Apples in Stereo -- "7 Stars" (2007)

Simple lives we once left behind

We're so distracted now

It's been two weeks since I came to Joplin to help out my parents and see what the tornado had done to my hometown, and it's time to move on.  This post will feature a few final pictures from my visit.

I didn't plan to post these pictures on Father's Day – it just happened that way.

There are a lot of Joplin fathers out there who lost their jobs as a result of the May 22 tornado, and a lot of Joplin fathers whose families' homes were destroyed.  None of that is the fault of those fathers, of course, but I'm guessing that their inability to shield their families is weighing very heavily on them this Father's Day.

After all, a father's job is to take care of his family – period.  (No excuses.)  

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I went to Joplin shortly after the May 22 tornado to check up on my parents and provide them with some practical help and moral support, but also because I spent the first 18 years of my life there – a simpler life I left behind on the way to becoming "so distracted now" – and I wanted to see for myself exactly what had happened to the schools and neighborhoods that were the center of my universe.

Every day that I was there, I took long walks and used my Blackberry to take pictures – many of which I've already posted.  Looking back, it was almost as if I was a tourist on a trip to the site of an ancient civilization, where I snapped pictures of ruined temples to show the folks back home.  

After I left, I saw a picture of a homemade sign from Joplin that said "Put down your camera and help us," or words to that effect.

Mea culpa.  I worked to help clean up my parents' house and yard, but I didn't do anything to help anybody else.  Maybe I  should have done that instead of just being a voyeur.

On the other hand, I even saw local policemen stopping to take pictures with their cell-phone cameras.  It was hard not to stare, and not to want to have photos of what things looked like – without having pictures to show, I could never have described what I had seen to my kids and my friends. 

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While I moved away from Joplin a long time ago, it was where I spent the first 18 years of my life.  I knew much of the area where the damage was the worst intimately.  I had walked and ridden my bike on those streets 40, even 50 years ago.  I wasn't just gawking at Irving Elementary School and Joplin High School and all the destroyed houses in between -- those were my schools, my neighborhoods.

I saw this house when I was walking from Irving School (which was destroyed by the tornado) to the house I grew up in (which was damaged but will survive).  The interior of this room is surprisingly intact, given that the wall that enclosed it was ripped off – it looks almost like a stage set:

This house is only two blocks from my parents' current house.  The clothes hanging in this closet appear to be undamaged – why are they still there two weeks after the tornado?  

Someone took the time to prop up this child's bicycle on its kick stand.  Who?  (Why?)

This sign was leaning against a half-destroyed house on Murphy Boulevard.  Before the tornado struck, had it been hanging in a young girl's bedroom?

I saw abandoned wheelchairs at several different locations.  This picture was taken near 24th and Iowa, just across from the high school – the houses in this area were completely flattened:

These wheelchairs are standing in the parking lot of a nursing home where several people were killed.

It was an odd coincidence that I saw three houses with ruined pianos on the same block.  Here's one of them:

The legendary Dude's Daylight Donuts on Main Street – a New York Times story about local businesses that were destroyed by the tornado led with a mention of Dude's -- was just a pile of generic rubble:

But after poking around for a few minutes, I found definitive evidence that I was at the right spot:

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Finally, while walking on West 26th towards Main Street, I saw some inexpensive metal flatware lying in the gutter.

There were actually nine spoons instead of eight, which is even more odd.  Where were the forks?  Where were the other knives?

God only knows.  And God only knows where about a million other missing things have ended up.

Of course, a lot of people in Joplin lost not only their forks and knives – but also their clothes, and cars, and pianos, and family photos, and kids' toys.

Some people lost even more.

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Click here to listen to today's featured song, "7 Stars" by the Apples in Stereo.

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