LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER EIGHT

      It had been three months since the driving winds and unchecked tides from superstorm Sandy swept over Staten Island, battering the middle-class communities of Tottenville, Oakwood, and Midland Beach, situated along New York Bay.

      A lot of us who lived in the area never fully appreciated the full impact of the storm. In Armonk, thirty miles to the north, it was mainly a wind event—downed trees and mangled power lines blocking the roads for weeks, resulting in close to two weeks without power.

      The heartbreak of the Jersey shore and Staten Island seemed a million miles away.

      But driving across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge three days later and seeing the devastation for the first time, it looked to me as if the storm had just happened yesterday.

      Homes along the shore were split wide open. Streets were still blocked with whatever the tides and winds had thrown around. A tanker was aground, with the famous message written on the hull: FEMA CALL ME! There were mountains of random debris. From the bridge I could see boats and cars still piled in streets and driveways like discarded toys. Power lines twisted at right angles. My mind flashed to the angry residents who appeared on the news, screaming about how FEMA hadn’t even come around yet, how insurance companies were ignoring them, how they were living in cramped, remote motel rooms, unable to even gain access to their own battered homes.The rebuilding hadn’t even begun.

      I swung off the bridge onto Hylan Boulevard. Midland Beach was about two miles south.

      Where Joseph Kelty had his home.

      I was lucky to even make it to St. Barnabas’s, ignoring what the GPS was telling me, searching for any street that was even open. I had to walk the last three blocks on foot. The church was on Rector Street, a few blocks inland from the demolished shore.

      There was a line of people leading into the church, an old red-stone Romanesque-style structure with a bell tower. I took a seat in the back and waited while the pews filled in. Finally the organist played a hymn and people turned; the family began to file down the main aisle. I saw a nice-looking man in his mid-thirties with his arm around the shoulders of a young boy. He had to be Kelty’s son and a grandson. He followed a woman who looked around my age with her husband and two kids. They took their seats. Maybe a hundred people were there. The organist stopped. Finally the priest stood up.

       “O God, you are my God, I seek you,

       My soul thirsts for you;

       My flesh faints for you,

       As in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

       So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,

       Beholding your power and glory.”

      “We are here today to celebrate the return of our friend and neighbor Joseph Kelty to his immortal father.”

      A few people wept in the first rows. The priest went through his blessings and prayers, and when it was time to remember the deceased, he called Kelty “a little rough around the edges, except where it counted—in his heart and in his deeds.” He called him a “salt of the earth, good-hearted man, who came into this life without much and would have left the very same way were it not for the bountiful blessings of his family he had built up.”

      A co-worker stepped up to the altar, a round-shouldered black man with a graying beard who introduced himself as “Carl. From the tunnels,” who said, “Joe Kelty was as solid and dependable a man as any who ever worked the lines.” He said he would pick up any shift when someone called in with a problem, rain or shine. “Except for his grandson Chris’s birthday. We all knew that day, June seventh.”

      Several people in the pews laughed.

      “And when he worked his way up to supervisor,

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