Extemporaneity, Through Tragedy, and into Faith

My playwright professor at Carnegie Mellon advised us, when facing writer's block, to extemporize. When no thoughts come to mind, the next step is to begin writing the word "block."

Bilhah turned from Jacob, a wisp of hair across her face, and held her arm against the bare skin of her chest. She imagined it burned, the flesh, in a way that she did not burn, saturated as she was in the knowledge that... cats fighting in the night became a ball of rolling audible fur, in the dead of night, when the night rumbled with passing Coast Guard helicopters, rattling the window which the couple had only dared leave open to the air for the first time since the long, long winter had... blockblockblockblock... let its fingers slip.

Those cold fingers, which had slithered back from the coverlet and the house and across the yard and down the street, and which clattered across the stones of the New England shoreline, out into the bay and the river, where the cold still had the power over life and death — beat the rotors as they may.

Late last night, a helicopter flew low over the house. Midday, I directed my daughter's eyes away from the sandbox to watch another one (or perhaps the same one) through the trees. "See the helicopter?" "Hedipopter?"

About five hours later, the Coast Guard called off the search:

Shivering with cold, his feet cut and bleeding, 14-year-old Christopher Duarte stood at the Roses' front door about 1 a.m. today, saying his family had been involved in a boating accident, and he needed help.

The teenager, barefoot and wearing a T-shirt and shorts, told Dave and Karen Rose that he'd been fighting the current, as he swam to shore for what seemed like nearly two hours. The last time he saw his mother, the boy said, she was clinging to a fender on the boat, without a life jacket.

"He kept saying, 'There's been an accident. I swam to shore. I'm sure the boat sank by now,"' Karen Rose told The Associated Press.

Duarte's mother was among three people who died when a small pleasure boat carrying six people capsized in Mount Hope Bay during the night. A fourth person, Duarte's aunt, remains missing. Duarte's father, 35-year-old Allen Duarte, was rescued and was in critical condition in a hospital.

Well. That's not a direction in which I had expected this post to turn. Rather, my intention had more to do with perspective on the various annoyances and difficulties of life. How insignificant that intention was by comparison. Perhaps we should learn our perspective before our foundations sink from view.

God, bring the lost home to you and return Allen safely to his son, Christopher. And reach out your hand to those who have lost those parents, sons and daughters, and friends.

"Why did you doubt?"

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