Still Standing

The worst part of living in the aftermath of a major disaster is that life goes on.  The months after are kind of like that moment right after you catch your pinkie toe at a right angle to a chair leg—You know, that moment when you can’t talk, can’t breathe & the world practically stops turning as you process the pain?

Except it doesn’t stop turning. Babies are born, loved ones die, kids graduate college and move away, and you keep getting older. Life moves on, and there’s not even a single still moment to take a deep breath and yell “DAMN IT THAT HURT!”  

The magnitude of the damage the storm inflicted, not just to our homes and buildings but to the collective mental health of our community, cannot be overstated. The knowledge that nothing will ever be the same—that there is a before and an after and no other option—it takes a piece of your heart.  

At times, this recovery feels an awful lot like grief. 

Nothing will ever be the way it was before the storm but it will be normal again one day;  hopefully, a new and better normal. What makes this place the only place I want to live isn’t the buildings or the landscape, it’s the people: a community so resilient, joyful, hard working, and strong that not even a Category 5 hurricane or its aftermath could take us down. 

Recently my husband reminded me of the hibiscus trees that we thought had been blown away by the storm, and of finding them the day we cleared the front yard last October.  Those trees were a much needed sign that not everything was gone, that some part of our old life still existed firmly rooted in the ground in front of our home.  I propped them all back up that day, half expecting that they would not make it through the winter.  

But those hibiscus trees are still standing, and they have bloomed like crazy all summer.

XOXO

Julie

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Always Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all.

Emily Dickinson

Hope is a funny thing.  Some people are born with a surplus of it; some without much, if any, at all.  The rest of us--the great unwashed masses--are left to slog our way through life's ups and downs sometimes with the greatest of hopes and sometimes utterly bereft of it. Such is the human condition.

Hold fast to dreams,

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird,

That cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

Dreams are just hope by another name, are they not? Maybe Langston Hughes' broken-winged bird and Emily Dickinson's "thing with feathers that perches in the soul" are one in the same. Both Dickinson and Hughes knew more than their fair share of sorrows and adversity, yet both expressed a belief that hope never dies unless you let it go. Much of Hughes' poetry centered on dreams--not bright, shiny, happy dreams but on dreams unrealized or denied. His poetry was a defining element of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50's and 60's in America, inspiring playwrights like Lorraine Hansberry and many believe, one of the greatest speeches ever made: I Have A Dream, delivered by Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. Even though most of Hughes' poetry is about dreams deferred, his words always carry an underlying thread of hope and optimism.

My experience is that there is, you know, surprisingly always hope.

Doctor Who,Vincent and the Doctor,  written by Richard Curtis

The last few weeks have been hard.  Unless you've lived through it, I really do not believe it is possible to fully understand what it is like to live in a place that has been torn apart.  The mental toll is heavy.  Progress seems to happen in increments so incredibly small that it is almost imperceptible.  Even as I am typing this I can hear the Twitterverse saying "FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS" and the WhatAbout Crew getting ready to tell me how wrong I am to say how hard this is when there are so many people in the world living in much worse conditions.  

To that I say: This is our reality.  It is hard.  And it certainly isn't a contest. 

When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.

Theodore Roosevelt

I know two people who both finally got a new roof last week after months of fighting with their mortgage companies to release their insurance funds. And today I noticed a triplex that has a new roof and all new siding;  it looks really grand. A new friend will get to sleep in her own bed tonight for the first time since the hurricane.  

Things are getting better, we just have to hang in there, and listen a little closer to hear that little feathered thing sing.

XOXOXO

Julie

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The Life-Changing Magic of Hurricane Michael

Lately all you see on the internet is Marie Kondo this, Marie Kondo that.  If you don't know who she is, Marie Kondo wrote a bestselling book entitled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014) and stars in a new Netflix series called Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.  The essence of Kondo's KonMari philosophy is to keep only that which "sparks joy," and that decluttering your possessions will improve your life.  Full disclosure: I downloaded the book in 2015, but it sits unread in my Kindle app.  I was too busy with all of my clutter to read it if you want to know the ugly truth.

The cleaning out necessitated by Hurricane Michael damage got us going and now we are cleaning out our entire house.  Every cabinet, closet and drawer.  I am appalled by how much stuff we have accumulated over the last 20 years that we don't need, or for that matter, even want.  There's no room for the stuff we love.  Just cleaning out the kitchen cabinets yielded the equivalent of a fully equipped kitchen....things we never used and things we forgot we even owned.

The hurricane taught me an important lesson: what we can't live without and what we need are not always the same thing as what we want.  We are all tidying up, right?  Hurricane Michael did a lot of the work for us-- maybe too well. He didn't have to go so hard in the paint on us, we were happy with our clutter thank you so very much.  

But you know what? There was an awful lot of stuff in my kitchen that sparked absolutely no joy in me whatsoever. Now that entire extra kitchen we had jammed in our cabinets is on its way to a new owner who needs it, and that surely does. 

And that is magic.

Happy Saturday, I'm gonna go clean out a cabinet.*

XOXO

Julie

*Should go without saying but just in case to be clear, I'd take my ridiculously jampacked kitchen cabinets, gross shed, and embarrassingly disorganized garage all back in a heartbeat if it meant no hurricane, 43 people would still be alive, and thousands of people would still have a home or a business and a job.

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The Broken Places

In 1918, Ernest Hemingway briefly worked for the Red Cross on the Italian Front of WWI as an ambulance driver.  In 1929 his novel about a young American on the Italian front, A Farewell to Arms, was published. Hemingway’s writing style, perhaps more than any other American author of the early 20th Century, defined the ethos of his generation. He was a master of words, brief and long form. An urban legend exists that he wrote the saddest short story ever on a bet, comprised of exactly six words:  “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” It is a matter of great debate whether or not this story is true, but the fact that Hemingway could say more with less is indisputable. 

A Farewell to Arms contains a single paragraph that in less than a page drops more truth about love, life, depression, death and the vagaries of fate than some authors manage in an entire novel. Nestled in that paragraph is a line I’ve been thinking about a lot since the hurricane: 

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” 

Panama City is broken.  The place we call home is in pieces. My neighbor said as much to me last night: “everything is broken.”  Every day I drive down Harrison Avenue and there’s a new empty lot where a building used to stand.  The psychological beat down one takes every day just going about their usual business is immense.  There’s no escaping the destruction.  It is everywhere. The landscape has changed. Lives are changed forever. Nothing will ever be the same.  That right there—the knowledge that there is a before and an after and no other option—that takes a piece of your heart. 

But being broken is not the end of things:  even bone is strongest at its broken point during the healing process.  Cracks let the light shine through. The Gospel of John says “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”  Our broken pieces are just letting new light in; it is going to be different for sure but whether it is better is still up to us. 

We can let this adversity overcome us, or we can prevail and be strong at the broken places.   

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Where All the Ladders Start

In the twilight of his life, William Butler Yeats lost his mojo. His last poem, The Circus Animals' Desertion was published in 1939.  In Circus Animals, Yeats chronicles his fruitless search for his missing inspiration:

I sought a theme, and sought for it in vain.

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

After failing at finding a theme, he turns his search to the source of his inspiration. Yeats looks back at his greatest works, and realizes that along the way he had begun to cherish the characters created therein more than the ideas they represented:

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

Yeats concludes that inspiration is not found in things, but within oneself:

....Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start, 

in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. 

It is oddly encouraging that even the man considered by many to be the greatest poet of the 20th century found himself at the well of inspiration without a drop of water to drink.  I have loved my job since I was 24.  Still, work is work and if you are lucky like me, most of the time it is fun. But at the end of the day, it's still work.  As I learned this summer, work that no longer inspires you is just miserable. 

I lost my ladder.  

For the last six weeks, I have been looking for my ladder—thinking a lot about my practice and what I love about it. I love the daily interactions with my staff and my partner, and most of all with my clients.  The biggest draw for me of doing estate planning and probate is the chance to hear someone's story.  Everyone's got one if you take the time to listen.  I have the privilege of hearing those stories and the satisfaction of helping people. I also enjoy the demands of civil litigation and a good fight--that's where the intellectual challenges happen.  Our local Bar has some tremendous talent.

My office reopens Monday, November 26, 2018, after a long and involuntary break thanks to Hurricane Michael. I'm excited to get back to practicing law. I'm excited to have a computer network  and a printer. It's the little things, am I right?  I miss my clients and colleagues.  I miss my employees and the people who are a part of our daily routine. I wanted to hug our UPS delivery guy yesterday when he carried in some area rugs we ordered to cover the ugly floor situation we have going on right now. 

I even miss the daily grind of running a small law firm and all the challenges it entails. 

My personal office upstairs was wrecked by the hurricane, so I had to move to a different one. I relocated downstairs, back full circle to the office I had when I was just a baby lawyer—armed with nothing but dreams and ambition and a ton of raw knowledge.  When I passed the Bar my mentor Chuck told me "you know more about the law right now than you ever will again, but you know nothing about practicing law.  So pay attention." 

I'm back again, but this time with 24 years of practice.

I found my ladder.


XOXO

Julie

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Downtown Panama City--Changed for Good

I've worked in downtown Panama City since I was 17, which for those keeping count is thirty-one years.  I worked downtown through the lean times when we struggled to find a coherent identity and through the prosperous times when everything seemed to finally be moving in the same direction.

Today I went to my office to keep working on the never ending list of things left to do before we can reopen for business.  It was wet and cold today. Everything seems more grim in that kind of weather.  It is already grim enough here right now, we could have done without it.

Shine enough light on anything and it looks better.

I stopped off at Vinny and Bay's Coffee and Eatery for a mocha and sat at the bar facing the street. From my seat I had a great view of Harrison Avenue north and south of 4th Street.  One of the things I love about downtown Panama City is the old and new storefronts:  there is such a perfect mix between the old from several eras and the new, that it gives our downtown a really special small town retro vibe.

That view up and down Harrison reminded me of better days when things weren't so roughed up.  I squinted my eyes and it all looked normal again.  Of course, it will be a while before we get there in reality. But we will.

Vinny and Bay's is an inspiring place, created by two friends to make a place for people with Special Needs to work and be proud of who they are.  On the wall is an art installation which reads "Changed for Good" a line from my favorite song in Wicked.  The lyrics of For Good play off the difference in meanings of the word good-- at once referencing forever and at the same time meaning better.

Elphaba and Glinda both sing "Who can say if I've been changed for the better" but that "I have been changed for good."

Downtown has definitely been changed.  Buildings are gone, some never to return. Nothing will ever be the same.  Change is inevitable, whether it comes all at once like it did for us or gradually. And it is surely for good.  We can't turn back time. Right now, it certainly does not feel like our town has been changed for the better.  But really, that remains to be seen.

It is up to the stakeholders--we who choose to operate our businesses and work downtown, the patrons of  those businesses, and those who choose to live downtown--it is up to us to make sure that this change that has been thrust upon us by Mother Nature is for good.



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Hurricane Michael: A Month Later

Tomorrow will be one month since the town I've called home for 47 years was utterly destroyed by Hurricane Michael.  I loved this place before the hurricane ripped it to pieces a month ago, and I love it even more now.

No matter how big Panama City gets, this place is still a small town. I can't go anywhere without seeing at least one person I know.  Sometimes that gets old, but it has sure been a comfort in the last month.  People here are welcoming.  Maybe that's because we have two big military bases, or maybe it is just our way. You can move here at any age and within months you're one of us. You don't have to be BORN here to be FROM here.

We may be shattered and torn but the heart of this town is still beating and the things that make this community a wonderful place to live are alive and well:  they don't exist in bricks and mortar. What makes this place the town we all love is its people, and we are down but in no way are we out.

That's not to say things aren't grim right now.  People are struggling. Struggling with sudden unemployment, sudden homelessness, never ending lists of tasks and repairs to do or arrange, anxiety as we wait to see what our insurance companies are going to do, and the depressing and ever present sight of debris piles and collapsed buildings that are a constant reminder of our new, more desperate reality.

Just because a month has gone by and the initial trauma is over, don't think for a second that our town has suddenly transformed back to the Panama City of October 9, 2018 as if nothing ever happened.

Don't believe the callous disregard shown by the lack of national news coverage.  NOTHING is back to normal here.

Nothing.




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