Tales from Missouri

Well, here I am in the sizzling heart of America. I thought it was hot up in Illinois, but that was NOTHING compared with here! The temps are record-breaking here, too. The weather forecast for tonight showed that right this minute, at 11:00 at night, it's still 90 degrees out there. That's 32 degrees Celsius, hotter than it is in Penang during the daytime. And Penang is practically equatorial, for Pete's sake! The weather forecaster's prediction for temps throughout the day tomorrow read like this: Morning,78 degrees & already hot. Midday,95 & stay indoors. Late afternoon, 105 degrees (40.5 C) & record heat. By bedtime, 85 degrees and still miserable. Time for some indoor, air-conditioned activity!

On another weather-related subject . . . . Joplin, Missouri, experienced a monster tornado back on May 25. It was the worst one in 55 years or so. For that matter, 2011 has been an incredibly tornado-prone year, with over 1,000 of them so far and the season isn't over yet.

My friend whom I'm visiting here in Springfield, Missouri, has a young cousin, Kevin. He, along with his roommate, lived in Joplin, right in the path of that killer tornado. Somehow they both miraculously survived! They'd just moved into their second floor apartment when the tornado tore through it. They took shelter in the bathtub, but the tornado pulled both lads out and deposited them in a closet. It then knocked the door of the closet down on top of them and that's evidently what saved their lives.

When the dust had settled, they crawled out and looked at the other side of the door. It was riddled with shards of glass, bits of wood and other things that had been driven into the wood by the tremendous force of the wind. Theresa said that even now, two-plus months after the event, people are showing up at doctors' offices and hospitals, complaining of infections from things that had been driven under their skin by the incredibly powerful wind.

This is kind of gruesome, and I do apologize for that, but she also said officials were unable to get an accurate body count immediately after the tornado because sometimes they had body parts, rather than bodies, to count.

Kevin survived and at first they thought his stuff had, too. He'd just moved in, so a lot of his clothes, his computer and such were still in those big plastic tubs with the lock-on tops. In the aftermath of the tornado, he saw that many of them were still there with the lids on. However, there were teeny, tiny holes up near the handles under the lids. The tornado blew tiny particles of fiberglass insulation into the boxes, where it got into all his clothes. Even after they were washed, there were still so many particles in them, they all had to be thrown away even though they'd looked perfectly all right. His computer had been in a tub and it, too, seemed OK at first. But fiberglass from the roof insulation had gotten into that one as well, so his computer wouldn't even start up.

This 21-year-old kid had to get all new stuff, but at least he had his life to live and his family to support him. How about all the others who had neither? Whether we support the disaster victims in Japan or those here in Missouri or elsewhere, it's important for all of us to keep those people in our minds and hearts. we need to keep on giving and not forget about all these unfortunate folks even though the news media have moved on to other, "hot topics" like the weather.