Sunshine and Storms

The sun is shining brightly outside my office window and above the roof of the house across the street I see beautiful blue sky. A perfect day in a quaint, quiet neighborhood. You’d think to look at it, that "peaceful" would be the typical descriptor.
However, if you walk out on the front porch, as I did a few minutes ago, you’ll get a completely different perspective. The porch is spattered with mud, littered by leaves and looking pretty much disreputable. It’s not that we haven’t been keeping neat and clean around here. It’s that last night we had a tremendous storm. The wind blew like crazy, hail banged against the roof and the cars, and the rain was coming in horizontal.
I was talking with one of my neighbors about the wild night. In our typical Spanglish discussion she used the Spanish word for storm, "tormenta". That word says things that the English equivalent just doesn’t touch upon.
Lately, it seems that our economy has come upon some really stormy weather. I guess, like Global Warming, part of it is completely natural and expected and part of it is man made. But it doesn’t really matter how it got here, what matters is how we get through it.
We all hate to see people suffering. And those who are more familiar with it, hate it the worst.
Years ago, back in my corporate life, I was given the task of heading up the United Way Fund Drive. At the launch of the campaign, we had a photographer and a staff writer and we went up to the CEOs office and he presented us with a personal check. We took his photo and wrote up something for the newsletter.
After that, I went around to all the high paid corporate officers and they all wrote checks. And I thought I was getting somewhere. But as I worked my way down the payscale, I discovered something surprising. The folks in Maintenance and Housekeeping, they were in no position to write big checks, but what they could do was bi-monthly withdrawals from their wages. And they did that. Folks who were making just over minimum wage were finding a way to donate hundreds of dollars to this cause.
I remember thinking, maybe they’re not adding it up, maybe they don’t understand how much they’re giving. So I asked one young woman who worked in the laundry, "Do you realize how much this amounts to over a year?" She nodded. "I’ve been burned out," she told me. "I lost everything. I know how it feels and I’m grateful for all those strangers who found a way to help me."
I guess what that says to me is that, sooner or later, most of us find ourselves on both the up and the down side of the economic world. If we can help somebody else, then we really should. And when times get so tough that we can hardly take care of ourselves, then we should be just as eager to accept help when it’s offered.
While you’re in the middle of it, the storm completely consumes your senses. You hear the scream of the wind, the moaning of the trees. You see the flashes of lighting on the swirling water in the street. You smell ozone and you taste the rain.
There is a tension to it that can so easily slip into plain old-fashioned terror. Once that happens, well you don’t forget it soon.
It’s one of the truths of writing, that authors allow the same themes to creep into their work time and time again. The stories may be 180 degrees dissimilar, but somehow when you boil down what’s being said, you get the same thing. We’re like one trick ponies. We’ve got this tiny piece of human insight and we put it out there again and again and again.
I guess my piece of insight is that life, although unmercifully short, is amazingly long. Things change and despite terrible storms that torment us today, tomorrow may look completely different. It may well bring that beautiful, peaceful calm. Different enough to have us smiling out the office window.