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Friday
Here’s a heartwarming story that has an obvious literary parallel. Neither story starts out promising, however.
When a tornado recently swept through Clarksville, Tennessee (where, incidentally, my brother lives, although he was unaffected), one family thought they had lost their baby. Here is the account given by ABC News. First the build-up:
Sydney Moore had just put her two young sons down for an afternoon nap when a deadly tornado tore through her hometown of Clarksville, Tennesseenover the weekend.
Moore, 22, said she and her fiancé Aramis Youngblood were standing in the living room of their mobile home when they heard a huge sound that she described as like an airplane flying directly over them.
Then the tragedy. While Moore protected her eldest son, she said Youngblood ran to the front of the house to grab Lord. As the tornado passed through, both adult and baby were grabbed by the winds:
“In the front bedroom, Aramis was in there with Lord, and the roof came off and swept them up,” [Moore] said. “The bassinet was the first thing to go.”
When the storm passed and Moore and Youngblood, whose collarbone had been dislocated, were able to talk, her first frantic question was, “Where’s my baby?” to which he replied he didn’t know.
And then the miraculous ending:
After a 10-minute search, Youngblood found Lord nestled safely in a tree, around 25 feet away, according to Moore.
“It was just like he was placed in a tree, like a little tree cradle for a baby,” Moore said. “It was like a cubby hole in a tree, at the bottom.”
Moore says of Youngblood, “I saw him walking through the woods, carrying Lord in the pouring down rain, and all of his clothes were ripped. It was like a scene in a movie.”
The baby had a cut that had to be treated but was otherwise fine. The trailer home, on the other hand, was completely demolished, with the bathtub “almost a mile away” and the roof at the other end of the trailer park. A member of the rescue unit said of the devastation, “It looked like a bomb went off. It looked like it had been in a war zone.”
And now for the literary equivalent. First, the tornado touches down:
Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.
Then a strange thing happened.
The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon.
What happens next is not unlike what happened with baby Lord. The author even compares it to a baby being rocked:
It was very dark, and the wind howled horribly around her, but Dorothy found she was riding quite easily. After the first few whirls around, and one other time when the house tipped badly, she felt as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle…. [After hours of suspense], at last she crawled over the swaying floor to her bed, and lay down upon it; and Toto followed and lay down beside her.
In spite of the swaying of the house and the wailing of the wind, Dorothy soon closed her eyes and fell fast asleep.
It so happens that Dorothy’s landing is harder than Lord’s, but both are spared:
She was awakened by a shock, so sudden and severe that if Dorothy had not been lying on the soft bed she might have been hurt. As it was, the jar made her catch her breath and wonder what had happened…
Sometimes real life is as fantastic as fantasy.