Part II:
Once we were back on the air, we stayed on until after 11pm that first night, churning out the latest information for food, shelter, help, anything people might need to know. To say we were all exhausted, would not even come close, and yet, sleep would not equal rest for many weeks.
Something strange was growing in our newsroom..nobody seemed to know what day it was, and we all had the same look in our eyes..kind of a zombie-like/what has just happened look. Every day since then, we have been wrapped up in that tornado in some fashion. We started in rescue/recovery, to where we are now, rebuilding.
For the first week after, we wrote on a big dry-erase board hanging on the wall: "Today is _______", because we got tired of asking each other again and again, "what day is it?" Time essentially stopped Wednesday, April 27th at 5:13 p.m. Hundreds of peoples from all parts of the city were living in a park rec-room, most of our student interns had to leave, get away from the tragedy..it was simply too much to bear.
Fast-forward to three months later and things are getting better. I no longer have that feeling of panic in my chest like, " where am I?" when I drive down the street to get home. That happened a lot the first few weeks..on the roads I had driven down for months, I would feel lost and then frightened for moments..then I would realize, okay, I know where I am. We brought counselors on our show to talk to our viewers about grief, loss, recovery, patience, feeling lost, you name it, they talked about it.
The reason I wanted to share this, is because if you have experienced these same things, I want you to know it will be okay, things will get better.
"Life is like a train track" comes from one of my favorite preachers, Adrian Rogers. He said we get the good and the bad at the same time some times..and he was right. April 27th started out as the happiest day of our life, since our wedding day..and then it became one of the saddest just hours later.
We eventually did celebrate Bryan passing the bar, but every thing in our life has so much more meaning. We take nothing for granted. Our shelter, food, clothing, everything is so much sweeter. We also have a renewed appreciation for our family. April 27th could have been the day we found out Bryan passed the bar and also the last day we were on the earth. But, thankfully it was not. We are still here, God has something for us to do..so we continue down the train track, with a few scrapes, but still moving forward to a new life.
Janie
**the photo is the last thing I saw on the air before the power went out in the studio. I work right in front of the stadium, and we thought the tornado was headed directly for us, we all took cover on the set and braced for the worst.
So much has happened since I last wrote. It may take a while..so hold on.
Here we go: a month and two days after the last post, we had the most wonderful and the most horrible day, all at once. Since February, we had been counting down the days until April 27th: that's when the results of the bar exam would be released. On the morning of the 27th at 8:46 a.m., my phone rang, and Bryan said " my name is on the list! I did it!" We were beyond happy! Eight long years of hard work, moving from family, going back to school to get two new degrees, moving from city to city, working every holiday..it all came down to that moment and we had crossed the finish line! We talked about how to celebrate, etc. and then I hung up the phone, got ready, and went to work. Everyone had been helping me count down the days and when I walked in, we all cheered!! It was very sweet! Of course, we had both called our parents and loved one's with all the good news. Little did we know, less than 9 hours, our world would turn upside down and we wouldn't talk about this remarkable achievement again for almost two weeks.
I knew we could have some bad storms that day, but nothing could prepare anyone for what happened at 5:13 p.m. that day. An EF-4 tornado rolled through the heart of Tuscaloosa chewing up everything in its path. Thousands of homes and hundreds of businesses were destroyed. 43 people were killed that day and hundreds more appeared on the initial missing list. There are very few experiences in life that can compare to what happened to our temporary home. I heard some of the National Guardsman that came to help compare it to "war zone". Our home was spared, and it became a temporary hotel for 6 people for the next few days. Two bedrooms, one bath, and we made it work somehow. Everywhere you looked in our little rental, you would see people sleeping, and food was everywhere. Bryan turned into a chef and kept the food coming. We lost our ability to be on air from the moment it hit until about 6:30 a.m. Friday morning. During that time, our crew stayed out in ground zero shooting stories, and I hunkered down in our one working edit bay gathering everything together and making a game plan for the moment we came back on air. We finally got back up with our first newscast at 1:00 p.m. Friday, and that's when I finally saw what had happened. Going to work and coming home were re-routed beyond the damaged areas, so it wasn't until the first videos rolled that I saw what everyone else already knew...it was catastrophic. And, there was no way we would ever be the same.
On this one day, we had gotten the best news of our lives so far, and just hours later, we had survived a deadly tornado, it missed our home by 1/4 mile.
We said goodbye to our dear friend Alex this week. He and his sister Molly joined our family when they were just a few weeks old, that was 16 years ago. Molly passed away last fall suddenly, Alex died after being ill for almost a year. It would be impossible to include in this one post all of the joy they bought to us though the years. From the moment we brought them home, they brought us so much laughter and kept each other company.
I'll share a couple of memories...
When they were brand new puppies, we lived in a very sweet neighborhood where a lot of people liked to walk their dogs. They always looked so happy walking around the block, people smiling, dog's tail's wagging and everyone in rhythm. I got the bright idea to do the same thing with Alex and Molly. So, we got little puppy leashes and hooked them on their little collars and we started down the drive way. Me and Molly, Bryan and Alex, and then......whooooosh! They were gone! We had the leashes and collars..but no puppies! They had finagled ( a mississippi word that does not require proper spelling ) their little selves right out of the collars and we were left looking at two "puppies gone wild" in the street, in the neighbors yards, around the corner, everywhere we looked..it was two short, collie-mutt puppy bullets zooming out of control! I started screaming at them, "Molly!! Alex!! Get back here!" Which of course worked because at just about 6 weeks old they already knew their name, phone number and zip code, right ? ? NO!! I might as well have been screaming "PIZZA! FRENCH FRIES! BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!" Because they had no idea what their names were, we had only had them a few days.. Bryan was smart enough to remain calm and said we should split up and track them down, quickly! ( Did I mention all the nice calm neighbors and their dogs were walking past us laughing hysterically? Yes, the dogs were laughing, too. It's my post and my dogs, so just go with it.) Some neighbors even came out of their house to see what the commotion was all about. Here's what they saw: two fuzzy blur's of collie-looking puppies flying around the yards, darting in and out of the street, followed by one grown man ordering "Alex" to stop and "come here" and one grown woman screaming frantically, "MOLLY, STOP! I MEAN IT! RIGHT NOW! COME BACK HERE!" Again, the dogs heard " BLAH, BLAH! BLAH BLAH BLAH! " We eventually caught them and when I got them back inside their fenced in back yard, I told them both, " I hope you enjoyed that trip! Because you will never get to see the front yard again!" And they didn't unless it was from inside the car looking out the window on the way to the vet.
Here's a glimpse of what they accomplished while we lived on Hemlock:
they used to break into the bottom of the house, pull all the cable out into the yard and crawl back in where it was cool and lay down..and the only warning we had was when the t.v. suddenly turned blue and then we knew they were on the loose; they also broke into our utility shed through a crack in the corner to hang out and we couldn't find them until we would bring food and then they would bust out and it sounded like the building would collapse..or when Alex decided he wanted to help Bryan smoke some ribs and by "help" I mean he hopped up with two front feet on the front of the smoker, took his long collie nose and grabbed the huge rack of ribs from the smoker and ran in the yard..only to discover they were too hot to eat! They also ate the wheels off our grill, the metal off the back door, and the handle off the water spicket..I won't tell you what happened when my Mother picked up a basket of apples in the back yard that Alex thought belonged to me...let's just say he had to go to "jail" for a few days, and when he came back, he was no longer singing tenor, he was officially a soprano.
I told you, there are so many stories..
But this is one of my all time favorite Molly and Alex stories.
When we decided to go back to school and move to Tuscaloosa, that meant moving the entire family. So the vet recommended we give Molly and Alex some medicine to relax so they wouldn't be "insane in the membrane, insane, got no brains!"..that was their theme song..to say they were hyper and happy together would be an understatement. So, that's what we did. Remember, I told them they would never see the front yard again, so after giving them the medicine, we backed the car up to the gate at an angle so the gate opened right up into the back door of the car. The vet said it would take a little while for the medicine to kick in, so they were still "super pumped about the move!" at this point. So, when we went to get them, we cracked open the gate and they shot out like two bullets right into the car! They never knew what hit 'em! We had captured them successfully and Bryan got behind the wheel. I hopped in the front of the truck with our cat Precious in her "car" or animal carrier. And we were off to our new lives! About an hour down the road, Bryan calls me on the cell and tells me things have changed drastically! The medicine worked great on Alex..he was calm, laying down in the back being good. It was a different story with Molly..we might as well had given her a giant hit of "e" or "f" or whatever the name of those wild hyper kid drugs are called. She was out of control with eyes blared. Bryan said she was hopping back and forth playing a little game called "front-seat, back-seat, front-seat, back...you get the idea". She also liked to box with her little paws and that was also amusing to her ...she was using the back of the drivers seat to box around on. While he was telling me all of this, Precious was moaning in her "car" like she was at death's door..when I checked on her, she wasn't dying, she was car sick..and you guessed it, she got sick. Then she was furious with me that I didn't immediately pull over and clean it up so she could be comfortable. So, Bryan and I finally found a place to pull over, me with Precious who is wailing, Bryan and his punk-rock Molly, and Alex who is asleep in the back. While Bryan comes to help me with Precious, I look over to check on the dogs...and that's when I saw it. Alex was no longer asleep, he was WIDE awake and behind THE WHEEL! He had both paws on the steering wheel ( I am not making this up..I couldn't, I'm not that smart) and Molly was jumping up and down in the back seat as if she was celebrating, singing"East bound and down, loaded up and truckin'! We're gonna do what they say can't be done!" I calmly walked over to Bryan and told him, he might want to go check on the dogs...I could take over for Precious...How we made it alive to Tuscaloosa , only the Lord knows.
I believe that right now, Precious, Alex and Molly are reunited in Heaven at our home waiting on us to get there so we can all spend eternity laughing and playing together..
And to borrow the words of one of the funniest women ever, "I'm so glad we had this time together".....
Molly Bear Wallace 1995-2010
Alex Handsome Wallace 1995-2011
