Jill, Will, Sophie, and the Hurricane

Mack Hall

As Wodehouse might have said, young men and women often ask me about my successful career in fleeing hurricanes and how they might begin building a future in that noble endeavor.

First, of course, you need a hurricane. I acquire hurricanes by living in East Texas, which saves transportation costs. If you live along the Gulf coast you needn’t order any hurricanes and don’t have to pay for shipping; the hurricanes simply come to you.

Second, when a hurricane presents itself you must then run away from it. Running away from a hurricane means it will almost surely go somewhere else, and you will make the stay-behinds happy in their bragging rights down at The Old Geezers’ Café’ when you return home with dramatic tales about the hotel or guest-room television carrying only fifty or so channels. High (yawn) adventure indeed.

Third, you should find as your refuge a household with three generations, including small children, under one roof. Three of my fellow refugees in this most recent Runaway Scrape were Jill and her pal Sophie, both fourth-graders, and Jill’s four-year-old brother Will.

Will, being the only boy, got the worst of it, but pity him not, for he usually began the it. Whenever Jill felt that Will’s behavior was growing presumptuous, her remedy was to hold him upside down and bash his head against the floor. When Jill forgot that her mother was in earshot on one such occasion the spectators learned that Jill’s you-are-in-such-big-trouble-young-lady name is Gillian.

Sophie, possessing both a somewhat gentler nature and the wisdom reflected in her name, did not participate in the upending of young Will, but smiled benignly upon the operation, rather like the nicer sort of dentist who says “This might sting a little, but you’ll be all the better for it.”

Will, though, is forty or so pounds of Churchillian determination, blended with a touch of the primeval, and not easily suppressed. Will took revenge on Jill and Sophie by discharging projectiles, foam balls propelled by an apparatus of wood and rubber bands won at the Cushing, Texas Labor Day jollifications. I regret to report that there was collateral civilian damage, and Grandpa confiscated the perfidious engine of destruction and placed it atop a bookshelf, far above the grasp of small guerrillas.

Which then led to an event involving a toy bow and arrows. Will’s dad seized those away from him, and in a stunning betrayal of the bonds of blood and manly comradeship turned the arrows on Will, who shrieked and giggled in horror and fear: “Shoot at me again, Dad!”

In the meantime, Jill and Sophie somehow formed a commando group in order to retrieve the wood-and-rubber-band perfidious engine of destruction, which in a suitably Eastern European volte-face they gave back to Will.

And I think this was all in the half-hour before church, but I could be wrong.

Following church the three children got out paints and brushes and sheets of paper, but after generating several two-dimensional images Jill and Sophie decided that Will would be a much better canvas for their creative endeavors, and so they painted him. As in, they painted him. With paint. The objective was to render Will as a butterfly, but in the end he resembled a rather loud snake. I am told by his mother that scrubbing him was an energetic experience, but even so Will was still rather green in the morning.

But perhaps I have in this narrative concentrated too much on Will. Let us not neglect Jill, who not only chastises unruly small boys with the efficiency of an Alaskan governor but who is also quite capable of walking around a table laden with fried chicken, biscuits, green beans, cole slaw, and macaroni-and-cheese, and then through Grandma’s kitchen featuring festive baskets of fruit bars, crackers, and cookies, and a refrigerator stocked with comestibles from all over the world, and then back around the table and summing up her inspection tour with “There’s nothing to eat!”

And then there is sweet Sophie, who in the midst of mighty battles sits serenely with her coloring book, ducking whenever the missiles fly, constructing colors and images that make the world a better place.

Jill, Will, and Sophie; these three abide, and they are great love indeed. The greatest happinesses are the small happinesses asleep like puppies amid disheveled piles of blankies and pillows on the living-room floor, one of them still somewhat green but all of them safe from hurricanes, joyful proofs of a loving God who means for the world to go on.