a few years after i got to southern illinois, in the late nineties, i googled my own name and found two out of the five or six in the country with my exact name lived in a nearby town, a coal-mining town about thirty miles away. so i took a family calendar, which had our genealogy, over to this old guy and gave it to him. politely he invited me in and we sat around chatting for a while, trying to figure out if there was any way we could be related. he'd come from a farm family and didn't really know his ancestry, how he'd got his name, where they were from. but he'd given his son the same name, and his son was a policeman/fireman as we spoke.

he was retired and in fairly bad health after a life on the farm, in the mines, or in some bad jobs which he told me but i forgot. what struck me was seeing bills and magazines with basically my name on them all over the house as if it was my house, but, in so many ways, we lived in entirely different worlds. a town of ten thousand, everyone knows each other, and it gets pretty rowdy at times with people set in the character roles that they set out for themselves, and grow into those roles because there is plenty of room to grow, people can be as extreme as they want. i'd lived in towns like this and i recognized that aspect of it, and i went back a time or two over the years, even sat on a jury once of people from that town, a parade of emergency personnel testifying about a guy they'd all known all their lives and known all too well, so much that they'd pretty much decided he was guilty before they even saw what he'd done. i thought about these folks when i went back through there; the town has a single hill and a small downtown, a little hospital tucked back in the neighborhoods, and a strip mall out by the wal-mart, by where the road down into the shawnee hits the road to indiana.

this was the town hit by the tornado the other day, six people killed, and the police chief is all over the news these days if i were to google my own name again. we here, thirty miles away, can hardly help; we don't have chainsaws, we worked a full week and are exhausted; we don't know from house and pole-barn debris, what do you do about it, so as not to be overwhelmed by grief or wonder. whole pole-barn stores, including wal-mart, destroyed; hospital took a hit; little houses with no basements, struck at 5 am, people had no time to find cover, and their places were flattened.

all these wild connections i have with the place though, and i still can't say i really even knew anyone there, even the police chief. i'd met his dad, of course, and his mom, same as i'd met the people in that trial and even one or two others from the town, over time, but not really known them. after the trial, though, which was for the guy who killed two well-known blues musicians, i went home and listened to their blues, which was now gone. it was fantastic; they had this haunting sound that reminded me of the allman brothers that completely reflected the dead-end, small-town feeling which i could relate to, both the feeling and the music it took to get yourself out of it.

small towns are at their best when they're cleaning up after a disaster, because they know everybody and there aren't that many secrets, and in fact people have some free time and if they all get out there doing something, they fell better about themselves for years. in such a small town everyone knew the people who died, even was related to them, everyone had a story, everyone can say something. but we, thirty miles away, are cut off, vaguely, with our feeling that luck drove the thing just off our path and onto theirs, that maybe the next one will be coming our way. a few sirens and we're all in our shelters, and my students are a little nervous too, they've never seen anything like it. they're asking visitors and gawkers to stay away though, and we will, out of respect and a sense of privacy. i didn't actually know any of the people involved, not a one. their wal-mart was destroyed, but hey, they can build another one of those in minutes. my week is over, i'm on my way to bed, with only these images, blues musicians, old coal miner, a few people i'd met here and there. the old guy and the musicians, they'd already died, but my mind wanders, i'd put them all in one geographical drawer and now that drawer is rent asunder, a kind of pile of photos that will occupy my dreams for sure. and life will also go on, in its own way.