The Small Things

The news crews have moved on, overworked charitable groups are busy doing what they can for newer crises. Hurricane Katrina still makes the news; the hardest hit communities from Hurricane Rita get some exposure to the eyes of the world at large. After all, Galveston County was spared the worst of it; we were lucky. Lucky! Such a relative term that applies in cards, horse racing, and avoided automobile accidents. The cold equations that drive luck do not count the small things. They are statistically non-significant. Who dares speak for the small ones, when there are so many fresh, large events to occupy our minds?

I’ve walked to work for six months past a man clearing a burnt out site by hand. Bucket after bucket he fills up with debris, clearing the land one laborious inch after another. I don’t know why he has chosen to remove the charred reminders of a once proud house and business that way. He sits on an upturned bucket most days sorting small things into piles, and returns greetings with a pleasant face and smile. Tiny compared to New Orleans by others, but not a small thing to him.

There is a family in Hitchcock that evacuated for the hurricane in an overloaded elderly car with depressingly bald tires. They listened to the mandatory evacuation and obeyed, taking their last dollars out of the bank to do so. That car had several flats on the way, blew the radiator hose, and suffered the creaks and groans of carrying life to safety slow mile, by slow mile. Hourly workers, no one paid them for labor not done nor covered the spoiled food left behind in the refrigerator. Purchase of the cheapest tires they could find emptied their pockets and left them faced with falling behind on a bill or two. Without that car they could not get to their jobs, take the babies to the doctors, go grocery shopping when they could. A small thing perhaps, but to them it was almost the undoing of their struggles to get ahead in life.

A dog or two was left to roam the roads here and there; other pets died in overheated cars on that trip and are still mourned quietly by their owners. Children sleep again, nightmares about never-ending trips to nowhere have faded. Most of us have immersed ourselves back into the flow of our own lives. The small things are deemed no longer newsworthy, if they were ever more then filler in the first place.

As we enter another hurricane season I can’t help but wonder about all the small things. The small things leave tears in my heart and settle deep in my mind. They should not be forgotten, they mattered to the ones that went through it. The small things are the frameworks of our life together; they make us one and provide a personal memory of a statistically impersonal event. Will they matter more this time? Who will care enough to speak of them next year or the year after?