Lord, Have Mercy

I'd solicit your prayers for a couple of situations that have come close to our family in recent days. . .

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Our neighbors across the street are a young couple (well, younger than us), members of our Christian community. Jen takes a bit of pride in, years ago, having played something of a 'matchmaker' role for them. They have four children, three girls and a boy, ranging in age from 11 down to 5, for whom 6F has been a frequent babysitter. The husband/father (call him Al) is 36. I've known both him and his wife since their college days.

Last Wednesday, Al had a stroke. When he was very young (maybe four, or something like that), he had a brain tumor. It was treated agressively, with radiation, and probably some other stuff, and he never had any kind of recurrence. But the radiation and other agressive stuff that was done three decades ago, caused that part of his brain to 'age' more rapidly. Whatever the case, 36 is terribly young to be having a stroke. The immediate effects are paralysis of his left side, and significant difficulty speaking. His prognosis for survival is excellent, but it remains to be seen how much function he regains, and how long it takes.

Which, of course, leaves all sorts of unanswered questions for the future, as to what their life will be like, how they'll pay their bills, what will be the effect on their kids, etc, etc etc. . . Needless to say, it's a pretty freaky time for them. Al's wife hasn't had a 'real job' (ie, outside the home, for pay) in many years, and suddenly she's looking at having to do that again (and you may have noticed, all talk of recovery aside, the economy is still running somewhere short of 'robust')

It's been good to see our community rallying to their support. Another young family (with eight kids of their own) (no, not us; does it freak you out that there's more than one?) has taken their kids in indefinitely, so Al's wife can be with him in the hospital. And folks are putting together a meal schedule for them, so they can come home without the immediate pressure of putting food on the table.

Anyway, if you all could lift them up in your prayers, they can surely use them. . .

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My youngest brother and his wife live in Tucson, Arizona. They met when they were both in college in Montana (Jen and I, and 7M, who was a newborn at the time, went to their wedding in Missoula - in the church that was used in filming A River Runs Through It). After graduation, they moved to Tucson, where his wife's family lives. My sister-in-law is an elementary school teacher.

My brother has always enjoyed telling the story about the time he stopped at the vacuum-cleaner store to pick up some bags for their vac, only to encounter Paul McCartney picking up his own vac from the repair counter (the McCartneys had a ranch outside Tucson; I've always gotten a kick from the idea of Paul McCartney picking up his own vaccum cleaner from the repair shop, and not just sending someone to pick it up for him) (or, for that matter, that Paul McCartney gets his vacuum cleaner repaired, instead of just pitching it and getting a new one).

Last Saturday morning, my SIL was out doing some shopping at a shopping center near their home. Suddenly, from the other side of the shopping center, shots rang out, and everything was thrown into confusion. In a matter of minutes, med-evac helicopters were taking victims to the hospital. Yeah, she was there.

She's OK; at least in a physical sense. But it has shaken her terribly. The 9-year-old girl who was killed attended a school near their house, which their nephew also attends. The 'degrees of connection' of the tragedy spread out all over their neighborhood.

I cannot fathom what could possibly motivate someone to kill a 9-year-old girl to make some kind of twisted political statement. I have my own political opinions, some of them quite firmly held, but I cannot imagine taking a gun to shoot up a shopping center in the hopes of killing my political 'adversaries'. This ain't freakin' Nazi Germany. . .

The victims and their families need our prayers; and Rep. Giffords, and the other wounded, for their recovery. Quite apart from their status as public servants, or members of one or the other political party, these are nonetheless human beings, with families and loved ones of their own. And please pray for the people of Tucson, including my SIL, who didn't ask for this to happen in their back yard, and are, as you might imagine, pretty deeply shaken by it.

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Oh Lord, have mercy. . .

The Fire Next Door

My friend Michelle Hickman, over at The Surly Writer, wrote a while back about her Neighbors From Hell. Which poked my memory for a somewhat similar story from my own young life. . . ------------------------- I bought my first house a few months after I started my first 'real job', a few months after I finally finished college. It just seemed like The Thing to Do - you know, getting 'established', owning a house, being in debt, all that good stuff. Alas, I was too terribly 'green' to know much what I was doing, and I didn't make the wisest choice for my First House. It was small, had virtually no yard, was three doors from a main thoroughfare, and two from a KFC (those Eleven Secret Herbs and Spices are tasty enough when you're eating some chicken-fast-food; but when they inundate your senses day after day after DAY after freakin' DAY - not so much). And there was an alley (sort of a cut-through in the middle of the block; I think it was meant to provide access to back-door parking for businesses along the aforementioned thoroughfare) that ran right alongside the house. But, being so new to drawing a paycheck, I hadn't saved up much of a down-payment, and so this little mislocated dwelling was all I could afford, just yet. This lack of available cash also had its impact in terms of what part of town I could afford to buy into, and who my neighbors were. Now, I had lived in the same general neighborhood a couple summers when I was in college, and I rather enjoyed living in a more, um, 'working-class' neighborhood, alongside folks who were pretty 'real' and unpretentious. Which has its good side and its bad side. (It's sorta like what Bill Cosby once said, in response to the assertion that 'cocaine intensifies your personality' - "But what if you're an asshole?"; unpretentiousness can cut both ways. . .) My closest next-door neighbors were a wonderful old couple, whose children were our age. They could not have been more delightful - we had each other over for dinner, and in the few years we lived in that house, we formed a friendship that lasted for years. Jen and I went to the wife's funeral visitation just a couple weeks ago; she was 96 years old. My other neighbors, across the alley, were not quite so delightful. It was a couple (I don't know if they were married; not that it matters, at least for purposes of this story), probably close to my age, or a few years older, and their relationship was, how shall I say - volatile. Both of them had a fondness for the distilled spirits, and it was a regular occurrence, especially on weekends, for me to be awakened at 2 or 3AM by the two of them screaming at each other in their front yard. I don't know what either of them did for their daily sustenance, but I'm pretty sure that at least part of it involved sales of recreational pharmaceuticals. Once, I came home from work and parked my car behind the house, off the alley, and saw the guy toss a small packet down from the second-floor balcony, to a guy I'd never seen before, waiting in the alley below. So I feel justified in saying that these were not the nicest of people. Of course, this was also around the time that Jen and I were about to begin our courtship, and in the back of my mind was the thought that, if all went well, I'd be bringing my bride to live with me in this house before too much longer, and possibly raising children there, as well (if I'd only known, heh-heh-heh). So one night, when I was once again awakened in the middle of the night to screaming and multiple crashes of broken glass (both windows and whiskey bottles), I turned to prayer. I told God that I aimed to bring my wife to this house, hopefully before too long, and to raise children here, as well. It was all very earnest and young-aspiring-husband protective. I told Him that I couldn't properly bring my family into a house with neighbors like these. In my desperation, I asked God to get them out of there - move them someplace else, whatever - just get them away from next door to my house. And then I drifted back to sleep. ------------------------- As it happened, the next weekend, I was gone on a retreat. It was a good retreat, and I returned home refreshed in body, mind and spirit. As I turned my car onto my street, and then into the alley, a surreal scene greeted me. The roof of the house across the alley was missing, and the entire second floor was blackened and charred. A mattress lay in the alley, still smoldering from a few burned holes. "Oh, Lord!" I thought. "I didn't mean for You to burn their house down!" Immediately the thought came into my head, "You asked me to get them out of there. They're gone." And I confess that chills ran down my spine, when I considered the almost off-handed (though certainly desperate) way in which I'd prayed the prayer, and now to be faced with what, at least to my eyes, was the very stark answer my prayer had recieved. . . ------------------------- I don't know what ever became of those neighbors of mine. As far as I was able to know from the other neighbors, neither of them was hurt in the fire, so I was glad to know that. But I never saw either of them again after that, as far as I know. Within a few weeks, the landlord had begun repairs on the burned-out second floor of the house, and before the snow fell, the house was good as new, at least to outward appearances. Jen and I got married the following summer, and we lived in that house for another two-and-a-half years. 1F was born during the time we lived there. When she was six months old, we moved to a larger house two blocks away, which was more happily located in real estate terms. We lived in that house for 17 years, moving to our current house ten years ago this spring. I owned that first house for another two years, renting it out (and proving to myself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I really, really didn't want to be a landlord) until I was finally able to sell it. But that's another story for another day. . .