5

Nancy Lamott sings a tune about the one she remembers most--"It Wasn't Exactly Paris"--on an album that Jonathan Schwartz was playing, and it grabbed me and stayed with me through Sunday afternoon NPR shows on memories and how utterly faulty and susceptible to suggestion they are. I remembered a journal I'd kept during that particular affair--a pretty, hardcover thing now tucked on top of a bookshelf, too high for children (as if anything is too high for determined children)--and decided I'd get home and read it, and then burn it. Good to let things go. The memories, false and moveable, are enough.

Nothing false or moveable about the Katrina memories; it all played out on the screen from this distant perch, much like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. But with Katrina there were months of follow-up agony played out on the screen. And then the screen moved on to other things, but anyone who bothered to know knew that the agony had not stopped. Our other Gulf war. More devastation--private, unscreened--every day.

Dean is plowing into the Gulf today, headed straight for--where?--oil platforms? Houston? We always see poor people in the islands suffering first: their decidedly NOT-hurricane-ready houses in shambles. You know THEIR power's not getting restored today. How do they cope, I wonder? Who rebuilds their homes?

If those oil platforms are wiped out, does the pipe that reaches into the ground just continue to push oil up into the water? How does that work?

Only questions. Nature's fierce. Hold hands.