by Pamela Morsi
His relationship with Lauren appeared to be very different from what we'd seen when she'd brought him home to meet us. Then he was the man-in-charge and she was trying every minute to get along and smooth things over. But it was different after the tornado. Lauren was amazingly good at crisis management. She could readily see what needed to be done and come up with a plan for doing it.
We had never seen her like this. I assumed that she'd learned these skills on her mission trips. If we were surprised, poor Gilk was virtually stupefied. But when she said "frog," the guy hopped. We all hopped. What else could we do? She spoke with authority and her directions made sense. She brought more out of people than they knew they had in them.
Cho Kyon was struggling with the enormity of her husband's care and rehab. Hye Won had come from
her new home in Midwest City and had been designated to help her. It was Lauren who realized that Hye Won was pregnant, and therefore, her mother wouldn't allow her to help. There were no extra hands, so Lauren had Belinda, one of the young women who worked at the tamale factory, trade places with Cho Kyon for a few hours every day. Belinda had started a nurse's aide course once, but dropped out. She was still interested in the medical field and was able to follow the directions of the home healthcare staff and the therapist.
Just the few hours that Cho Kyon got away from her house and sat down to do something else seemed to rejuvenate her. And it rekindled Belinda's interest in the medical field.
It was a simple solution. Lauren came up with it, because she looked at a problem as if a solution already existed; it just needed to be puzzled out.
What Gilk thought of this sudden change in his girlfriend, we didn't know. But Nate summed up the situation clearly.
"He's finding out our Lauren is more than just some Christian arm candy."
I was asked to attend a last-minute citizens' meeting one afternoon. I didn't know where Nate was, so I took Gilk with me. It was held out under the mayor's carport, standing room only. It was a semi-secret gathering. There were so many contractors, developers and urban planners running around town that it was difficult for us to differentiate them from the shysters, swindlers and con men trying to make a buck on our misery. We, the people of Lumkee, needed to figure out what to do next, without their self-serving input or the glare of camera lights.
"What we should do is level the whole area and put it in houses,” Tim Reynolds suggested. "We can rebuild a business district closer to the expressway."
"I liked Lumkee just the way it was!" Marvin Kredmur complained. "We should build it back like it was."
"It can't ever be what we remember," Pat Dawson said. "They just don't make buildings that way anymore."
"We should take this opportunity to use our insurance money to build better, more modem, efficient buildings."
"I'm thinking I won't bother to rebuild. The cash is good. I'll make more investing it than putting it back into small-town commercial real estate."
I glanced at Gilkison after that comment. Fortunately for him, I didn't read a hint of agreement in his glance.
In the end we formed committees to work out the details. Everything from zoning specs to contract bidding had to be managed. The decisions would lie with city council, but they couldn't begin to take care of the tremendous overflow of detail being thrown at them. The mayor decided to divide the different aspects of the tasks into committees. Each committee would report to a member of the city council.
"But how will the whole thing be coordinated?" Tim Reynolds complained. “Who'll put it all together?"
"I'm the mayor," he answered. "I make the final decisions."
"That's exactly right, Mr. Mayor," Reverend Shue interrupted. "For that very reason, you won't be able to shepherd the deal along."
"I don't get your meaning," the mayor said.
"As an elected official," Reverend Shue continued, loud enough for everyone to hear, "you will be called upon to make final approval of all the infrastructure spending. You'll be making improvements on the city codes and permits. And it will be you who has to ultimately come up with plans that city council can approve. I'm sure you'll do your duty to the best of your ability. But politics will inevitably rear its ugly head. Any 'no' to your political opponents will be suspect. And any 'yes' to your political friends will be deemed favoritism. The fate of this town can't rest on the outcome of elections. The final decisions will have to be yours, but we don't want politics to taint the process."
Everyone was listening closely.
"In a big city, the mayor would hire this job out," Reverend Shue went on. "We can't really afford to do that. We'll have to take a volunteer."
There was some murmuring among the crowd.
The Reverend continued, ostensibly talking to the mayor, but in fact speaking to everyone. "I think you should pick someone outside of your sphere of influence. Not anyone who works for the city or a company that might be bidding for work. Maybe one of the businessmen directly affected by the disaster. And let him coordinate the committees."
"Do you have anyone in mind for this committee coordinator?" he asked the Reverend.
He shook his head.
The mayor briefly scanned the crowd.
"Anybody got any ideas about who we might get to do this?"
People began talking among themselves.
"You," the mayor called on someone. "You, young man with your hand up, in the back. Do you have something to say?"
"I'd like to suggest you ask my dad, Sam Braydon."
I whipped my head around. I couldn't see Nate, but I could hear him.
"My dad is honest, dependable, he works well with people and he knows how to get a job done. I trust him. Everybody in this town trusts him."
I was stunned by Nate's words. Stunned and embarrassed and proud. I had no idea that he held that opinion of me. It touched me as much as anything he'd ever said to me. I glanced over at Gilk beside me. He looked at me as if he'd never seen me before.
Of course, I wasn't picked for the job. Even in small towns, guys who never went to college and sell tamales for a living aren't singled out to be community leaders. But I was asked if I wanted to be on a committee. I requested Architecture and Design. I thought that would be something where my family might be able to help. Corrie understands everything about design. And architecture is a three-dollar word for building: Nate knows a lot about building, so I figured he could help me with that.
For the next three months I attended committee meetings in a Sunday school room in the basement of the Methodist church. We decided that we weren't going to allow anyone to not rebuild. We formed a downtown consortium. If you wanted your cash you could only sell your business to us, and we were offering only a minimum fair price. We decided that there would be one design. All the buildings would conform to this design, and we accepted bids for the whole Main Street area.
Like me, everyone there had far too much to do to while away their days in book work. I took stacks of proposals, information on city codes and zoning home with me every night to study. There was so much to be worked out, so many snags to be unsnarled.
One night in the family room with Makayla banging on her musical toy, Jin sleeping in front of the TV and Corrie working at her computer, I was deeply immersed in my work. There was so much that had to be kept together. Every decision had to be documented. I finally got everything together in a big file. Across the top of it I wrote, City of Lumkee: Suburban Renewal.
33
Corrie
2000
I was sitting in a row of dignitaries behind the podium. In front of me, hundreds of Minnesota educators were seated in stackable hotel chairs. They were wearing their convention buttons, funny hats and award ribbons. They sat waiting, their notebooks open to blank pages, their pens held at the ready, as they listened to the speaker at the microphone.
“Nationally recognized as an education innovator, her learning-friendly classroom designs utilizing age, culture and behavioral norms ar
e nationally recognized for flow, function and the ultimate yardstick, student success. And she has done this as a public service for teachers and schools, public and private, struggling against ever more restrictive budgets. Now she's written a book and developed an interactive software program that shares with users some of what she's learned along the way."
The speaker took a breath and turned slightly to glance in my direction.
“Ladies and gentleman, today's undisputed authority on classroom design for the new millennium, author of A Place for Learning and the creator of EducationEnvironments.com, Ms. Corrie Braydon."
The applause was more welcoming than I expected for an education techie. People knew of my work and admired me for my accomplishments. It was a strange concept, but it felt really good.
During the long months of rebuilding after the tornado, Nate and I had spent our evenings escaping from the workday drudge and anxiety by upgrading the website. We managed to get our design software interactive. Teachers could come onto the site, enter in their own specifics and be shown designs that had been developed for classrooms similar to their own. They could then, with the new options available, customize that plan to more closely fit their needs. From the day it went up, it was an immediate success. Teachers took to it with the enthusiasm of middle schoolers to video games.
That was great, except it put a tremendous strain on our server and I was going to have to spend more money to keep the site operating. I thought about going back to Jim, the gentleman who managed the venture capital and who had been previously interested in me. But the dot.com bust was widening. His clients had lost their savings and he was out of business. Alternatively, I approached a publishing company. They were as excited as the teachers. They wanted to produce a CD version of the program on the Web to be included with the book.
I wasn't a rich-and-famous author now—even the top sellers at education presses are only moderately successful commercially. But it had done well enough to make it worthwhile to the publisher, and to provide me with a little development money.
As I stood before those teachers, I knew that I had achieved my goal. At eighteen, I had wanted to do something important. I had wanted to meet important people and make a difference in the world. I had done that now and not in a way that I would ever have imagined.
The new century had brought a number of highlights for the Braydon family, including the reopening of Okie Tamales on the new Main Street Mall.
On Gilkison's advice, Sam had taken on interested investors in the company and revamped the plant, utilizing the latest commercial equipment. It was housed in a more efficient, worker-friendly building and the new setup increased production.
Sam's work on Lumkee's rebuilding project had broadened his ambition as well as his knowledge. Plans were now in the discussion stage for a second production unit to be built near Conway, Arkansas. He hoped that by 2003 Arkie Tamales would be on sale in grocery stores from Fort Smith to the Mississippi River.
My father's rehabilitation was going well. Especially for my mother. Although I had done what I could to help her care for Dad after his stroke, most of his care fell upon her shoulders, more than anyone would have thought she would have been able to bear. Mom was always so self-involved. We all knew that she loved Dad, but as in most of her relationships, she was always more interested in being the love-ee than the lover.
This second stroke had left Dad almost totally helpless for weeks. Even as he improved, it was very slow progress. Because of the ongoing crisis all over town, a few hours a day was all that anyone managed to spare. Jin and her family needed more help than they could give. And poor Harlan Larson, Cherry Dale's son, trying to keep her business going so that he could pay for the care she required, began to count on us as the nearest thing he had to family. Mom was forced to fend for herself, with a very sick man totally dependent upon her. And like the rest of us in that dark, sad period, she rose to the challenge.
I worried that she would ruin her own health, trying to do for him. But the result was quite the opposite. Mom had a purpose. Perhaps more feeling of purpose than she'd experienced since Mike's death. The sagging seventy-something socialite was suddenly energized. Twenty-four-hour nursing care didn't even faze her. And as Dad improved, she began branching out, offering advice and assistance to other caregivers.
I guess this was the first time I realized that Lauren's affinity for social activism might not be some strange aberration in our family, but a strength of character she'd inherited from my mother, who had secretly carried it all her life.
In June, Lauren graduated from Baylor. The whole family went down to Waco, including Dad, who was still unsteady on his feet and using a wheelchair most of the time.
We were so proud of her, and we had a wonderful time wandering the well-manicured campus. The college atmosphere was fun and exciting, but I sensed a wistfulness in Jin. She never said a word, nor did she seem angry or jealous of Lauren. But I would catch her in private moments, her expression sad. And she held Makayla close more often than the little girl liked.
After commencement, Gilkison took us all out to dinner. His two younger children, thirteen-year-old Jared and ten-year-old Regan, were also in the party. They seemed like good kids, polite and quiet, though
Regan did show a little bit of underlying nastiness to Lauren.
Their father's unexpected announcement probably didn't make things better.
"With all the exuberance of this very special day," he said, "I wanted to tell all of you, whom we love so much, that Miss Lauren Braydon, a magna cum laude bachelor of arts graduate, has consented to make me the happiest man in the world. As of last week, we're engaged!"
Lauren was all flushed, I think with both excitement and a smidgeon of embarrassment, as well. Gilkison was obviously so happy, much more so than the people at the table with whom he wanted to share his joy.
Sam and Nate had developed a grudging respect for the man, but it was still grudging. Although she never spoke of it, I was fairly sure that Jin didn't care for the man. I, personally, thought my baby girl could do a lot better. And the two Oberfeld children appeared angry enough about the announcement to spit nails.
But we all wished them well and pretended delight, though I felt a definite pall had settled upon the celebration.
Lauren moved home and we both jumped into the plans for the wedding, which she hoped to have in late fall. Fortunately, she didn't want a grand affair, and Gilkison, after suggesting that the wedding be moved to Tulsa where the churches were larger and the reception venues more lavish, seemed to be willing to allow Lauren the sweet little small-town wedding that she wanted.
The plan was to have the ceremony in "Gram's church"—we'd continued to attend Ninety and Nine Baptist all these years. The sanctuary there would only hold a hundred and fifty, which was a great way to limit the growth of a grandiose occasion.
For the reception we chose the Elk's Lodge, which would easily and safely seat that many and still have separate space for dancing.
Lauren played a little trick on us. She planned a nice menu and went around getting bids from local caterers. She came back with an estimate for dinner, including the champagne toast, at thirty dollars a plate.
Having heard the whines of my friends, I knew this was not out of line. Although, I could tell by Sam's expression that it was more than he'd thought to be spending.
"Do you think we can afford this, Daddy?" Lauren asked him.
"If this is what you want, honey," he told her, "then I think I can swing it."
She hugged him.
"I love you so much," she told him. "And what I'd really like to do is have an old-fashioned reception with just cake and punch, and donate the rest of the money to the International Campaign Against Hunger. That would be a very blessed wedding feast."
So we planned a modest celebration and Sam wrote a big check to her charity.
Not that Lauren's generous nature was universally applauded. My mother was horrified
.
"What will people think?" she asked me rhetorically, and then answered her own question. "They'll either believe that Sam's business is on the skids, that you don't care very much about Lauren or that you're just cheap!"
The groom-to-be also had reservations.
"If we're not going to feed people, then the least we owe them is an explanation," he said. "Otherwise, how will people understand that they're participating in a good deed?"
Lauren laughed at that as if he were making a joke. "Oh, yeah, right," she said facetiously. "We'll get the M.C. to make an announcement. 'Your rubber chicken dinner is being donated to a grateful and deserving nutritionally deprived Third World citizen. He needs the calories and you could stand to lose a few pounds.'"
In the end a small, carefully worded acknowledgment was added to the back of the program.
Lauren chose Gilk's daughters to be her bridesmaids. His son was to be best man. By midsummer the hall was rented, the invitations sent, the decorations selected, the cake ordered and the dress altered. Everything was going great, except Lauren seemed to have lost her luster. She didn't seem happy or excited.
I thought maybe it had something to do with Jin. Jin and the baby didn't spend nearly as much time at home anymore. Her relationship with Nate had always been very private. If they were having trouble or estranged somehow, I couldn't tell. But after Lauren returned from school, Jin spent more and more of her nights and almost all of her days elsewhere. She was helping her parents a lot, assisting with her father's care and working full-time in her sister's business. I was glad to see that the hard feelings between her and her family had lessened considerably since the tragedy of the storm. Her father's disability was permanent. They never reopened the grocery, but I would see him in his wheelchair at the new Kim Pharmacy on the Main Street Mall with little Makayla in his lap, talking to her in Korean. We acknowledged each other politely.