This is What Happens When You Call Your Store "Target"

I woke up this morning to news that a rare Februrary tornado had touched down in northwest Oklahoma City yesterday, about two miles east of my father's house and two miles west of my mother's. It struck the busiest thoroughfare in that part of the city, the misleadingly named Northwest Expressway, a six-lane behemoth that cuts a gash across the otherwise orderly grid of OKC's secondary roads. Anyone who has heard me describe OKC as one giant Wal-Mart parking lot stitched together by a bunch of fast-food parking lots will have a pretty good idea of what this "expressway" looks like.

Here's a video showing the damage. Dig the slightly inappropriate horror-movie soundtrack that shows up about halfway through:



Luckily, no one appears to have been injured by this tornado. My family's fine - they didn't even lose power - and I believe we can credit the city's ridiculously low population density for creating a situation in which a tornado could touch down near a very busy intersection and only damage a few signs, buildings, and cars. Urban sprawl saves the day!

The same, however, cannot be said about the tornado that tore through the small town of Lone Grove, about 100 miles south of OKC, where some 8 people were killed. And there's nothing funny about that, so I'll move on.

Now, I know this part of OKC very, very well - what might look to you like a bland collection of prefabricated buildings surrounded by a sea of parking lots is, to me, a repository of many of my strongest childhood memories. The Chuck E. Cheese that was damaged used to be a ShowBiz Pizza, and I attended many, many birthday parties with my little friends there. I can still picture the large animatronic gorilla who sat in front and played the piano (what was his name? anyone?), the surfing polar bear (ditto), and the guy with the puppet whose specialty was singing happy birthday songs (ditto ditto). When I visited ShowBiz with my older cousins, the birthday guy would invariably find himself singing happy birthday songs to me whether it was my birthday or not - my cousins having amused themselves by telling the staff that it was my birthday and that, moreover, my name was Eugene.

My principal memory of the El Chico Mexican restaurant next door to Chuck E. Cheese is that it was the first place that I realized there was a difference between chain-restaurant Mexican and real Mexican. El Chico is an example of the former.

Across the street and down a little bit, the Target was also damaged by the tornado - this Target was once an ill-fated Wal-Mart knockoff called Venture, where my friend Maggie worked for a few months in high school. This was during the period when Maggie was making the rounds of all the establishments along Northwest Expressway - the McDonald's, the Buy For Less, Burger King - and seemingly unable to hold down a job at any of them for more than a month. Venture itself was kind of a dump, but that wasn't really Maggie's fault.

Also damaged was the Chick-fil-A, which I haven't ever visited but which stands on the site of the late lamented Village Inn pancake house, which burned down a few years ago. The Village Inn was one of the all-night breakfast places where I and my now not-so-little friends hung out once we were old enough to drive, but before we were old enough to buy cigarettes. Not that that stopped us. It was here that a waiter was once heard - mistakenly, as it turned out - to say "The answer is, Dutch Apple Pie," (I think what he really said was, "The dessert is Dutch Apple Pie"). This prompted us guessing what the question might be, and the phrase became a running inside joke for the rest of high school and beyond. To this day, when I hear somebody ask, "What's the answer?" my first impulse is to respond, "Dutch Apple Pie." And sometimes that's just what I do.

While I was thinking about all this it dawned on me that at least two of the places targeted by the tornado were explicitly Christian franchises. Chick-fil-A is run by a fellow with the improbable name of S. Truett Cathy, a former Baptist minister who has sought to infuse his operation with Christian principles by, among other things, closing the stores on Sundays and sending employees to seminars on how to maintain healthy marriages. The company's statement of purpose is: "That we might glorify God by being a faithful steward in all that is entrusted to our care, and that we might have a positive influence on all the people that we might come in contact with." According to Cathy, "miraculous" things began happening to his chicken restaurants shortly after the fateful 1982 meeting at which the board adopted this statement of purpose, and he hasn't looked back since.

The other Christian business in the area is Hobby Lobby, an OKC-based hobby store whose NW Expressway location happens to be in a former Wal-Mart (the rampant repurposing of these prefab buildings is an urban-studies dissertation waiting to happen). Hobby Lobby is also closed on Sundays and it has a more exhaustively righteous statement of purpose. It is as follows:

In order to effectively serve our owners, employees, and customers the Board of Directors is committed to:

Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.

Offering our customers an exceptional selection and value.

Serving our employees and their families by establishing a work environment and company policies that build character, strengthen individuals, and nurture families.

Providing a return on the owners' investment, sharing the Lord's blessings with our employees, and investing in our community.

We believe that it is by God's grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured. He has been faithful in the past, we trust Him for our future.

Both Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby, then, attribute their success to God's divine assistance. And who's to say they're not right? If God's spending all His time ensuring shoppers experience "exceptional selection and value" in their quests for dried flowers and multicolored yarn, then that explains an awful lot about the mess the rest of the world finds itself in. Maybe, just maybe, this tornado means He's finally turning His attention to more pressing matters.

All snarkiness aside, however, here's hoping the folks back home pick up the pieces and get back to work soon. Now is not the time to find oneself out of a job, even if that job is scraping crusty cheese off the festive Pier One plates at El Chico.