July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
News weighs heavy on her mind (9/12/05)
As I See It
By By Diana Dolecki-
Yesterday’s news. That’s what the tragedy in New Orleans will be by the time you read this. Yesterday’s news.
The newspaper headlines no longer scream about anarchy in the streets of a far away town. There are no more inane quotes from someone famous saying that these people have never had it so good, that shelters are better than the squalor they are used to.
We have returned to the everyday business of relating local events. We scan the paper to find out if any of our neighbors was arrested recently or why the alley across the way has been blocked off for over a week. News that is closer to home makes the front page and stories of storm victims and the ongoing challenge of recovering from Mother Nature’s hissy fit are regulated to inside pages because that is yesterday’s news.
Except … when my daughter calls on her way home from a 12-hour shift in a Houston hospital, she no longer tells me that they were bored and took turns doing lunges down the hallway to strengthen their legs. Her stories are more somber now. She talks about patients with tales of woe that make the admitting personnel cry. She tells me about people who beg not to be sent back to the shelters because they are afraid. There is silence on the telephone as we both wonder, “What if we were the dispossessed, the bereft?”
That thought is too awful to contemplate so we change the subject and speak of how her air conditioner at home went on strike. We talk about how the repairman and his wife took pity and came immediately to fix it because my daughter is five months pregnant. It is not pleasant to be pregnant in the late summer heat of Texas. We grow silent again and our thoughts turn to all those who are pregnant and homeless. There are worse things than to be without air conditioning in the last days of summer.
I tell her about going to visit my brother and his in-laws over the holiday weekend. I make her laugh with tales of pulling my nine-year-old nephew on an inner tube behind the boat and how he almost capsized several times. I forgot to tell her that my brother’s latest invention - a recumbent bike with three wheels - now operates under its own power. The last time I rode this contraption my brother tied a rope to it and towed me down the street. It is the only time in my life I have been able to ride a bike without falling off. Even though it has three wheels and therefore should properly be called a trike, my brother calls it a bike and since it is his invention that’s what I call it, too.
We laugh about other inventions of his. Most of his contraptions don’t have an easy way to stop. You usually have to jump off or in the case of the bike, the brakes are located conveniently on the soles of your shoes as you drag them along the ground. This has caused some near crashes and minor panic attacks but so far no broken bones.
We chatter about this and that but always in the background is yesterday’s news. People who no longer have the luxury of boats and bikes linger in our minds.
I drop my dollar in the collection cans and hope it actually gets to someone who can use it instead of going to fuel the bureaucracy, as I fear it will. I don’t know how else to help as prayer can only do so much. Yesterday’s news is on my mind.[[In-content Ad]]
The newspaper headlines no longer scream about anarchy in the streets of a far away town. There are no more inane quotes from someone famous saying that these people have never had it so good, that shelters are better than the squalor they are used to.
We have returned to the everyday business of relating local events. We scan the paper to find out if any of our neighbors was arrested recently or why the alley across the way has been blocked off for over a week. News that is closer to home makes the front page and stories of storm victims and the ongoing challenge of recovering from Mother Nature’s hissy fit are regulated to inside pages because that is yesterday’s news.
Except … when my daughter calls on her way home from a 12-hour shift in a Houston hospital, she no longer tells me that they were bored and took turns doing lunges down the hallway to strengthen their legs. Her stories are more somber now. She talks about patients with tales of woe that make the admitting personnel cry. She tells me about people who beg not to be sent back to the shelters because they are afraid. There is silence on the telephone as we both wonder, “What if we were the dispossessed, the bereft?”
That thought is too awful to contemplate so we change the subject and speak of how her air conditioner at home went on strike. We talk about how the repairman and his wife took pity and came immediately to fix it because my daughter is five months pregnant. It is not pleasant to be pregnant in the late summer heat of Texas. We grow silent again and our thoughts turn to all those who are pregnant and homeless. There are worse things than to be without air conditioning in the last days of summer.
I tell her about going to visit my brother and his in-laws over the holiday weekend. I make her laugh with tales of pulling my nine-year-old nephew on an inner tube behind the boat and how he almost capsized several times. I forgot to tell her that my brother’s latest invention - a recumbent bike with three wheels - now operates under its own power. The last time I rode this contraption my brother tied a rope to it and towed me down the street. It is the only time in my life I have been able to ride a bike without falling off. Even though it has three wheels and therefore should properly be called a trike, my brother calls it a bike and since it is his invention that’s what I call it, too.
We laugh about other inventions of his. Most of his contraptions don’t have an easy way to stop. You usually have to jump off or in the case of the bike, the brakes are located conveniently on the soles of your shoes as you drag them along the ground. This has caused some near crashes and minor panic attacks but so far no broken bones.
We chatter about this and that but always in the background is yesterday’s news. People who no longer have the luxury of boats and bikes linger in our minds.
I drop my dollar in the collection cans and hope it actually gets to someone who can use it instead of going to fuel the bureaucracy, as I fear it will. I don’t know how else to help as prayer can only do so much. Yesterday’s news is on my mind.[[In-content Ad]]
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