage that is the greatness of democracy. Not so much. Although there were a lot of people there. I used to vote at the health department but this year
was moved to the Moose Lodge. I bet you big city folks
didn’t get to vote with a giant moose head over your booth.

I usually take all of my children too, but this year I just took Jake. I like to have at least one of them tagging along, witnessing the wonder of America. Jake was thoroughly impressed, but I think it was mostly with his red Gatorade and the fact that the older ladies kept telling him he was pretty. My boys get that descriptive a lot in the toddler years. I don’t mind, and they don’t notice – so it works out.

And my sticker, although you can’t see it here very well, is a
lovely “We the People” version with I Voted Today
at the bottom. I love our country.