It Has Been Almost A Year-----Aug. 27, 2006\r\n Memories cannot fade. Hurricane Ernesto is barreling towards the Gulf, and the very thought that the Katrina nightmare can all happen again is unfathomable. \r\n The Sunday and Monday nights, when we evacuated to Rayville, LA to escape Katrina, seem so long ago. On Tuesday, we learned we could not return home due to levee breaks and mandatory evacuation. On our caravan to a gracious friend’s vacant fishing camp in West Monroe, we stopped to feast on hot dogs at a Sam’s Club. There were 15 of us, and we kind of stood out. An elderly woman approached as we were leaving. She asked 1 of my son-in-laws if we were from New Orleans, and tried to give us $20. She tearfully explained that she was on Social Security and could not afford any more. My eyes are full again just thinking of her generosity. \r\n For 4 days, we were zombies watching strange television stations that were not our trusted ones. Our cell phones were totally useless, and days went by without being able to contact our son and family who had headed for TN. And another son in Kuwait was frantic not knowing anything for sure. There was scrounging for prescriptions for the 3 great-grandparents, 1 of whom had a sudden, life-threatening spike in blood pressure. We were at the mercy of some strangers, and they came through for us. \r\n To get to Houma on Saturday took literally all day. The gas lines were bad, and after bringing 1 great-grandmother home to Albany, we encountered roadblocks near Ponchatoula requiring us to go all the way to Baton Rouge before heading again for Houma. \r\n For over 2 weeks, 12 and 7/9th’s of us, 4 generations, peacefully shared a 2-bedroom apartment. There was standing in Red Cross lines for food stamps, standing in line for prescriptions at the Civic Center, standing in line for depleted grocery supplies, waiting our turn in ER as my father suffered with severe abdominal pain. At least the FEMA applications were all able to be done online without standing in lines. On one day, the men among us, went to the Metairie homes of all of us to rid refrigerators of rancid, liquified, maggot-infested food. Police orders were strict and our men had to come and go before dark. There were no guarantees that all the roads would be passable, and extensive walking was to be expected. \r\n On 1 day, I had to report to Baton Rouge to pick up a UNO check, and arrange for automatic bank deposit. My pay was half of what it would have been, but I still had a job. The traffic crush was ominous in Baton Rouge, and we were glad to get back to overcrowded Houma. \r\n Once back at home in Metairie, we had lines for ice and MRE’s. There were lines at the scant few open grocery stores, allowing only 10 customers to shop at a time. As 1 shopper left, then another could enter. But we had electricity, running water, cable, telephone and Internet. An open Fed Ex place was difficult to find in Metairie, and non-existent in New Orleans. Twice, I had to pay $15 to get a CD with a semester’s worth of freshly recorded lectures delivered to Baton Rouge. \r\n The nearest open Wal-Mart was miles away in LaPlace, and it was there that we shopped for a birthday present for one of our displaced grandbabies. Our son and family lost everything, except for each other, the dog, and the car in which they evacuated. The sudden realization that I could literally buy any toy in the store, and the little fellow would not have it, hit me like a ton of bricks and made me choke back tears. My heart bled for my babies and yet, at the same time, my brain knew how much worse others were—all alone and still separated from parents and siblings, on top of losing home, clothes, toys, friends and pets. \r\nWe went very soon to check on our non-insured, non-home in Pass Christian, MS, threading through back roads and military checkpoints. We had to have shots first. Total obliteration was what awaited us. There were no walls or roofs for as far as our eyes could see. The community had been totally annihilated as if an atomic bomb had detonated. To this day, 3 of our 7 children will not go see the desolation, preferring to hang onto the years of good memories that 40-feet of water can not erase. One of our neighbors foolishly waited until 3:30 AM on Katrina Monday to leave. He witnessed all of our homes blowing away with major damage before any water had arrived. Now there are only 2 homes on our street which have begun rebuilding, and they are 12 feet high. Yet, even those homes which had been that high are just as gone as our ground-level one. \r\nWe were only back in our unscathed Metairie home for 2 weeks when our healthy, athletic 21-year-old daughter started with what later turned out to be Guillain-Barre’. She quickly became paralyzed and suffered intense pain. No longer on our insurance, Melanie needed to be admitted into a charity hospital, the closest of which was in Houma. So we lived again in Houma for 2 weeks until Touro reopened and allowed her to transfer there for 3 weeks more. All the while, I had hundreds of college students taking my online classes. Less sleep and plenty of TA help, allowed me to manage. Besides, there was plenty of good news—witnessing the birth of our 13th grandbaby and the safe return of our military son from the Mid-East.\r\n Now I am back teaching in person once again, though my online classes are still more in demand. Just snaking my way to campus, is gut-wrenching. I have to go through utterly devastated neighborhoods and eerie ugliness. So much debris has been carted away, yet so much more remains. My pre-Katrina auditorium has no walls, and my substitute room has peeling ones. A bad odor that 4 hours later was still offensive, left me and my husband with unexplained headaches on the first day of classes. The problem was promptly resolved. \r\n My psyche is fragile like so many others, and I feel the pain of people I have never met. It is all too easy to be moved to tears over things that do not deserve an emotional investment. This is when I practice what I teach my students. “You may not be able to control bad things that happen like hurricanes and broken levees, but you can certainly be taught to control your interpretation of and response to these things. This thing called optimism does not mean sugar coating all the bad stuff that happens to you. It means recognizing it for what it is—bad—but not allowing it to keep on extracting a toll indefinitely—not allowing it to victimize you as hostage forever. How you pick up the pieces—how you choose to mend will determine the ultimate outcome. Learn how to be happy in misery, rather than miserable because of it. Be a true survivor! Roll with the punches—bounce back after bad things and setbacks happen. This can all be yours if you establish and nurture and practice optimism. Optimism requires ongoing work but is well worth all the effort. It allows you to make the best of a bad situation and is so critical in the war against depression.”\r\nGilda Werner Reed, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of New Orleans\r\n