The Editor

By JIM D'AVIGNON

 In 24 hours, she was gone.

In the spring, when the weather finally grew warm enough to burst outdoors, the birdsong and barking of dogs was drowned out by the laughter of little girls. We had a flock of them there on Pearl Street, on the east side of town. We had half a dozen, and the Allens had three on the opposite corner, and even the Cates, who largely ran to boys, had one long-legged lass. All year long, these young ladies played together and spent the night together and ran in and out of one another’s houses, blonde hair and brown flickering in the sunlight, bluejeans blurring in constant motion.

It was hard to tell, come dinner time, how many would be sitting down at table, or whose they might be. Nobody seemed to bother taking roll. We just counted noses and put a plate out for each child. It averaged out in the long run, and if strangers couldn’t keep them all straight, nobody on Pearl Street had trouble telling the girls apart. When that gaggle of giggles roared through the house, we knew which girl had which name. It didn’t seem to matter much. We did have to make one small adaptation. Our Katie and the Allens’ Katy sometimes answered to one another’s name, so we just added a couple of syllables: Katie and Katyallen. No problem. About the only time there was any separation was on the weekend, when Bonnie Cate went to the First Baptist Church and the Allens went to the Church of Christ and the D’Avignons trooped over to the Holy Family Catholic Church.

During the summers, there even seemed to be some overlapping there. All the churches in town had vacation Bible schools, and each tried to avoid conflicting with the others. Children met Christ and their classmates in one church basement this week, and across the street in another church the following week. All June and much of July, children were treated and praised God together.

That’s how it is in a small town in Texas. That’s how it is in the South.

And when tragedy strikes, everyone comes together as well. When meningitis took Katyallen in less than a day, the entire town gathered around, bringing in casseroles and fried chicken, memories and prayers and love. Prayer we had with us always, but Southerners express their love with something tangible, something homemade and fattening. And so it was that the tables in the Allen home overflowed with food. The incredible speed of the illness that took Katyallen, and her young age, and the underlying fear that it could have been any one of us perhaps made the grief more poignant, but the gathering was not unique. Within hours, the women had descended on the Allen house, washing and scrubbing; and the Cate boys and I worked in the pouring rain to finish a fence project John Allen had promised a client. Helping out, with food and in other ways, is the response to loss.

I thought of this last week, when a devastating cyclone swept through lowlying Myanmar, sweeping homes and buildings and entire villages away. For mile after soggy mile, little was left. Roads were gone, bridges destroyed, trees uprooted, foodstocks lost or ruined. And the death toll began to mount, from the hundreds to the thousands, to the tens of thousands. When the winds diminished and waters began to recede, an entire people took to the few patches of land available, trying to help one another out. And the world, appalled at the extent of the damage, promised aid and, like a small Southern town, cried out to help.

But the leaders of Myanmar inexplicably dithered. They would not accept aid at all to begin with; and when that stance weakened, they still refused certain aid. They would not accept it from the United Nations. They would not let American planes land. Finally, after days of stalling, the doors have been opened, and aid is finally beginning to reach the people who so desperately need it.

I am not a geopolitician, a student of countries and governments, of pacts and policies and shifting alliances. I am just a daddy and a Southerner and a sometime resident of tiny towns. I do not understand a leadership that will not accept aid, that will allow its people to suffer because of a perceived loss of face or a belief this will somehow reflect badly on its governing policies. It’s as if the casseroles and the hams and the sandwich plates were turned away a the door. How can that be?

I was horrified again this week when China was rocked by a 7.9-magnitude quake. Within the first hours, reports of death and devastation began to come out. This country, too, is looking at a potential death toll that is likely to reach into the tens of thousands. However, there seems to be a key difference in the way the Chinese leadership has reacted to the quake. Within hours, government officials were racing to the scene. Aid is being provided, first from local sources, but it seems clear that China will gladly accept foreign aid as well.

Many of us have gained the impression in recent months, as unrest over treatment of the country’s ethnic Nepalese grew in the spotlight of this summer’s Olympic games, of a repressive government in that country. Yet in this time of crisis, China has shown a significantly more focused concern for its people. It is a gratifying development.

Also during the past week, we have been granted a timely reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust, when a nation turned its back on its people, when a citizenry allowed itself to be seduced into indifference. The occasion led to a touching moment of inter-faith communication locally, when Rabbi Neal Katz invited Father John T. Pawlikowski of Chicago to speak to his temple congregation. That story is on page 3 of today’s Catholic East Texas. And on page 5, our readers are treated to another reaching-out moment, this time to prisoners and again involving the time-tested Southern formula of food and faith.

It’s remarkable how the pattern repeats itself over the centuries. Whenever a people is in need, the need is inevitably a dual problem: both spiritual and physical.

We cannot take casseroles to China, perhaps, but we can begin with prayer. And keep an eye out for our other opportunities as well. o