Well, I have indeed been offline for a while. I have been in too pissy a mood to write for the last week or so. Can’t guarantee this won’t be a pissy epistle (at least I am still alliterative), but I’ll give you a couple of the high points.

I’ve been on crutches for two weeks now. I have an historic and unprecedented (for me anyway) case of tendonitis of the right foot. Totally my own fault, the result of overuse, and of not sitting down occasionally, like I should have, when it started to hurt. Add to that the fact that business at the lye-berry doubles in the summer, and I’ve been on my feet way, way too much. I know better, but when there are people waiting in line, you wait on them. Anyway, I woke up two weeks ago and couldn’t walk. Had to call the foot doc (God bless you, Jim) and get them to call me in a pair of crutches until they could see me in the office. A week ago today he gave me a cortisone shot, a medication with which I’ve had good results in the past, but this time it did almost nothing. I can’t get another shot for another week, so they’re going to get me some physical therapy.

The really crappy thing about being on crutches is that, while using them, you don’t have the use of your hands. I have gotten really frustrated having to allow others to carry my purse, book bag, and the tiny ice chest in which I tote the small ice packs that I wear on my foot all day long. My employees have even had to go fill my water cup for me. I always wanted a personal assistant, but this is not how I wanted it to happen.

While I’m on a rant, let me just say that I hate – no, the more accurate word is despise – the fact that, when I’m at home, I can’t do anything more useful than smear up a peanut butter sandwich. I have a house full of boxes yet unpacked, and an office that is in complete disarray, but I can’t have of the fun of putting things in cabinets and organizing shelves because that would involve too much standing. I remember a few years ago in a hotel room in Clear Lake, Iowa, making a promise to God that if I survived the night, I would consider any day without food poisoning to be a good day. Now I feel the same about crutches.

And since we’ve already begun the pity party, I went to my general practitioner yesterday to get the results of my annual blood work, and learned that my triglycerides are four times what they should be. That’s normal, cubed. My cholesterol couldn’t even be accurately measured – something to do with a ratio to the triglycerides, if I understood correctly. Anyway, I’m on Lipitor and off ice cream for a while. Not sure what I’m going to use as my drug of choice for stress now. Maybe I’ll have to take up drinking.

Seems like all I do lately is post photos of storm damage on my blog. The last was from my mom’s house, which was hit by the May 10 tornado. This one is from my new home in Joplin – an apparent “micro-burst” in the wee hours of Saturday morning brought a very large Sweet Gum tree down on my house, destroying the carport. My friend Eugene and his crew spent Saturday evening and Sunday morning getting it off the house, and I’m starting to recover from the shock. (The sound a tree makes when it lands on your house is one you would rather go your whole life without hearing, and it’s especially traumatic when it yanks you out of a REM cycle.)

I called the police first thing, because (A) I knew I was rattled and I wanted someone to tell me what to do next, and (B) I couldn’t see how much damage was done, and whether I needed to call the fire department, the utility companies, etc. The very nice officer told me that all the Empire District trucks were busy, so I guess there were other pockets of damage. But it was weird – when I went outside to see the tree on the house (a sight that set my heart pounding so hard that I was worried I would have to be taken to the emergency room), there was almost no wind. Lightening was all around, and it began to rain when the officer arrived, but it seemed as if the damage was confined to that one tree. (Eugene would later report that a second tree had limbs broken off at the top, and he removed them too.)

As you can see in the photo, the tree wasn’t uprooted, but broken off at the base. Eugene says that is common in Sweet Gum trees – they are heavy but not very strong.

So my ’96 Oldsmobile, which I bought used in 2001, has this feature that I call the Old Lady Alarm. If you leave your turn signal on for, say, more than 30 seconds, a bell begins to sound. Clearly the intention is to spare you the embarrassment of going down the road with your proverbial pants down.

The thing is, if you’re sitting at a stop light, and the car is merely idling, you can hear the clicking of the turn signal and will turn it off on your own. The only time you need reminding is when you’re traveling down the interstate at 75 MPH after merging from the on-ramp. Thus the noise takes you completely by surprise, and it is intentionally loud, so rather than sounding like “Hey, stupid, you left your turn signal on,” it sounds like “THE DEATH STAR HAS CLEARED THE PLANET. THE DEATH STAR HAS CLEARED THE PLANET.”

I nearly soiled myself, had a nervous breakdown, and wrecked the car, all in the same second. Kind of a toss-up whether it would have been less embarrassing to just have people honk their horn at me.

Drumroll, please – I have Internet in my house! This posting is coming to you from my very own home office. I finally found the time to read the directions to get the cable hooked up, and, predictably, the modem didn’t work, so they had to send a technician over. Good thing I saved that project for my day off. Anywho, I hope to be posting more often now that I don’t have to do it from street corners.

The job at the lye-berry has some of the oddest forms of satisfaction. My staff and I are the front line of defense for complaints great and small, but, I am surprised to learn, I have garnered something of a reputation as being able to deal well with unhappy campers. If I ever leave this job, I’ll have volumes of stories to tell, but as it is, most of it must remain confidential.

More soon, it is to be hoped. Stay loose.

Our insurance company at work sent out a phone number at which those affected by the tornadoes could call for grief counseling. I surprised myself by calling it last week.

One of the people who died in the tornado was Kathy Rountree, the former Kathy Bilke. She was a couple years behind me in school, and though we didn’t know each other well, we had worked on an art project together. When I learned that not only had Kathy perished, but also her husband, her young son, and her mother, I literally didn’t know how to feel. It was a shock, of course, but I hadn’t seen Kathy in many years, so I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to feel a sense of loss, at least not a personal loss.

Then I thought back to how Kathy and I made jokes about the giant mural we worked on at Seneca High School. The art teacher’s design – on which neither Kathy nor I had any input; we were just transposing it into a larger size – was highly stylized, and we thought some of the Indians looked a little funny. One particular brave was seated facing away from the viewer, and his loincloth bisected his ample waist in such a way that it looked like he had an additional set of gluteal muscles. Kathy would say, “I’m telling you, that Indian has two butts.” Her sense of humor was really dry, and I liked her immediately. I remember thinking that if it weren’t the end of the school year, and I weren’t graduating and going off to college, Kathy and I might have become good friends.

So, when I learned after the May 10 tornadoes that Kathy had died, my brain sort of froze up, and continued to do so every time I tried to process that information. I began having symptoms of depression, which led me to call the grief counselor. Days later, I found myself driving down 7th Street on my lunch hour, thinking of Kathy saying, “That Indian has two butts,” and I burst into tears. I sobbed for the loss of a friendship that never really got started, and for the girl that Kathy had been, and for the wife and mother she had become, and the friend she clearly was to so many others. It seems so wrong that her personal history has reached its conclusion.

I’ve decided I do have the right to grieve for Kathy, and for her husband and child that I never met, and for her mother. I am allowed to grieve for Paul Gallemore, who I probably never passed more than fifty words with in my entire life, but who was the daddy to two good girls that I grew up with. I know how much losing a daddy hurts, so I will feel their pain along with them.

I read in a book once that there is no wrong way to grieve. I’ll keep that thought as I continue to try to understand this tragedy.