Wednesday, September 24, 2008 8:46 PM CDT
COLUMN: Hurricane nearly puts teens' dignity on the clothesline for all to see
By PENNY WEAVER, Night news editor
pweaver@jg-tc.com
I got the biggest kick out of a friend’s narrative via email several days after Hurricane Ike hopped, skipped and jumped all over the Gulf Coast.
As they say, “everything’s big in Texas,” and that includes a sense of humor. I lived in Houston a couple of years, and that’s enough to experience the big ego that Texans have, as well, and I found it endearing. It’s kind of a supercharged sense of state pride.
One of my friends is on the Houston City Council, so she updated constituents and the rest of us on a regular basis after Ike did its damage in the Bayou City and surrounding areas.
Many folks in Houston — and I’m sure in plenty of places in Texas and Louisiana; I’m just using Houston as an example — still are without electricity nearly two weeks after Ike’s Sept. 13 landfall. I checked the list of zip codes on my friend Sue’s list, and where I lived from 2001-03 would still be in the dark even now.
Hey, at least Houstonians are saving on their electric bills. I bet if their provider was AmerenCIPS, they’d find a way to charge people anyway — and charge extra for having to do their job and get service back up after a storm.
But I digress. You’ve already read page A1 anyway.
Sue related the many things you’d expect in the wake of a hurricane: damage to homes, fences, trees and yards, if they were still standing at all; fights against flooding; struggles with how to get more food and water until grocery stores were reopened; and injuries to people, which luckily were few.
Most of us have at least experienced something similar, such as being without electricity during and in the wake of a thunderstorm, albeit on a smaller scale.
The first order of business was evaluation of people and property. The next was continued survival without electricity and “new” ways of preserving food, water and ice.
As most of you parents can imagine, teenagers in this situation got bored faster than Ike’s tremendous winds blew. Sue said she introduced her teenage son to a wonderful activity called sweeping, via a broom, to help keep him busy. With school still out, this activity came in lieu of other chores, such as mowing the lawn, that use up precious gasoline.
I liked her perspective on the sound of an electricity deprived neighborhood: Instead of just cars coming and going, garage doors opening and closing, “new” sounds emerged in the city: People on front porches visiting, or standing across the fence — or where it used to be — talking.
Somewhere, in what Sue called the “Island of Darkness,” a youngster practiced a clarinet, someone played the piano and a mother’s voice floated down the street as she told her child not to do that again.
Such sounds are what Sue and many of us remember from our childhoods, and in many neighborhoods these days those sounds are gone. But the renewal of more of a sense of community is among the good things that came of something bad, Sue said, and she hopes they continue even after Houston regains some normalcy.
My favorite commentary from Sue regards keeping kids motivated while also working within the constraints of not having electricity. She related that once she threatened to hand wash her kids’ undergarments last week and hang them on the line outside to dry, they got life in perspective quickly.
According to Sue, an even more dire threat is for a parent to suggest that they will hang their own underwear on the clothesline outside — which draws extreme protests from the younger set.
Sue’s grandmother, she explained, would hang a kid’s underwear on the clothesline most visible to the street if that youngster was in trouble, while those who behaved got their items hung on a line behind the bed sheets. Other parents did the same thing.
So that’s where Sue got the inspiration for her laundry threat —and in her childhood neighborhood, everyone knew who was in trouble by where their underwear hung on the clothesline.
It’s a sense of humor that sustains human beings in such tough circumstances. I’m proud to know people with such guts, both in Houston and around here.
What amazed me in a negative way after Hurricane Ike was that so many people so quickly lined up for government aid such as water and other supplies. Doesn’t anyone keep backup supplies of food, water and other necessary items on hand?
I know I do, and I bet many people who live around here do, too, but it certainly seems to me that it’s even more important for folks along the coast to do so, as hurricanes can be so devastating. And, with today’s forecasting, I’d surely think everyone had time to stock up.
Well, it’s easy to second-guess, I suppose. I also wouldn’t live in a place such as Galveston that is so close to the Gulf, or anywhere directly on any ocean coast, simply in deference to the odds of such powerful storms.
I bet folks who live in those places wouldn’t live in “Tornado Alley” in the Midwest, either. What do I know anyway? I never thought it was that big of a deal to hang underwear on a clothesline. Everybody wears some ... I hope.
Nevertheless, thanks, Mom, for always hanging our clothes outside in the back yard. I never knew how lucky I was.
As a follow up: Apparently I spoke too soon about the vending machine prices in my column on Sept. 18. Now they’ve actually gone up: what was a 65-cent candy bar is now a 90-cent candy bar.
Good heavens! Raise it 10 cents, and I could sympathize, but is a 25-cent jump really, truly justified?
Oh well — who am I to complain? I shouldn’t be eating that stuff anyway. I’ll bring my own snacks to work, like I should. Maybe someday they’ll be real, honest-to-goodness healthy snacks, too.
If I need any incentive, all I have to do is imagine my mom marching over to my house and putting a clothesline up in my front yard.
Quick! Someone get me an orange!
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Read all over wrote on Sep 25, 2008 7:11 AM:
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"Many folks in Houston -- and I'm sure in plenty of places in Texas and Louisiana; I'm just using Houston as an example -- still are without electricity": You work for a NEWSPAPER (sort of, anyway) -- can't you find out where people are without electricity?
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I wonder whether Harry Reynolds and Penny Weaver flipped a coin to see who was going to have to write to the bottom of the page this time. "