mid-August 2006.\r\nContingencies define daily life in post-Katrina New Orleans. \r\nAn unknown man on our neighbor’s porch arouses my suspicion. He stays for more than two hours, alternately nodding off and pacing. A call to our neighbor reveals it’s a close relative in need of mental health and drug treatment and adjusting to a new family policy of tough love. Almost one year following the man-made flooding, the city is full of people without access to mental health treatment. I call my wife and ask her not to return with the kids. I leave to meet them around the corner and find my neighbor speaking quietly with her brother on the porch steps. Another neighbor appears—smiling and ready to join what seems to be an impromptu chat common in neighborhoods throughout the nation. They often take place in the middle of streets in New Orleans. I head her off and we stand across the street next to a uniformed utility worker. (Later I learn my neighbor had recruited him from his worksite down the street, and he had obliged.)\r\n\r\nThe kids were both hungry, and though the last thing we needed to do was add to our debt, we surprise them with a treat—we’ll eat out tonight. Later, this brother and sister come home unaware of the drama. Across the street, the brother facing toughened love is gone, and his sister calls that night to apologize, tearfully. \r\n\r\nThe next day the intense mid-August heat did in our car battery. I waited at the Sears Automotive shop at Clearview Shopping center ready to enjoy both the normalcy of this event and the fact that the battery had expired while the car was in our driveway. I settled in to do work. An elderly man seated next to me commented on the return of the Jon Benet Ramsey case ten years later; as reported on the television news, a non-family member had just confessed to the murder. The elderly man noted how tragic this had been for the Benet family. Expecting the normalcy of mindless chat, I go back to my work. The next news story was about FEMA providing more than 30 million dollars to address mental health needs in the city. I commented that it’s about 11 months late, and the man commented quickly and fluidly.\r\n\r\n “I need that. I’m tearing up now. It needs to come out. I lost everything to Katrina. And this is the third tragedy. My shoot didn’t open correctly when I was a paratrooper. Look at what happened to my ankle. They didn’t have MRI back then, just x-rays, so they missed this [pointing to his collar bone protruding one inch from its proper location]. Then my brother-in-law came at me with a machete one night. ‘Get ready to die!’ I still dream about that sometimes. And now Katrina.” \r\n\r\nPre-Katrina I would have known several free and reduced-cost mental health organizations to suggest, but most are closed now. But that and most everything is quite a bit different one year later.\r\n