As the world goes sideways, a moment of grace

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – This week, violent tornadoes ripped through middle Tennessee and leveled neighborhoods across our region. At least 25 people were killed statewide and, in Nashville alone, some 700 homes and 1,200 other properties were damaged.

We were lucky at our home – only a few fallen limbs. In some places to the east of us, the devastation was total. On Thursday morning, the local news reported that Tennessee’s first case of coronavirus had been confirmed, just one county over. No fever or coughing in our house, though, so the morning unfolded as school mornings usually do. Alarm off at 6 a.m. Coffee brewed. Dogs fed. Recalcitrant teenagers shaken from slumber.

My 11-year old wasn’t ready for business as usual. With the wisdom reserved for children and the very old, she looked up at me with a furrowed brow and whispered from her half-sleep, “Mama, the world is in a jumble.”

I had to agree with her.

And yet, amid that jumble, and even because of it, I found cause for hope that morning. Hope and a healthy serving of grace.

I work from home on a flexible schedule. So does my sister, and we were able to make space in the workday to head to Cheatham Place, a neighborhood in North Nashville, where volunteers from a local nonprofit, Hands on Nashville, were gathering to provide relief to families who had lost just about everything.

There was a quick camaraderie among the folks at the recreation center where the volunteer efforts were being staged. The place was without electricity, so a cheerful woman wearing a headlamp directed us to a long table covered in diapers of all sizes, baby food, new blankets and cans of Chef Boyardee. A group of young African American women, clad in pink-and-green sweatshirts emblazoned with the Greek letters of a college sorority, stood shoulder to shoulder with a teacher from a public school that is closed until further notice. She stood next to a middle-aged lawyer who’d taken the morning off to help. The band of volunteers extended down the length of folding tables borrowed from a local church. As mothers and their kids filed through, grabbing flashlights and baby formula, underwear and Lunchables, the room looked a lot like America. Only the bewildered looks on the faces of the hurting and displaced identified the neediest in the room.

As the morning wore on, we’d run out of canned goods, blankets and ramen noodles, so we drove to Walmart to replenish supplies. By then, my sister and I had been promoted to “coordinators” – which made us chuckle – and we decided to post a photo on Instagram to mobilize our friends and bring in more supplies.

At Walmart, the checkout lines were six and seven carts deep with volunteers. We met two elderly men from a local African Methodist Episcopal Church who were loading up on sanitizing wipes and toilet paper to distribute from their church. A young woman and her Kurdish friend were buying cases of water and Gatorade to drop off at Gideon’s Army, another local charity. The cashier wished us all a “blessed day,” a salutation that usually leaves me a little uncertain, but not so much that day.

When our shift ended, I checked my phone. In the three hours we’d been organizing diapers into boxes by size, friends raised $1,350 in donations. Scrolling through my feed, usually heavy on staged table settings and #NoFilter sunsets, I noticed a different tenor in the posts from my Nashville Insta pals.

A platform that so often isolates and excludes was bringing people together. And not just virtually. Across the city, people were finding out about relief efforts and reporting to places they might never have otherwise seen, working with people they might otherwise never have met. Talking, listening, released from our silos of race and class and gender and political persuasion, we had a job to do, all of us – and we were doing it.

I caught a ride back home and as the driver maneuvered his way through streets thick with Nashville Electric Service trucks, he asked whether I’d mind some music.

This being Nashville, I replied, “Of course not.”

I leaned my head back in the seat and heard a bass-baritone voice rise slowly out of the speakers, singing old familiar words, a hymn almost.

“When you’re weary, feeling small.

When tears are in your eyes, I’ll dry them all.

I’m on your side, oh when times get rough.

And friends just can’t be found,

Like a bridge over troubled water. I will lay me down.”

It was Johnny Cash, covering Simon and Garfunkel.

A Music City moment of grace, briefly bringing order to a world in a jumble.

Keith Meacham spent 25 years in the field of education. She lives with her family in Nashville.