Green Bay 45, Arizona 51 (OT)

closure

Hand on the doorknob, eyes down the hall: "Thanks for everything, Ms. P."

I nod, and we exchange see-ya-laters; this isn't goodbye but it is, so far, his second attempt to walk out that door. He had feared I'd try to celebrate him, so I didn't. He feared I'd try to give him something-- it's become a tradition-- so I refrained, calling him back only to hand him my card. His departure then, just like his graduation, an all-paperwork transaction with no pomp or circumstance or party. Maybe in May, maybe if he keeps his promise to me to walk through the ceremony.

I've told him (without basis) that his parents will appreciate it, that he'll someday be glad to have done it (perhaps), that two hours out of his life is not too much to give those of us who want the payoff and the photo memento (in other words, me). It's silly, I suppose. It's not like one cap-and-gown afternoon will trump nearly seven years (he was a sixth grader), but after all the laughs and the drama, the near-misses, close calls, and successes, the questions, the answers, the education in all senses, I'll take whatever closure I can get.

For now that boils down to a not-quite-casual doorway exchange and the choked-up feeling I got when he left.

Crime wave

As if last year's flood weren't enough, my town seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Though I live in what is lovingly referred to as "the hood", I've never felt unsafe. Recent events are troubling, though.

On the morning of March 24, a woman was robbed at gunpoint in the 1400 block of First Avenue East while she was sitting in her car in a parking lot. Robbery at 7:40 a.m.! And I understand the culprit dropped two beers out of his pockets during the crime, and returned to fetch them.

Less than 18 hours later, two men were shot at Who's on First sports bar, 1323 First Ave. SE. Granted, this happened at a more fashionable hour for crime, but still.

As if that weren't enough, there's now this.

I can hardly wait for summer.

Former journalists gather here

I suppose it's about time I weighed in. And today is an apt day. In a prior life, I was a newspaper reporter -- a reasonably good one even. I won some awards, at least.

I flamed out about 13 years ago, though I have to do the math each time. The fire still burns, though the pilot light goes out frequently. Every election, every homicide, and every now and then, I miss it. Not today. And not lately.

I left on my own terms, kind of, but I have no regrets. But I still feel for my Gazette colleagues, both those now jobless and those left behind. Even my first newspaper boss isn't popping champagne.

This land

Whatever happens in the next 4-8 years, let's at least remember this.

Biggest Loser indeed

Tonight brought the grand finale of the third of my trio of guilty pleasures -- reality TV. First went The Amazing Race, Sunday night Survivor ended, and tonight the Biggest Loser was crowned. I'm pretty pleased with all three outcomes:

--brother-and-sister team Nick and Starr Spangler (she's now dating someone from the show who I hope is surnamed Banner, or that he'll change to it)
--high school physics teacher Bob Crowley became the oldest (and perhaps most genuine) Survivor winner
--and Michelle Aguilar gave Biggest Loser it's biggest misnomer. Michelle is no loser.

Not after patching things up with her mother, who joined her on the show. They hadn't spoken in 5-1/2 years after mom left her daughter and husband for another man, taking Michelle's siblings with her.

Not after nearly leaving the show for the guilt she felt about leaving her dad at home, not to mention many years of pent up guilt and feelings of inadequacy.

Certainly not after sharing the same household as Icky Vicky and Hippo Heba. I know it's a game, but Vicky showed her true colors through her behavior and should have been sent home by Shellay when she had the chance. Heba was her all-too-willing partner in crime.

All's well that ends well though as Michelle won despite not having the highest percentage of weight loss. That distinction falls on Heba, who lost 46.93 percent dropping from 294 pounds to 156 (contestants spend about three months at the ranch for the taped episodes and nearly that long before the live finale).

Michelle "only" lost 45.45 percent, going from 242 to 132. You could always see the beauty in her and her mom, but tonight you could tell they both finally saw it themselves. You have to love a reality show that rewards those that it brings the best out of.

In a perfect twist of the game that restored my faith in the voting public, America got to choose between Heba and her husband Ed to be the third finalist to join Michelle and Vicky. Ed pleaded with viewers to vote for Heba, and both seem to have spent the last three months assuming we'd listen.

Not so fast, my friends. A very pregnant Allison Sweeney revealed that Ed received 84 percent of the vote. Talk about profound rejection!

Heba wound up winning the $100,000 consolation prize, which is probably fair. And Vicky got shut out, finishing third among the finalists. Reality can be harsh.

To his credit, Ed lost 139 pounds (one more than Heba), but started out at 335 (41 pounds higher). Yes, losing weight is easier for men, but in his defense he's a chef. How can you know if it's good if you don't taste it?

Pounds-wise, Phil, who took the most crap from Vicky and Heba -- until he was voted out and they turned their wrath on Shellay -- led with 180 pounds. Can you imagine?

Phil's wife Amy nosed him out for second place in the consolations with 45.85 percent to his 45.62. That couple is nearly half the size it was six months ago!

Parenting for dummies

Oh, how I wish someone would write this book. Maybe I should. It seems I'm qualified.

I don't know quite when I got so dumb, though the transition to high school seems logical. Once best buddies, our relationship seems to have deteriorated to angry dad and brooding son.

"Why can't you just let me figure it out on my own?" he said for the second year in a row as grades that started out so promising continued their downward spiral as the trimester quickly draws to a close. If only you gave me some reason to think you could.

Much as I appreciate e-mail progress reports from teachers, they only add fuel to the fire. Less-than stellar grades I can accept. Missing assignments I can't.

"You yell too much." Guilty as charged. My intentions are pure, even if my methods are flawed.

"Sounds like a normal kid," said the youth pastor we consulted today. Also, "does he understand consequences?"

Yes and no.

Serious consequences like throwing away a free education or accomplishing a dream of playing college baseball don't seem to resonate. But trivial consequences like the threat of missing a high school football playoff game as a spectator? That's enough, apparently, to prompt the suggestion that he might just quit baseball.

He didn't mean it, I hope. He just knows how to get my goat.

Maybe I went too far with the academic contract, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

--Meet with your teachers to discuss strategies for improving grades and/or submitting missing assignments.
--Meet with geometry or Spanish teachers after school for extra help, or attend study table.
--Spend 20 minutes each without distraction studying geometry and Spanish each night.
--Begin using your planner so you don't miss any more assignments.

Is that really so unreasonable?

Failure to comply results in grounding, including loss of cell phone, computer, television, IPod and video game privileges. Most of those things didn't exist when I was his age, so maybe I don't understand how dire the consequences are.

Or maybe I just don't understand teenagers.

Much as I'd love to have my buddy back, my first responsibility is to be your dad. Admittedly, I have much room for improvement. But so do you. What do you say we work on that?

at the funeral home

"It's not like I have a choice," she says, staring off into the future. She's done what she had to do, and she'll keep doing it. For her father, for her sister. For her mother, lying still in the next room. She looks younger than nineteen. She looks like the kid she'll never be again, except no kid should be that weary. No mother should pass from life at the age of not-quite-forty-two. It's not that others don't have it worse, not that it won't be as right as it can be in the end. It's not that anyone said life would be fair; we just wish it would be, anyway.

The rented chapel is crowded but silent, the custom not quite familiar to the two blondes in the back. We are all just being there for them, quite literally. At the moment, it's all that we can do.

message

RIP. A name. A date. Tragedy reduced down to a text. If only it were really that small.

The buzz of homecoming recedes as I type out my reply, say either nothing or everything. I can't tell. I can't help but think of my mother. And being nineteen. And all that's ahead, or what might not be now, for the girl on the other end of the line.

I tell a girl who needs to know. We sit quietly.

"At least she's at peace now," says my teenage companion. I wish that and more for the daughter.

listening

And now I sit holding the phone. Wondering and waiting. Debating, though there's no real question about what I can do.

Nothing.

Nothing except wait and wonder and be ready to reply. Nothing except try to find the words for the girl who is losing her mother. The weeks have passed, have become days, maybe hours. She sent a message to let me know. I tell her I'm sorry. I tell her she's strong. Shake my head and sigh at what she's been through. She tells me yesterday was her birthday.

I ask after the family she's been holding together. The conversation ends.

It will start again, I know, though maybe not with that question. It will start again when when she needs to, when she wants to. When she needs a break. Or maybe when she's gone.

Tonight

I tell the stories all the time. I tell them matter-of-factly, as the only white person in the room. I tell them because history matters, and context, and if these brown and black kids think things are bad now, well. They have no idea. I liked to think I told the stories for an appreciation of how far we'd come and how far we have to go-- such a good liberal, don'tcha know. But considering how hard this retelling of the facts and the figures and bits of history that of course I already know hit me, well. I didn't really have any idea.

This is a little long, but you should read it and be better for it. Tonight.

Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech
By ROBERT A. CARO

AS I watch Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama’s speech — and in a way his whole candidacy — might not have been possible had that other speech not been given.

That speech was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act, and in some respects Mr. Obama’s candidacy is the climax — at least thus far — of a movement based not only on the sacrifices and heroism of the Rev. Dr. King and generations of black fighters for civil rights but also on the political genius of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as it happens was born 100 years ago yesterday.

When, on the night of March 15, 1965, the long motorcade drove away from the White House, heading for Capitol Hill, where President Johnson would give his speech to a joint session of Congress, pickets were standing outside the gates, as they had been for weeks, and as the presidential limousine passed, they were singing the same song that was being sung that week in Selma, Ala.: “We Shall Overcome.” They were singing it in defiance of Johnson, because they didn’t trust him.

They had reasons not to trust him.


In March 1965, black Americans in the 11 Southern states were still largely unable to vote. When they tried to register, they faced not only questions impossible to answer — like the infamous “how many bubbles in a bar of soap?” — but also the humiliation of trying to answer them in front of registrars who didn’t bother to conceal their scorn. Out of six million blacks old enough to vote in those 11 states in 1965, only a small percentage — 27 percent in Georgia, 19 percent in Alabama, 6 percent in Mississippi — were registered.

What’s more, those who were registered faced not only beatings and worse but economic retaliation as well if they tried to actually cast a ballot. Black men who registered might be told by their employer that they no longer had a job; black farmers who went to the bank to renew their annual “crop loan” were turned down, and lost their farms. Some, as I have written, “had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go.” So the number of black men and women in the South who actually cast a vote was far smaller than the number registered; in no way were black Americans realizing their political potential.

More important, many civil rights leaders felt that President Johnson wasn’t helping them nearly as much as he could have — and that in fact he never had. He had passed a civil rights bill in 1964, but it hadn’t been a voting rights bill.
And they remembered his record, a long record. It was not merely that during his first 20 years, 1937 through 1956, in the House and Senate, he had voted against every civil rights bill — even bills aimed at ending lynching.

Leaders of the civil rights movement who had watched their bills die, year after year, in Congress — not a single civil rights bill had been enacted since 1870 — knew that Johnson had been not merely a voter but a strategist against civil rights, a tactician so successful that Richard Russell of Georgia, the leader of the Senate’s mighty “Southern caucus,” had raised him to power in the Senate, had, in fact, made him his anointed successor as the South’s legislative leader, the young hope of the elderly Southern senators in their desperate battle to maintain racial segregation.

In 1956, by which time Lyndon Johnson was majority leader, he devised and carried out the strategy that had not only crushed a civil rights bill in the Senate by a majority greater than ever before, but had done so in a way that humiliated, in a particularly vicious manner, the liberal senator who refused to bow to his wishes, Paul Douglas of Illinois.

In 1957 he had engineered the passage of a civil rights bill. The mere fact of its passage in the face of Southern senatorial power — it was the first civil rights bill to be enacted in 87 years — made it a significant benchmark in the history of American government, and the guile and determination with which Johnson drove it to passage made it a landmark of legislative mastery as well. But he was forced to weaken it to get it through, and liberals, not understanding the obstacles he had surmounted, blamed him for not making it stronger.

Some civil rights leaders who had been talking to Lyndon Johnson since he became president were now, by the spring of 1965, convinced of his good faith, but most were not, and the mass of the movement, symbolized by those protesters outside the White House gates, still distrusted him.
•
Men and women who knew Lyndon Johnson, however, felt there was another element to the story. They included the Mexican-American children of impoverished migrant workers he had taught as a 21-year-old schoolteacher in the little town of Cotulla, Tex.; to the ends of their lives they would talk about how hard he had worked to teach and inspire them. “He used to tell us this country was so free that anyone could become president who was willing to work hard enough,” one student said.
Others remember what one calls the story about the “little baby in the cradle.” As one student recalled, “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby — any baby — might grow up to be president of the United States.”
His former students weren’t alone. Men and women at Georgetown dinner tables were also convinced of the sincerity of Johnson’s intentions. “I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,” recalls Bethine Church, the wife of Senator Frank Church of Idaho. “I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I’ve ever spent.”

These men and women felt Johnson truly wanted to help poor people and particularly people of color, and that he was held back only by his ambition: his desire to be president, and because he was a senator from a Southern state. But when, in 1957, ambition and compassion were finally pointing in the same direction — when he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the “magnolia scent” of the South — he set out to pass a civil rights bill, he did it with a passion that showed how deeply he believed in what he was doing.

The bill he got was the weak one, and civil rights leaders blamed him because the advances it made were meager. Only a week before the March 1965 speech, Dr. King had said that at the rate voter registration was going, it would take 135 years before even half the blacks in Mississippi were registered. And as the limousines were pulling through the gates that night in March, the protesters were singing “We Shall Overcome,” as if to tell Lyndon Johnson, we’ll do it without you.
But they didn’t have to.

When Johnson stepped to the lectern on Capitol Hill that night, he adopted the great anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.
“Even if we pass this bill,” he said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”
And, Lyndon Johnson said, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
He paused, and then he said, “And we shall overcome.”
Martin Luther King was watching the speech at the home of a family in Selma with some of his aides, none of whom had ever, during all the hard years, seen Dr. King cry. But Lyndon Johnson said, “We shall overcome” — and they saw him cry then.
And there was another indication of the power of that speech. When the motorcade returned to the White House, the protesters were gone.
•
Another significant moment had occurred in the Capitol after the speech, as Johnson was coming down the aisle accepting congratulations.

It wasn’t just congratulations he wanted. One of the congressmen on the aisle was Emanuel Celler, the 76-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which handled civil rights legislation. Long a rights champion but now an elderly man, Celler said he would start hearings on the bill the following week, but “I can’t push that committee or it might get out of hand.”

Suddenly, Johnson wasn’t smiling. His eyes narrowed and his face turned cold. He was still shaking Celler’s hand, but with his other hand he was jabbing at the old man. “Start them this week, Manny,” he said. “And hold night sessions, too.”
Celler did. The heroism of the march at Selma, the heroism all across the South, the almost unbelievable bravery of black men and women — and children, so many children — who marched, and were beaten, and marched again, for the right to vote, created the rising tide of national feeling behind the passage of civil rights legislation, the legislation not only of 1965 but of 1964 and 1957. That feeling did so much to make the legislation possible. It has taken me scores of pages in my books to try to describe that heroism, and all of them inadequate. But it also took Lyndon Johnson, whom the black leader James Farmer, sitting in the Oval Office, heard “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary” to get the 1965 bill passed and who, with his legislative genius and savage will, broke, piece by piece, in 1957 and 1964 and 1965, the long unbreakable power of the Southern bloc.

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

LOOK what has been wrought! Forty-three years ago, a mere blink in history’s eye, many black Americans were unable to vote. Tonight, a black American ascends a stage as nominee for president. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Just give them the vote,” and they can do the rest for themselves.

All during this long primary campaign, after reading, first thing every morning, newspaper articles about Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, I would turn, as part of the research for my next book, to newspaper articles from 1965 about Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to win for black people the right to vote.

And I would think about Johnson’s great speech, when he adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, when he joined his voice to the voices of all the men and women who had sung the mighty hymn of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King cried when he heard that speech. Since I am not black, I cannot know — cannot even imagine — Dr. King’s feelings. I know mine, however. To me, Barack Obama is the inheritor of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legacy. As I sit listening to Mr. Obama tonight, I will be hearing other words as well. I will be hearing Lyndon Johnson saying, “We shall overcome.”

Robert A. Caro, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, is at work on the fourth and final volume of his Johnson biography.

Contact

Keystrokes and pixels. Her phone to my inbox. Casually transmitted with the flick of a thumb. Three months ago, a daytime SOS still would have meant a detention. Now it's a lifeline cast out with a click of Send. A secret cry from a mostly-grown girl with nowhere much to turn. That much is clear since she's coming to me now that the doctors have told her dying mother, "Sorry, that's all we can do."

I stare at the message, beg it to reconsider. Re-read and hope to find some less desperate news. No luck. Now what. How do I respond to this burdened child, who may be the one--who will almost certainly be the one--to explain to her sister that they are about to lose their mother? My mind is empty and my fingers are still and the time stamp on her note is aging.

I click across windows, rearrange virtual letters and half-formed thoughts, tell a friend. Take advantage of my luxury long as I dare. Come back and wade in with a wish and a prayer. I don't know what to say; I say it. The reply is near instantaneous.

And then it's a dozen messages. Trying to ask but not pry, suggest. Be some kind of comfort. Offer or guide. A distraction. Be whatever it could possibly be that would lead her to my name in that phone. We don't have that much history. Just enough, maybe. A contact. A chance. A connection.

Oh, the priorities

It was the summer of, "Are you kidding?" The summer of, "They hired who?" So much energy in disbelief and ranting, so many drooped shoulders and slackened jaws. And not just over that one job. For a while there, it was going around. Decisions that had to be wrestled to the ground. Small stuff sweated through. In the end, most things work themselves out, but space-time is such a bitch, always so demanding:

Back in May I'd wondered why I didn't get invited, but I figured that's just the way things go. In July I wondered which weekend was the weekend. On Wednesday I greeted the party girl as she hurried through the door.

"I love your hair!" The color is different, the cut is new. She thanks me, pleased but rushed, as she rifles through her binder, on some sort of mission. I don't realize she doesn't belong in this class until the envelope is in my hand. She's made a special trip.

"But I thought it was over!"

"Oh no, it's still on," she replies, and at the same time I'm thinking that explains it and no wonder, maybe they changed it--and wait, brain, pay attention--did she just say August 23? Oh, no. Add a silent dammit.

I'm opening the invitation, but I ask her, "When is it, did you say?" Hoping to conjure some kind of revision.

"A week from Saturday."

"Cristina!" Exclamation point required. I am sorely disappointed. Of all days. "I'm sorry. I am so sorry! But I can't go."

"Ms. P!"

"I know!"

"All summer I was kind of offended and sad because I thought you didn't ask me." And yet here I am turning her down.

"Why not! Why can't you come?"

"Well, I have these tickets. These hundred dollar tickets," I say, thinking that might convey something, since the name Bruce Springsteen is not gonna mean anything. Because it, ah, didn't back in March.

She doesn't ask me if I can sell them--though somebody else will, later. She seems to understand, but we're all deflated. "You have to at least come to the church."

I'm calculating, desperately--that's not the part of her quinceanera I'm so anxious to go to, but I wouldn't mind appearing, would want to show her that I care, but 2:30--pit wristbands, Latino time at Our Lady of Guadalupe. . .it'd certainly be close. Oh, dear Virgin! A white girl needs a favor!

just sad

I never watch the TV news; I just don't need the hype. And I suppose I am out of the loop. I've pretty much lost track of which blonde belongs on which local channel and which weather guy and/or gal stands in front of which highly sophisticated radar map. I am not, however, uninformed. I read all kinds of news though there's no paper involved, even when I bother to bring the one in from the driveway. It's just easier to click, even when, like this, it's hard. My thanks to the reporter who somehow wrote the story gently, and my thoughts and prayers to the family, friends, and teammates.

A year off

These are the words that stick in my head. Sure I cried while watching the retirement press conference live in my office. I so wished it wasn't so. But it was clearly over, this Brett Favre magic carpet ride.

Somehow, though, after all hell broke loose, the only comment I can remember is Deanna's. Clearly uncomfortable about sharing the stage with her husband, she said the annual celebrity softball fundraiser was off. They were going to do nothing for a year.

Some nothing it turned out to be.

My Packers, on the verge of a Super Bowl, are in turmoil or will soon be once Brett reports for camp. My allegiance is conflicted and I can't even decide who to hate. On the plus side, my son talks to me more than ever now.

He remains optimistic that this will end the right way. I, conversely, am starting to come to grips with the notion that Brett Favre will wear a different uniform. After he takes a year off, of course.

My City of Ruins

My city, indeed, is in ruins, ravaged by a flood that is expected to crest tomorrow morning at 32 feet -- a full 20 feet above flood stage and 12 feet above the record. Please pray for Cedar Rapids. This is going to be a major blow to my hometown.

The Cedar River has flooded roughly 3,200 homes and many businesses in Cedar Rapids, forcing around 8,000 people to evacuate as the water continues to rise. Coe College, which lies just outside the city's 500-year flood plain, wasn't spared. After floodwater breeched the edge of campus, which houses the physical plant and the power supply, the college shut down and transported the 100 or so students on campus for the summer to our rival school -- Cornell College.

The ground floors of City Hall, the County Courthouse and the County Jail, all housed on an island in the river, are submerged in the churning water. Streets between Interstate 380 and the river are submerged up to the roofs of buildings. A train bridge was swept away in the current and all the city's bridges are under water.

Because of a power outage at a water treatment facility, the city's water system is operating at 25 percent capacity and residents are being urged to limit use to necessary human consumption.

MidAmerican Energy has cut gas to about 5,500 customers, and anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 Alliant Energy customers have lost power. Those with utilities, like me, thankfully, are being urged to conserve.

"This is an endurance competition for the public and the citizens," City Council member Brian Fagan said. "It twill flex the ties that bind us as a community."

Fagan said the scope of the damage is "all-encompassing" downtown.

"The situation is changing dramatically by the hour, and so is the image of the city," he said.

My city of ruins.

Tornado twists fortunes of Iowa town

Leave it to the LA Times to best describe an Iowa tragedy.

Parkersburg, population 2,000, had seen its economic fortunes improving. The storm kills four people and destroys at least a third of the town.
By Jay Christensen and P.J. Huffstutter
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

PARKERSBURG, IOWA — In a place where a man's fortune often depends on which way the wind blows, Parkersburg was enjoying a time of bounty. Farmers across the region, flush from a nation hungry for corn-based ethanol, had splurged on new tractors and sporty trucks for the first time in years.

Along the main thoroughfare, business was brisk. Civic leaders routinely boasted about how -- in a state without a professional football team -- this hamlet of fewer than 2,000 people had turned out four NFL players over the last two decades.

Such good times in a state that has seen its economy roller coaster and its population dwindle in recent decades made Sunday's deadly storms all the more painful.

The tornado that ripped through this blue-collar agricultural town -- destroying at least a third of Parkersburg and killing four people -- was nearly a mile wide in spots and cut a path almost 50 miles long. National Weather Service officials said early estimates indicated the tornado might have traveled on the ground for as long as an hour.

Two more people were killed in nearby New Hartford, about nine miles to the east. And at least 65 people were injured when the tornado barreled across freshly planted fields in this eastern portion of the state, about 80 miles northeast of Des Moines.

"You really are overwhelmed when you see it," said Iowa Gov. Chet Culver at a news conference Monday. "You can't imagine this kind of devastation, homes completely gone."

The search for the injured and the dead stretched into the early morning hours Monday as emergency vehicles raced across debris-littered roads. At least two of those killed in Parkersburg had been huddled inside their basements, city officials said.

"We get tornadoes here, but it has been years and years since we've seen anything close to being this bad," said Rod Donavon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Des Moines. "The sirens went off. People sought shelter. And they still died."

The storm system was believed to have been at least a 3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which estimates the strength of tornadoes from 0 to 5. A level 3 means the winds were between 136 mph and 165 mph.

After the tornado hit about 5 p.m. Sunday, Jason Johnson and his wife, Barb, crawled out of the basement and gazed upon miles of overturned trucks and houses blown off their foundations.

Their house was destroyed.

Johnson's parents had recently sold their home in nearby Waverly, and were expecting to move next week -- to a place just down the block from their son.

That house also was demolished.

"None of us has a place to go after Friday," said Jason Johnson, 39. "I'd like to find my wife's wedding ring. That would make my day. I found mine this morning in the backyard."

On Monday, Mayor Robert Haylock had to duck under downed power lines as he focused on Parkersburg's other immediate problems: clean water, steady phone service and housing hundreds of residents in a town that had lost 21 businesses and more than 200 homes.

Some of those homes were on the town's south side, part of a new subdivision near a nine-hole golf course tucked in the middle of farm country. They're all gone. Debris was scattered across fields, and chunks of rebar and siding had pierced the trunks of wind-stripped trees.

Haylock, who has served on the City Council since 1973, was out of town when the storm hit. He arrived about 10 minutes after it passed.

Parkersburg's lone grocery store was in ruins, as was the only gas station. The same was true of City Hall, along with government records and historical documents that date to the 1800s.

Just last month, Parkersburg had passed a multimillion-dollar bond measure so the school district could build a fine arts auditorium for concerts and community plays.

It was another sign, Haylock said, of how Parkersburg "was growing and the economy was good."

Aplington-Parkersburg High School now has no roof, no windows and few standing brick walls. The gymnasium, where at least 1,000 people gathered for graduation last week, was a mangled pile of crumbled brick, shredded roofing tiles and sodden paper.

On the football field, a goal post was twisted and broken, as were the aluminum bleachers. Much of the high school's memorabilia honoring the Falcons' proud football past was either missing or buried beneath piles of debris that, in some places, were nearly two stories high.

Dozens of parents and teachers spent Monday digging through the rubble for reminders of local heroes such as the Denver Broncos' Casey Wiegmann and the Green Bay Packers' Aaron Kampman -- who have returned home over the summers to work out in the weight room and inspire young players with stories of life in the NFL.

Their high school football coach, Ed Thomas, was busy Monday answering frantic calls from out-of-town family and former students -- and trying to dig a few mementos from the wreckage of his home.

Nearly everyone he knows was affected by the storm. Wiegmann's father still lives in town. A tree hit his house, Thomas said.

Kampman raced from Kansas City, Mo., to get back Monday. His grandfather was one of the people injured in the storm, Thomas said.

"We'll put this town back together," said Thomas, who has lived in Parkersburg for 33 years. "We're going to rebuild and stay here, coaching and teaching. God give me help."

Abigail

She is the queen of magical thinking, of "I wish it: make it so." She knows what she wants if only it were easy. She knows what she wants if only it were possible. She is dramatic and mercurial, charming and sometimes giving. She is beautiful. She is young. She is in too many was exactly the same person she was when she was twelve. She is only a kid, only a student. Delete the onlys, make it true. She is a constant presence in my life whom a few short days hence I will likely never see again. The thought of it makes me cry.

It's not that I will miss her in a way I'd miss a friend. It's not that the ending here is necessarily unhappy. I hope, I wish. It's just that it's so final, in every sense the end.



Her family is moving back to Mexico; her older brother is already gone. That came as a shock to both of us, that he got up the nerve to do it. Ciudad Juarez is not the suburban midwest, and we both understood that calm, quiet boy didn't know what he was getting into. His messages home have been brief and blunt, protective of his sister: "Abi shouldn't come." Think on that for a little while, imagine what truths are stretched around those few warning words.

And so while her Senior classmates mostly prepare to celebrate their launch out into the world, their independence, their next step, she sits, half serious, half sentimental, and wonders what to do. Reality has sobered her in unaccustomed ways, and there's nothing I can say. No good answers I can give her. That has mostly been my role in her life: six years of telling her how things work. Yelling in frustration. Offering advice. Explaining and explaining and explaining. Being whoever Ms. P is to her. Certainly not just a teacher. I cannot even articulate, but when she turns in a PowerPoint, one of her lasts projects, with "Love ya, Ms. P" randomly on the title slide, well. Maybe she is trying.

I wish she were heading off to something. Anything. I wish her unrealistic half-baked dreams were attainable. I wish she could just visit her old home--"I remember the cardboard houses on the corner," she says, when she makes that same wish. "But now they have paved streets."--so she would know for sure what she's missing. But for someone in her position, cross the border, north to south, and for all practical purposes, jig's up. The commentators may argue differently, but in her mind, there's no coming back. But maybe there's also no staying. Living with her Jehovah's Witness aunt and her ex-military husband in Georgia until she reaches 18 this fall is the other option she's been given. Neither of us can see that, not to mention the big Then What. So maybe she just stays with her family--so important to her--and tries to make a life in the land that's now foreign. A place that makes her uneasy to contemplate. I imagine that she will. And maybe it works out okay. But her brother's words still echo: "Abi shouldn't come."

On June 1, she and I will both wear caps and gowns, both walk through the commencement. I'll sit at the end of her row. She'll get her diploma--hallelujah--and we will celebrate our accomplishment. Plural possessive adjective there intentional. And then I'll greet her family, minus her big brother, another former student, again for the last time. I will tell them how much I've appreciated knowing them. I will wish them well. I will tell her that she better, somehow, let me know what happens. And then I'll say goodbye.

Postville

Gazette columnist Todd Dorman hit this one out of the park.

The sprawling Agriprocessors packing plant on the outskirts of town is imposing and intimidating even if you don’t know about the jaw-dropping lawlessness our government says went on inside these fences.Knowing sends a chill up your back.

So it’s probably lucky you can’t stay long. Tuesday, a stern, but polite, woman told Gazette video journalist Mike Barnes and myself to leave, pronto.

Fair enough. Nothing to see. No one’s talking. But there was plenty to see elsewhere.

There was St. Bridget’s Catholic parish near downtown, where dozens of plant workers and their families milled around inside the church and outside in the courtyard. Many here have family members among the 390 plant workers detained by federal immigration officials at Monday’s historic raid.

I know workers broke the law in coming here and working here and must deal with the consequences. Fine.

But you’d have to be one hard-bitten, coldhearted Minuteman to look into the anxious, dazed faces of these people, as their children played around their feet, and not feel some sort of sympathy.

“They’re lost,” said Sister Mary McCauley, pastoral administrator at the church.

McCauley wishes Iowa’s congressmen could be here to see this. So do I.

But I’m less forgiving.

This would have been a great spot for a congressional junket. Time for our so-called leaders to see what dereliction of leadership and government malpractice look like, close up.

This is what it looks like when you do next to nothing to rein in a meat packing industry that’s mutated into a monolithic monopoly of misery fattened by illegal immigration. Could it be that the folks who run this industry line political pockets with campaign donations? Campaign finance records show that members of the Rubashkin family, which owns the Postville plant, donated tens of thousands of dollars, mostly to Republicans, over the last decade. Say it ain’t so.

I think we’ll all be watching to see if top Agriprocessors executives take one of those famous federal perp walks. Justice demands it.

Add congressional inaction on big ag’s excesses to its inability to control the nation’s southern border or come up with a realistic plan for dealing with illegal immigrants already here, some for years, and you understand why Congress gets the kind of dismal approval ratings it so richly deserves.

This is a crisis, and all we get from Washington is a deficit of courage and a surplus of rhetoric.

I listened to federal officials describe, with straight faces, the detention center at the Cattle Congress fairgrounds like it was a summer camp, complete with bilingual board games in the rec room. Then they touted portable federal courtrooms on wheels, pulled onto the fairgrounds to dispense American justice by the truckload like kosher hot dogs.

So let me get this straight: After allowing illegal immigration to explode and for plants like Agriprocessors to reap the benefits for years, and now, after federal helicopters and buses roar in to save the day, tear up a town and scores of families, do they want us to stand and cheer? No thanks.

Instead, I’ll pray that the next Congress and president can fix this. And that Postville can heal.

Do you know Jack?

Did that give you the chills? Want to do something? Why not support the American Cancer Society's Relay For Life? Supporting or, better yet, participating in your community is the best option. I'd also gladly accept your support for my participation here.

Now what will you do?