"There's a Story Behind this Duck..."

I've been working on this blog entry for a month. I was about to give up, but then Ben called yesterday and told me St. Mark's was looking to compile various perspectives on the floods. Did I have any thing I could pass along? As it turns out, I did.

Ben and I were among several people who helped clear out a handful of the houses which had been affected by the flooding in Cedar Rapids. There are no words for the devastation – the sludge that covered the floors, the piles of mold that had replaced carpet, and the smell that I will always remember when I see photos from that week in June.

We’ve had lots of people who, when they hear we worked in these homes, want us to talk about it, to describe for them the things we saw. But usually we find ourselves at a loss for words; we just don’t know how many ways we can say, “It was awful,” “You can’t imagine it,” or “It was heartbreaking.” The other day, I ran across this quote from the typescript of T.S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman: “It’s strange that words are so inadequate. And yet we go on trying to compel them to our service. Though all words fail, even falsify our meaning.” Eliot’s sentiment captured much of my experience of these floods. Words were so inadequate, yet over and over I have seen people turn to language and stories to help them move on from this tragedy – those people interviewed on the news, my students and their moving responses to the floods, our own feeble attempts to articulate this experience for our far away friends and family, and those people who we helped and the stories they told us.

What I have learned from those we worked for is that it is not the stories of the larger devastation that are the most moving or heartfelt. Water marks on the roof, mold spores, rotting floors and drywall – these things are awful, but they are so catastrophic that many have trouble grasping what these signs of devastation truly mean. The stories that give us the most empathetic understanding of these terrible events are those that speak about the little losses – the boxes of mason jars, the books, the plates, the odd and ends that inhabit junk drawers and storage cellars. These everyday things could just have easily been from our own houses, our parents’ houses, our grandmothers’ cellars. After working with the victims of these floods, I found I mourned for the mundane – for the everyday clutter, comfort, and memories that were now garbage.

It was Dennis, and his duck, that taught me the importance of telling these little stories. As we worked to clear out the area that used to be his back porch, he started handing us a number of plastic, decoy ducks: “These ducks will need to go, but I wish I could save this one. There’s a story behind this duck. Mother will be very sad to lose him.” It was a plastic duck – one of those oddities which we all have in our homes, a thing that other people would shake their heads at and wonder why we ever keep such a thing. But there was a story behind it, and that story made it important. More than once, as we were carrying his belongings out of the house and garage, Dennis stopped us to tell stories about the objects or about himself, to show us a photo of his cat on his cell phone. He didn’t want to stop us from taking his items to curb; he just wanted to tell us their stories before we did. I began to realize he was eulogizing. He was sharing the memories associated with these belongings, so that even though they were gone, the part of them that mattered, their stories, not only lived on in him but in us as well.

As I listened to Dennis’s stories, I remembered the 80 year old woman, Thelma, who we had helped earlier that day. She sat in a chair in the middle of her yard as she watched us carry the contents of her basement to the curb. She was a picture of propriety with N-95 mask on her face. Ben asked her if there was anything she wanted us to save; she requested we salvage only three things – a toolbox, an old radio, and a box of tea cups. We found the toolbox and the radio almost immediately, but we could not find the tea cups. We fingered each soggy, cardboard box through multiple layers of gloves; we scanned the dark, mucky floor for shards of China, but we found nothing. We began to feel like failures. She had asked for so little, and still, we could not fulfill this one small request. Then, finally, in the last box left on the fruit cellar shelves, Ben found them. We were giddy with the discovery.

When I hauled the next load of glass to the curb, Thelma was sitting there, still perfectly proper, except now a sludge covered box sat next to her. And peaking over the top of that mucky mess, there was a lip of bone white China, rimmed in gold, looking as prim as its owner in spite of its miserable surroundings. At that moment, I had a sudden urge to walk over to her, sit cross-legged in front of her, and ask her to tell me the story of the tea cups. Why were they so important? Who were they from? What had she used them for? But I pushed away that thought. We were not here to listen to stories; we were here to clear out this basement, to get the work done, and to move onto the next house.

But as I stood at the next house listening to Dennis’s stories, I realized how right that impulse to sit and listen was. Our ministry was not only to do the physical labor – to begin the mending process of the material structures – but also to assist in the personal journeys of healing, to sit and listen, to assist in the eulogies of these scattered, random pieces of everyday life. I thought of Mary, who “seated herself at the Lord’s feet and stayed there listening to his words” and Martha who ask Jesus to set her sister straight, to tell her to get back to work. Jesus told her, “ ‘Martha, Martha, you are fretting and fussing about so many things; only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen what is best; it shall not be taken away from her’ ” (Luke 10: 38-42). I had feared failing Thelma when we could not find the tea cups, but I think my failure was not asking her about them once they were found. I failed by not sitting with her, listening, while she watched her life move past her to the growing pile of trash on the curb. The work was necessary, yes, but it was not what was “best.”

I wish I was a poet. If I could make a list of the things I carried to the curbside into melodic memorial, I could preserve them for the people who once loved and treasured them; I could make the eulogy I failed to listen to that afternoon. But I’m not a poet. I can offer you nothing more than a simple list of some of the things I encountered as we cleaned houses in Cedar Rapids this summer – my humble and inadequate memorial to the lives and stories as they were the day before the river changed everything:

* A Stetson Hat
* An old fashion school desk
* A turquoise and green printed pillow, which belong to the cat
* A kitchen glass full of sludge
* A basket full of plastic detergent cups, the kind that come free with powdered detergent
* A handful of army men, working their way out of the muck, as if they were in a small budget war film
* A dime store copy of Tarzan
* National Geographics, years and years of National Geographics
* A doll dress hanging on a small wooden hanger which was tacked onto one of the basement posts
* Dozens and dozens of glass milk bottles
* A box full of letters, neatly organized and tied into bundles
* A pair of men’s boots which surely belonged to someone who is no longer living
* A plastic duck…there was a story behind that one

For more responses to the Floods of ’08, visit the blog created by my Mount Mercy Students at http://www.whenfloodinghappens.blogspot.com/