It's Only Stuff

I spent a leisurely morning offline, reading the newspaper over breakfast and then watching last week's Lost on Tivo while I laid out my pills for the coming week. Eventually I sent My Beautiful Wife a text message asking how her workday was going. She responded that she'd mostly been glued to Twitter following the "EQ and HI tsunami" reports. What?!?! I turned on the TV and booted up the Macbook and learned about the powerful earthquake in Chile and the tsunami warnings around the Pacific rim.

I checked in with Twitter friends in Hawaii and learned they were safely ensconced above the danger zone. Someone tweeted the URL for a CBS station on Oahu that was streaming live coverage. A Twitter friend in Santiago, Chile had posted "Terremoto en Chile" ten hours earlier. Another had messaged back to her in Spanish, "Can you phone my parents?" and later the tweet shown above, which translates as, "Now I know about my parents. Very scared but they're fine. The house is damaged but it's only stuff." Soon I was watching The Weather Channel on TV and both CNN and Hawaiian CBS coverage simultaneously on the laptop, mesmerized by the ocean's retreat in Hilo Bay.

I'd been absorbed in this for some time before I realized that this would be a perfect time to make my regular Saturday call to Mom. My mother was a Navy WAVE stationed on Oahu in World War II, which began her life-long love affair with Hawaii. She had just come in the door when I rang, and I told her to turn on the TV. We watched coverage of the earthquake damage, the aftershocks, the tsunami's advance; together, two thousand miles apart.