Heroic Efforts

Just a day after a tornado in Edmond sent us to my parents' storm shelter, another much bigger and much more violent tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma, 22 miles south of us.  The tornado hit two elementary schools, and seven children died in the basement of one of them. This is the fifth major tornado to hit Moore since 1998. 
    I was asleep while all this was going on.  Gaby was watching the coverage when I got up, and we had two different channels on two different TVs going for several hours.  As my friend Mark said on Facebook, " This is like watching the 9/11/01 coverage. I want to turn it off but feel honor bound to watch it, you know?"
I personally couldn't post anything on Facebook.  The normal politico-economic stuff that usuall interests me just lost its flavor.  Even the project I worked on last night, which I would love to show off normally, because it's turning out really good, just didn't seem approprate.  I 'liked' some others' posts, but I just didn't have words that someone else hadn't already said.
      I particularly related to something my friend Becca said which was that she really wished she could actually be there to dig through the rubble, just to feel she was actually doing something.  It turned out, though, that she did have an outlet.  She's the Chairman of the Blue Energy Commitee at the hotel, and she spent the day compiling a list of volenteers for Feed The Children, and was an integral part in organizing the donations sent from the hotel.  So she got to be a heroine after all.   
    We needed to go to the grocery store today, and I had seen on Facebook a list of items that were needed to be donated, so I decided to pick up some of those as well.  Somehow I got very emotionally involved with this particular trip to the store.  I managed to control myself, but every time I saw someone go by with a cart loaded up with diapers and bottled water, I could have burst out crying right there in the store.  It was a totally unexpected reaction.
    We took our donations to one of the local TV stations, where Becca had told me a Feed The Children truck was located.  Three guys there separated our stuff out to pallettes loaded with like items.  I felt inadequate.  But time and money are not in great supply at our house, and I could have used that as an excuse to sit at home and do nothing.  I guess I should be satisfied that I did not.