Gladness

The morning of the hurricane I tossed through the stifling hotness of our sealed apartment, appreciating the little breeze made by our fans, when the power cut. Any Hollywood-ified natural disaster movie I’ve ever watched begins this way: the power cuts, which is actually the portentous beginning of evil winds, menacing volcanic eruptions, and ill-fated victims, slain by an un-motherly nature. There I awaited my own cruel end by asphyxiation from being trapped in the sardine-can-like apartment, trumpeted by some melancholy Hans Zimmer music score.

Feeling hungry, I braved the sprinkling of rain from our basement to the kitchen upstairs. Nasim had left her oatmeal still hot, in fear of her own safety. With no lights, I lifted the latches on all the windows and pushed them open a bit. As I frantically pulled perishables from the fridge and freezer, while also searching for breakfast, Rex darkened the doorway. “I wanna show you something,” he beckoned, grinning.

There, just below the cruel slope of our driveway, were green trees shifting violently in the increasing gusts of an oncoming storm. From where we stood, we felt only the embryonic brush of an excited zephyr. Rex turned, eyes delighted, “Pretty cool, huh?”

Expecting a torrent of rain and howls and terror, Nasim and I did things akin to building a living room tent; we had neat little piles of food and water, oil lanterns sitting eagerly on the table, and freshly charged electronics pulled securely from any open cracks. As the morning darkened, our phones lit up with text messages and calls from our mamas, Jahweh, Dara, Rheal, and some of our other new and old friends. Winston, our neighbor, stopped by us on his way from lunch to make sure we were alright. Jan, our old landlady, who is mostly deaf from Lupus and whose arm is inconveniently broken, texted to say she was locked in tight with water, ice, and chocolate, and that she was reading by the light of her headlamp. The only one truly unnerved was poor Rex, the caretaker of the Center where we stay, who sat listening to weather updates while nervously chain smoking in his apartment next to ours.

“Do you know what time this thing’s supposed to hit?” Nasim asked Jahweh during their phone conversation.

Jahweh sucked her teeth, “Girl, they sayin’ all kindsa things. Some sayin’ two, others say six.” They both laughed.

By the time Earl graduated from Category 2 to Category 3 and then 4, the eye was already well north of us and we weren’t suffering from anything but cabin fever. The winds died down almost completely before we slept.

I have to say, I was a little disappointed. No Hans Zimmer. No dramatic story of how we held on by our teeth while gales 100 miles per hour tried to rip us from our destinies of living long happy lives. In fact, we watched a movie and ate the last of Bonnie’s homemade coffee ice cream (it was going to melt anyway). No, the only thing unpleasant about the winds was the five day power outage, which didn’t exactly leave us hurting (we had a generator, which we connected to the water pump).
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Majestic turned eight this Sunday. She made sandwiches out of chocolate chip muffins and wheat thins at our kitchen table while we let Dara’s car cool en route to a surprise birthday party. There, where one man’s job was to renew the punch (Tang, Orange Juice, and Kool-Aid together in the same tangerine-colored cooler), Nasim and I stared at the red blob of Gaston on a Blackberry. “You see that? If it were gonna be a hurricane, it’d be a different shape.” Alright, juice man.

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Avocadoes, carambolas, and mangoes littered Susie’s yard where she was desperately trying still, after seven long hours, to rake up the mess of leaves and branches that had been strewn by the wind. When I came upon her she smiled broadly, tiredly, and offered me a bag of the fruit. Excitedly, I picked a few big avocadoes and mangoes and the ripest of the carambolas that were being thrown into the trash heap. Searching through the leaves for avocadoes, I piled them into five heaping groups and could swear there were more than one-hundred.

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“Miss Jan fell,” Keeyan said to me one morning.

“What?!” I looked around for her, heart pounding.

“Yeah, she alright though, just broke her wrist. You ain’t know? She been a while.”

Later that afternoon, upon receiving her text, I peeked through Miss Jan’s stained-glass door. She smiled weakly and pushed the dogs out after I slipped in. As we moved to her bedroom I felt the sadness in her steps. Smothered by the punishing weight of the decaying old social systems, Jan recounted the various murders, corruptions, and disgusting acts of humanity that she had heard or witnessed or read. We talked about the darkness in the world and I tried desperately to remind us of the brightness and rise of a new World Order. Perhaps to lighten the mood as much for my sake as hers, Jan strained to point out the humor of not being able to hear and now not being able to use one arm.

“A sense of humor, but also gladness is what we need in this life,” she told me. “Gladness I say because it’s the attitude we adopt in times of darkness. It’s finding the joy and being grateful.”
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Rain, once again, deters us this season. Not just big rain like the kind splashing from pregnant clouds, but hurricane rain that throws trees onto unlucky cars. Between hopping through puddles and short-lived showers, we find that our best laid plans often need three back-ups. For me, nothing is more disappointing than taking steps that fall through the soggy cracks. Darkness often creeps into our days. At times we think we might be totally misunderstood by the community until we suddenly find some fruit that has been thumped to the ground by the wind: some child gathers the children eagerly for class, a mother welcomes us into her home, a friend joins us in meeting a community of ripe people, being hopelessly tossed into the trash heap.

After the hurricane day-turned-night passed, I thought the sun never looked more brilliant.

It is my earnest prayer, that ye be not like unto this, but rather that ye keep your faces steadfastly turned to the light, so that ye may be as lighted torches in the dark places of life.

(Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, p. 20)