It hasn’t been a good past few days for the country. We had another mass shooting and out West in Colorado, thousands have been displaced and thousands of homes have been damaged by raging flood waters.
But there’s a video making the rounds on the Internet today that gives us a bit of hope. It features Mark D. Changaris, of Boulder, Colo., sitting at his piano after a mudslide wrecked his home.
As Changaris described it to us in an email, his roommate had just gotten back from helping some friends evacuate from their home. After a grueling day, they had taken a shower and were settling down, when the slide hit.
A video shows water rushing through the house, down the stairs, and there is absolutely nothing they could do about it.
When the waters subsided, Changaris sat at the piano and played a melancholic rendition of Tears for Fears’ Mad World.
“It’s a beautiful piano, and it’s been a part of my life for the past few years,” Changaris told us in an email. “I guess in some sense I was saying goodbye. In another sense, it felt good to play, to just be in the moment and let the rest of the craziness drop off. It also helped make me feel more normal, that in the face of something so outwardly bizarre, something old and familiar could warm up the place.”
Changaris said that he and his housemates are “safe and sound,” with friends and significant others who have taken them in.
“Our hearts are going out to the people out there less fortunate than us who are homeless from this disaster or have lost loved ones,” Changaris said. “We’re very lucky considering how big the slide was and how forceful the rain was. It could’ve been so much more.”
Article source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/17/223532713/watch-in-the-midst-of-destruction-something-uplifting?ft=1&f=1001