Rambling on Perspective

September 2005

I'm not sure if it engendered my love of photography or anthropology or both, but I have always been fascinated with perspective. I sometimes think that humanity's greatest failing--original sin, if you will--is refusal to see from another's perspective. In the largest sense, many people see as The Greatest Evil what many others view as Great Righteousness. Then we get wars and all that crap. But daily conflicts are also often about empathy for perspective.

This weekend brought me some jolts that gathered this fascination back into the foremost of my mind. On Wednesday night, when we were still expecting a Category 5 hurricane (which looked more like a non-existent 6 to me), I wrote:

"Da'Quan is one of my first grade students. He is a precious child who is cruel not out of malicious intent but out of what he has learned. I love Da'Quan with all my heart.  I am thinking of all my kids. Oh my goodness. Where will they go???  Tomorrow, Penny was supposed to be the Queen of the Day in our class. These kids have been looking forward to this for weeks. These kids learned to subtract because they knew how many days/kings/queens there were until Penny would return to school.

And then there is Da'Quan. He cares only about pit bulls. And Penny.  At home, he has grown up amongst the fighting dogs and the fighting children.  That's what he knows. It's a home where he saw his mother shot and murdered.  It's a home where pit bull means just that.  But he ran his finger so sweetly on Penny's head as he cradled her in his arms.  He loved the little kitten. And he has been leaning against me lately, craving love, wanting to know when Penny will come back. I see so much potential in this child. If I could just teach him to read, he could be a great writer, because already at 7 years old, he is filled with stories to tell.

I pray that we will all come back on Monday. I pray that all my babies will make it through the storm. I pray that I can run my hand over DaQuan's head again."


We won't make it back to school today. Our schools are closed until Wednesday.  It surely seems more of a holiday than last Thursday and Friday as we all prepared for disaster that never struck, but I have to also keep in mind that this means some of our schools were hurt, likely mine, and therefore the homes of my students. So many of them live in mobile homes and hundred year old shacks. We were JUST east of the hurricane line; they were likely within it.

I was just commenting to Mark that I was disappointed in my experience of my first hurricane. We were sooo prepared for that big storm, and we had only 1/4 inch of rain (we needed more desperately) and winds that reminded me of California's milder Santa Ana winds. I must confess that Spencer and I are both thunderstorm groupies. We love a big storm. If we were younger (and stupider), we would have headed for the eye. (A mere 6 years ago, I was leading him up a canyon in a thunderstorm to photograph flash flooding when our budding elderly
wisdom took hold and we turned back.) So, my category 5 turned into someone else's category 3, and in my selfish humanity, a very small but vital part of me felt gypped.

Then I read DeLynne's e-mail on the TICA list. She just returned to her condo which was devastated in Katrina a few days ago to start cleaning it out. While we were taping windows and sawing tree limbs over the house, she was wading through gunk to clean out her home. While I sit here in my own petty misery due to a sinus infection from mold spores blown in through the open windows when we were without power, DeLynne is suffering from pneumonia because of the mold. While I clean the debris in my yard and move everything back into place, DeLynne is cleaning goop and mold and gunk from her belongings, many of which are destroyed.

And so my perspective had to shift from disappointment to gratitude.

I am thankful that on this hottest day of the year, we have power and air-conditioning. I am grateful that even if we lacked power, the fur-kids and I could hang out in the boys' kennels where the misters would cool the 115 degree heat index by 10 to 20 degrees. I am thankful that we have water for the misters.

I am grateful that I have this time off from school to give in to my sinus infection, take meds and sleep, and have time to piddle around cleaning things up. I am thankful that we did not have to evacuate because three of our cats never would have made the trip. I am thankful that I had ALL of my cats inside with us for the storm and that the kennels were tied down so well that the boys had a place to return to yesterday evening--even the garage boys. (Our kennels are on raised decking--it's a jungle thing.) I am grateful that we were so prepared that some corollary of Murphy's Law was in effect. I am thankful that our dear friends Sharron and Tom were able to help friends from Orange and Beaumont in their evacuation.

But most of all, I am grateful that all of our friends and family still have their lives, and that no more lives were lost to Rita.  I am thankful for Spencer, the furbabies and human babies that give me purpose and comfort in the best and worst of times.