Last night there was a great event at church with kids dressed in their Halloween costumes and a trivia game for their parents. The adults were divided into teams and vied for a magnificent blue and gold plastic trophy from 1993 (repurposed for this special occasion). It reminded me of something in light of next week’s approach of Hurricane Sandy along the Eastern Seaboard. Warnings about the potential for this storm to become a mega-storm of historic proportions have been both consistent and dire. My hope is that people will take them seriously.
I had been reminded of the so-called “Storm of the Century” in mid-March of 1993. It was described in The New York Times as “a monster with the heart of a blizzard and the soul of a hurricane.” Because of the snow, I was stuck for three nights at a Holiday Inn off the New Jersey Turnpike on my way back from North Carolina to Connecticut during my first year at Yale Divinity School. Freemasons — a lot of them — from New York City were also stuck there. They had a party.
I remember, too, that hundreds of people died as a result of that 1993 “Storm of the Century,” and there will surely be too much suffering if this new mega-storm develops. So here’s a prayer for tonight and for the dark nights that await us all:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
I also spent the “Storm of the Century” in a Holiday Inn. I was with my parents and three brothers — we were visiting the town in NC that was to be our new home from northern Indiana. We were there to look for a house that weekend, and despite the warnings from our real estate agent, we drove into the storm like the know-it-all Yankees that we were, and spent four days starring out the window of our hotel watching the townspeople attempt to clear two feet of snow with bulldozers and payloaders. Good times, good times…
Well, I basically did the same thing. This Southerner heard the endless warnings on the radio about the storm and could have driven all the way to New Haven. Needless to say, I didn’t. So I also stared out a hotel window, watching snow plows try to clear an exit on the New Jersey Turnpike. It never looked as though one of them had touched it. When I finally did get back to Yale Divinity School, there was an emergency meeting in the Refectory. We were told that if enough snow accumulated on the dormitories, built in the 1930s, the roofs might collapse!