I recently picked up a copy of San Diego’s local Navy newspaper, the Navy Compass and came across an article that got me all choked up right there in the parking lot of the commissary, among the shopping carts and grocery bags. Apparently there is a new television show airing this fall that will renovate and give away a home to deserving families who have never before owned their own home.
Sounds a lot like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (which I happen to love, I am a tear-jerker junkie). This new show, called Home Team, is a little different in that they don’t build an impossibly impressive home from the ground up, they renovate an existing home. They do not give it outright to the family, they award them a 10% down payment, one year’s mortgage payments, and $5,000 worth of furnishings. All in an emotional surprise reveal.
That is the part that got me choked up in the parking lot. The Navy Compass spotlighted an episode where they give a new home to Jennifer Showalter, a local San Diego mom. She is the widow of Joshua Showalter, a Navy Aviation Electronics Technician 2nd Class, who was killed last August, along with Lt. Cmdr. Scott Zellum, Lt. Patrick Myrick, and Lt. James Pupplo, when their aircraft crashed into a volcanic island south of Japan. The three officer’s wives, along with Joshua’s shipmates, family, and friends, spent over two days remodeling the house for Jennifer and her four-year-old daughter.
I remember hearing the local news last summer, when the crew was killed. I remember how, for a moment, I put myself in those women’s shoes, and imagined the agony of hearing that my husband had been killed. But only for that fleeting moment, and then I locked that image away again, pushed down deep where we Navy pilots’ wives keep ideas like that safely repressed.
And then in the parking lot the other day, I was looking at a picture of all four widows, looking exactly my age, as three of them surround Jennifer while she stands, shocked, in the foyer of her new house. All of them are smiling. Beaming, actually. And that is something I think I will have to tune in to see this fall.
