Patrick's Rants

I was watching a local TV station this past Thursday night when the story switched to this hurricane – Katrina. As I looked at the map I realized that the projected – make that current – landfall would take it right over my mom’s house. Normally when you hear about a hurricane there is all kinds of time to take it in; watching the projected path, the projected doom with a perverted obsession. This time it was like it just showed up. Needless to say I made a quick call to my mom. Yep – it’s blowing like mad… electric lines are arcing off in the distance, the eerie blue-green sparks of electricity and rain in a macabre dance of death. We might lose the call as her power has flickered a few times (she’s using a cordless phone). For now mom still has power, until it flickers again. She calls me back.

She held the phone out the window… or maybe just near the window so I could hear it howling. It’s stopped whistling. But it’s rumbling. The last “hurricane” that I lived through was called David. Although David devastated the Dominican Republic it barely swiped South Florida where we lived. We got a day off of school and there was water in the streets. We watched TV in the dark during the middle of the day – our plywood shutters letting in tiny streaks of sunshine. That article says it was in 1979… it seems so much more recent. There were other storms – I don’t remember their names though, and the worst they usually did was dump a bunch of rain on us.

Katrina is a catagory 1. The lowest level a hurricane can have – deadly yes, but only a 1. Mom tells me that everything is shuttered up – that she’ll be ok and that the call waiting is beeping at her. We hang up.

I call again Saturday morning to see how she has fared. There are some trees down in her neighborhood, but no real damage. On Sunday, when Katrina was upgraded all the way to a catagory 5 – the deadliest of all hurricanes – I call mom to ask her if she feels lucky that it was only at 1 when it hit there. She tells me that she had to stop watching TV coverage. Mom lived through Andrew in 1992. In the aftermath she drove from where she lives (near the Dade-Broward county line) a few times a week to help hand out ice and other essentials. The coverage of what was coming to Louisianna made her sick. She told me that she felt a little guilty that South Florida hadn’t taken much of the sting out of Katrina – indeed she went from catagory 1 to catagory 5. Guilt. Over something she really has no control over. Somehow perhaps mom feels like a concentration of prayers and other “pyschic energy” should have done more to put Katrina to rest. I say there is nothing to have been done.