Marriage and Mayhem.

This morning, as one daughter brought me my wallet, informing me that I don't seem to have $16.00, and that is what she requires for a school trip, and the other daughter buzzed about, ready to head off to school and the Drum Major audition afterwards, I was mostly thinking about going back to sleep. It is cold. It is damp. Then Youngest's feet pounded down the stairs into the early dawn on his way to see his ducks, and I gave up on sleep. Propped up in bed, under the incubating warmth of the down duvet, I flipped my smartypants phone to the Facebook app, and read a few of the days entries, when my friend Phyllis' entry "I fully admit I can't wait for the Royal Wedding tomorrow morning at 6 a.m." popped up on the screen. I dashed out of bed and downstairs in my jammies to see if I hadn't missed it all. They were just finishing the main part of the ceremony. Fortunately, with recapping, I have seen the highlights, but really, I had intended to figure out the machine that records these things so I could watch it in its entirety, at a decent hour. I did record what I hadn't missed, because I think my children should all have a small bit of memory from this too. I remember Charles and Diana's wedding. I was Middlest's age at the time. Her big 80's poof dress, the carriage, the enormously long train on her gown and the even longer walk down the aisle. She added a good dash of attractiveness to the royal family that seems to have had skipped a few generations. Kate's "commoner" genes should help a lot too. I'll bet the next gen of Royals will be cuties.
At the same time, in complete and eerie  juxtaposition to the majesty of the Royal Nuptials, is the massive disaster of tornadoes in the south. As a child, I'll admit I was not well trained to church matters and the words of the Bible. I did go to Sunday School while we lived in New Jersey. This was the early 1970's, and what I remember most was my Sunday School teacher wore that awful, unbreathing, thick polyester, in big splashy pattern dresses, didn't shave her armpits and smelled like sweat.
I also attended away camp one summer, when I was 12. It was Camp Morningstar? maybe. On the banks of the Cheasapeake Bay. It was a religious camp, and we prayed and did a Bible study. But again, I mostly remember hating it. Being homesick, particularly for my animals, and cold and damp the entire time. I had been signed up for "Wet Wooly Wild Water Week". And sent with two bathing suits that never dried out. NOT a pool kid, I detested waking up at 6 a.m. for a cold swim in the pool. I liked the parts in the bay, okay, but not enough to rescue the week for me, and never went back.
That was pretty much the sum of my religious education before I became an adult. But here is what I remembered most from the bible stories I had learned as a child; it was a scary, dangerous time to live. God could flood the earth, and unless you were in Noah's family, you were toast. God could send things called plagues, that killed everyone, bugs, that ate everything, and sand to drown you.  I felt much safer living in New England .
Except, for the past few months, I've been thinking about the biblical-style take on things like the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. If it had been 4000 years ago, in Palestine, it would've made the bible. I would say that you could count it as the wrath of God. We know so much, we think of it as shifting of earth's core and plates and faults and stuff. But I would call it " a disaster of Biblical proportion". Now, the tornadoes. If you were hanging out in your tents, eating unleavened bread and tornadoes a mile wide on the ground for a couple hundred miles came to call, and you managed to crawl into a sandy cave and live, your account would've made a Bible story.  Fires that burn an area of land larger than Isreal, Hurricane Katrina's arrival, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, blizzards; Biblical disasters are not a thing of the past atall, atall. Heck, here in relatively safe Ohio, we've seen rain for most of 40 days and nights. The most rainfall in April in recorded history. Thankfully, not of Biblical Proportion- we have no ark, no boat, no canoe. But for the folks in Alabama today, or coastal Japan, I  think they may feel exactly as the people of  Egyptian Old Testament. My childhood naivety alone was what made New England safer than Jericho, for I don't think it matters the time or the place- the walls can just come a-tumbling down.