Seven-year-old Gordon Anderson was killed in a car accident while driving with his mom last week. I went to his funeral yesterday.
He came from a good Mormon family. One that believes that families can be together forever. Hope and faith in Jesus Christ anchor them through tough times. This is their biggest test.
His grandpa gave a moving eulogy of a boy who lighted up a room and filled his world with hugs, questions and energy - tons of energy. His grandma sang "Goin' Home." His four siblings, mom, dad, and 20 other members of his extended family sang "We Can Be Together" and "Love One Another" through their tears. And one of his uncles put together a video tribute that left 450 people wiping their eyes and scrambling for tissues.
While Gordon's death near Lockport, Manitoba, was tragic, his funeral was anything but bleak.
Love filled the chapel. Admiration and anecdotes of the little guy filled the post-service air in the foyer. And gratitude toward Gordon's principal filled our hearts.
Yes, his principal.
He had arranged something none of us had seen before. A moving tribute to the boy, Gordon's desk, signed by his teacher and classmates, was placed discreetly along one of the walls of the foyer. Underneath it, his family had tucked his gym bag and a pair of his runners.
The desk had a powerful effect on the many knots of people who gathered around it. It provoked pictures and questions and somehow made the boy more real - even to those who had never met him.
It was a loving gesture on the part of his school administrator, teacher and classmates - and it left a huge impression on everyone. What a thoughtful touch of warmth it added to the celebration of Gordon's remarkable short life.
When we drove the streets hardest hit by the Minot flood we entered a wasteland of abandoned homes, abandoned belongings, and - in many cases - abandoned dreams.
No one washing their cars, weeding their gardens, blasting their stereos or heading for the convenience store. No families out for bike rides, no one walking their dogs - not a pet in sight. No kids playing hop-scotch or running through sprinklers.
No usual Saturday hustle - just quiet desolation.
We were confronted with street after street of empty homes, all bearing outdoor scars of where the badly behaved Souris River ravaged their contents and turned Home Sweet Home into financial headaches for thousands.
Answering the call
We were all answering the call of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to clean out these houses - rip out every wet sofa, tear down every soaked wall, remove every carpet, every bloated hardwood floor, every heavy appliance, literally anything that had been touched and tainted by the water. It all had to go, right down to the studs, and be piled on the front property along the street so the owners could rebuild.
Everything touched by the Souris flood waters had to to be piled out front.
You couldn't help but feel for the owners, most of whom were advised against getting flood insurance, and who were now taking shelter with family and relatives anywhere but in the homes on which they were still paying mortgages.
So, when we and 300 other Mormons rolled into the parking lot of the Latter-day Saint Chapel - from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana - we were amazed.
The Church turned the chapel into a command centre that operated for weeks, filled with food, equipment, generators and everything needed to tackle the mess. We supplied the labour.
I'm a lot more comfortable writing press releases than wielding a hammer.
Shouldn't wrecking things be easier?
The Church is big on organization. Our organizers, Brother and Sister Ludlow from Thousand Oaks, California, had just finished wrapping up a similar project in Joplin, Missouri, and didn't have time to go home before being called to do the same work in Minot.
They put us into groups of 10 and we fanned out to clean or "gut" as we called it, the homes.
Usually, this could be done in one back-breaking day. Ours took the weekend. Many of us had office jobs - a few were handy, and the work we would do would be valued at anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000 depending on the home. But we wouldn't have taken a dime for our work.
The first day's shift was 10.5 hrs. I was whipped after the first two - or thought so at least. It was a hot day and the masks we wore because of the possibility of inhaling mould felt were like breathing through a scarf. I was surprised at how hard it was to "destroy" a home. Shouldn't wrecking things be a lot easier?
But like most things in life, you don't know what you can do until you push yourself. My second and third wind came. By the end of the day, I was whipped but very satisfied. The coolest part of the whole project - the thing that made it even more worthwhile than I knew it would be was this...
Meeting Kelly and Sarah
Kelly Warren is a K-12 special ed teacher who lives with her two-year-old son and her mother Sarah. Coming face to face with Kelly and Sarah was such a wonderful feeling. The fact that Kelly was a teacher was especially gratifying to me since I work for a teachers' union and they always have my respect.
Kelly and Sarah filled us in on the flood, the evacuation - all the details surrounding this major trauma in her life as a first-year teacher. We were so relieved to know that she had signed a contract in a neighbouring town 40 miles away and that it came complete with teacher accommodations.
Both Kelly and Sarah expressed heartfelt appreciation for the work we did and followed it up with this warm and thoughtful email.
"Sending out a heartfelt thank-you from Minot from Sarah and Kelly Warren! When left with only words to try to convey our gratitude, I am left feeling inadequate to say the least. Your group and their cheerful and giving attitude doing such "dirty" work was very uplifting and helpful at this glitch in our road. Your help gave us a much-needed surge of energy to take steps forward instead of feeling paralyzed by this overwhelming situation. Thanks again and I have no doubt that your impact on us and Minot will be felt for years to come."
But the folks in Minot, including Kelly and Sarah, aren't out of the woods yet. They have so much work to do. We imagine the pressures at this point are intense. That's why we were so happy to have had a small part in opening up the possibility that they can rebuild their home.
Three hundred volunteers in 99 tents camped around the LDS Chapel.
Happy to serve
We left Minot Sunday afternoon with some minor aches and pains, but our hearts were definitely full. We had definitely pushed ourselves beyond our comfort zone. We had helped a wonderful family do what they couldn't do for themselves - in a very small way, like what our Saviour did for us.
We felt blessed to provide service to people who needed it badly. Of 4,100 homes affected, the Church cleaned out 570.
I love Sarah's closing comments in the short interview I grabbed above. "If anything comes out of this whole flood, maybe it's just a realization that we're all connected and that to work together is a wonderful thing - and to just stay positive."
That's a wonderful message to take away from this project.
Stay positive, Kelly and Sarah. It was a privilege to meet you.
But a few days ago, I stumbled on an app quietly sitting in the App Store that allows you to stream, view or download just about any file on your desktop - without iTunes and without hardware of any kind.
Zumocast is an slick little app that you download onto your PC or Mac as well as your iPad or iPhone. This app is so quick and duh simple to set up that when you suddenly see the entire contents of your laptop or desktop staring back at you from your iPad or iPhone, it's pretty trippy. Especially when you consider you haven't had to convert or sync a thing.
Stream your heart out
The app is free and gives you access to every document, photo, video or piece of music residing on your PC or Mac. You can stream video and music to your heart's content and view, but not edit, all your non-media files.
The wrinkle comes in not with streaming videos, but with playing those you actually download to the iPad in fullscreen. That's where I found the software a bit buggy. Many times video that I tried to play fullscreen would be masked by the menu area to the side of the viewing area. On subsequent tries things worked as you'd expect. Playing video less than full screen was always fine.
I tried correcting this spotty performance by downloading various sizes of video files, but in the end it beat me. I had to go back to Dropbox's solid and flawless fullscreen performance on downloads.
Temporary blemish
But don't let this temporary blemish - which I expect will be corrected in the next version - turn you away from everything else Zumocast has to offer. Streaming video fullscreen worked fine for me as did music. And viewing all your desktop pics and documents from your iPad display is pretty clever.
While you're mulling that over, check out the first video I downloaded from my laptop to my iPad via Zumocast - a fun three-minute blast from LDS hip-hop violinist Lindsey Stirling. It kicks off classically and morphs into the Black-Eyed Peas. For a "throw-up" (graffiti tagger terminology for a quick piece of work) in an underground parkade it's pretty amazing stuff.
Catch more of Lindsey's tunes - plus her AGT performance - on YouTube.
Stephanie Mabey's "hope-infused reality" has been making me smile for two years now. From her initial three offerings released under the name Stephanie Smith to her new acoustic preview EP, she has been the Voice most played while I kick around the house, do chores or run errands. Her videos have been a frequent destination on my YouTube wanderings.
Mabey is an LDS indie-folkie who recently married and moved to Arizona, but is actually a transplanted Utahn. She recorded her knock-out debut album Change when she was 17, stunning folks with her introspection, crisp story-telling, and honest lyrics. Tell Me and the brilliant Waves followed.
Tunes like October, Another Ticket (inspired by a job ticketing merchandise at Target) and Fragile Sometimes are at once vulnerable and lovely. You can hear all of them on the listen tab at stephaniemabey.com. There are some terrific Stephanie Smith downloads still available at ldsmusicworld.com. Check out Let Me Know and Little Bit Scared.
Naturally, all of Stephanie's Mabey's material is available on iTunes. If you're looking for her first three albums, make sure you look up the right Stephanie Smith. There is another artist with the same name.
And if you're up for something completely different, watch If I Were a Zombie, Mabey's video poke at the Twilight movie franchise, "because vampires are getting way too much love these days."
Over the past few months, Mabey has been on a campaign to raise enough funds through sales of her EP to flesh out those songs and more for a fourth album. The way she's structured her fund-raising pitch is both novel and interactive. For $50 she'll let you download her EP, send you her new album, and list you in her liner notes; $750 will get you a house concert; and $1,000 will get you your own theme song to use as a voice-mail greeting, ring-tone or "just to hum when you're feeling down."
But enough gushing already. The bottom line is Stephanie Mabey's music rewards those who can truly appreciate honest, sensitive, intelligent music.
In the spare and beautiful Another Ticket, she says, "I sing out. like I've made it." We can only hope she does.
While Gordon's death near Lockport, Manitoba, was tragic, his funeral was anything but bleak.
