Mardi Gras A.K., Part I

The Carnival season is starting, and high time. As you would expect, this year we have a great opportunity for a little dark humor. I wish I could take credit for these, but they're not mine. They come from an interview Angus Lind did with a member (code named Deep Float) of one of the less sane Mardi Gras organizations called Krewe du Vieux for the Times-Picayune, February 10 edition. Many apologies, but the blog creator is having one of its "what do you mean, create a paragraph?" days. Just read 'em: 1. It's not a parade route, it's a projected path. The final destination of the parade is its landfall. 2. FEMA's just another word for nothing left to lose. 3. The parade theme is "C'est Levee!", a pun on "C'est la vie!" Couple that with "C'est la guerre" transformed into "C'est la mer," and you end up with "That's life, that's war" turned into "That's the levee, that's the sea." 4. Every float will probably break down along the parade route, and FEMA will be there two months later to fix them. They're designed for only a Category 2 parade. 5. Katrina gave new meaning to the terms "open house" and "waterfront property." 6. Life's a breach, and sometimes you just have to go with the contraflow. Some themes for parade floats: 7. A Day at the Breach. 8. Fridge over Troubled Water. 9. "Attention, K-Mart Looters." 10. A new Carnival throw: floating key chains. The next time you're swimming from your house to your car, you won't lose your keys. (Of course, your car won't move, either...) Stay tuned for more Mardi Gras After Katrina goodies...

Food, glorious food!

This morning our local Whole Foods store reopened. I had a mental list of local places I missed tremendously since the storm...my local coffee house, a favorite neighborhood grocery, and Whole Foods. Now all three of them are open. It is a glorious morning in New Orleans, headed for seventy degrees, the sun is shining, and Whole Foods is open. Yes, I had to park three blocks away. It was a wonderful day for a walk. I just had to make sure I didn't buy more than I could carry in my arms back to the car. (Sorry, the blog creator is in one of its moods today and won't let me create new paragraphs.) The store was jammed, and everybody (including me) had to tell every store employee, "We are so glad you are back!" I stuffed my basket with fruits and veggies, salad goodies, Italian chicken sausage, no-mad-cow ground beef, and other delights. (imagine a paragraph break) This store hadn't been open very long B.K. -- maybe a year or two. It is housed in a wonderful renovation of an old city bus garage called Arabella Station. The old metal building was rusted out and a neighborhood eyesore, and when Whole Foods announced it wanted to build a huge store there, guess what? The neighborhood opposition was enormous! Why? Well, the local businesses were afraid it would take up all the parking in the neighborhood. (The indoor parking lot at the back of the building holds maybe 50 or 100 cars, but unless you go early in the morning, it's always full.) And it was "too big." And, the real reason: it would cut into the business of the already established groceries in the area -- two large chain stores, two smaller neighborhood groceries, and a prepared foods shop just across the street. Well, I'm sure it did -- but I notice the other stores are still in business, even A.K. Nevertheless, Whole Foods overcame the opposition and opened the store. And it has been a boon for consumers. Sure, organic stuff costs more, and I pay more for produce there than I do at the chain supermarket three blocks away. But it's better produce! I have seen stuff for sale in the local supermarket that, if I were the produce manager, I would be embarrassed to have out there. Apples with wrinkled skins. Rotten tomatoes. That sort of thing. Whole Foods forced them to improve the quality of their produce -- and even offer an aisle of natural and organic products. So there. (imagine a paragraph break) Welcome back, Whole Foods! Every store that reopens A.K. is a cause for rejoicing, and we sure are glad to have you back in the neighborhood!

Levees

I commend to you a website: www.levees.org. It is a group in New Orleans that is working to get the word out that New Orleans didn't just flood after Katrina because it is below sea level and why rebuild a city below sea level, anyway? The site directs the reader to articles in major newspapers about the real reason why the city flooded: because the levees that were supposed to protect the city from storm surges even greater than Katrina were not built to the original design specifications, and huge, really stupid, engineering mistakes were made. One engineering consultant described it as the biggest engineering disaster in the United States.

I mention this because this weekend we are seeing stories about the twenty-year anniversary of the Challenger disaster. (I can hardly believe it's been twenty years. I remember I was sitting in an editorial staff meeting when someone brought the news to our editorial director and he announced it to the room. I knew this man wouldn't make up something like that, but I didn't want to believe it.) And at its heart, the Challenger disaster came about because someone decided to save money by using cheaper materials or parts, and in spite of having it pointed out that this was a bad idea, this "someone" went ahead and authorized it anyway. And seven people died and the space shuttle program got shelved for years. (The cause of the Columbia disaster was a little different, but it sent the engineers back to designing a new way to do things, too.)

At any rate...someone in the Vicksburg, Mississippi office of the Corps of Engineers questioned the plans for the levees back in 1990 and was told that, essentially, "this will do." But this didn't do. And this little mistake cost more than 1100 lives, with bodies still being pulled out of houses as of this week.

And there are people in Congress who are questioning whether to spend the money to rebuild the levees the way they should have been built in the first place, and President Bush is balking at providing federal funds to rebuild rental properties (by the way, New Orleans has far more tenant-occupied properties than homeowner-occupied properties; we are talking about not covering 180,000 homes here).

What makes me angry is that we would not be in this situation if the levees had been built the way they were supposed to be built in the first place -- the way we THOUGHT they were built, but you can't tell what the interior structure is like from looking at them on the side of the road.

My slogan for a sign I have yet to create, to carry in some future demonstration about the levees:

If you build it
RIGHT
They will come
BACK!

This city is in shambles. It probably will not recover economically in the remainder of my working years. It makes me angry, and it makes me sad.

Do you worry about terrorists attacking your city? Time and again as I drove through flooded neighborhoods in the weeks after the storm, I shook my head and thought, not even terrorists could do this much damage. It boggles the mind.

San Francisco came back after the 1989 earthquake. In time, New Orleans will come back too.

Chocolate

Well, the whole world knows by now that Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, made a little extemporaneous speech on Martin Luther King Day that blew up in his face. The world thinks Hizzoner is an idiot, but there are a few folks in the city who say he was just "telling it like it is."

Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation it wasn't. There was a little something in there to offend just about everyone. Martin Luther King having a conversation from beyond the grave with the mayor? "Surely God is mad at America"? And then there was the Chocolate City thing. One editorial writer in the Times-Picayune tried to explain to the folks who took it as a reference to Willy Wonka that it really was about a song from 30 years ago about majority-black cities. But I fear his voice has been lost in the crowing of "Mayor Wonka and the Chocolate City."

It was hardly stop-the-presses news that, B.K., New Orleans had been a majority black city for more than 25 years. So is Atlanta (the city, not the metro area). So is Detroit. And probably quite a few other major American cities. And because New Orleans was a majority black city, when 80 percent of the city flooded after Katrina, the majority of people affected were, indeed, black. Not all -- quite a few mostly white neighborhoods got flooded out too.

But what was also true B.K. is that New Orleans had a shocking percentage of its population living below the poverty line -- I don't know the exact figures but I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of the people. And a lot of those living below the poverty line were black. And a lot of them got flooded out and can't afford to return to the city. Housing is in short supply and what there is, is expensive. (Supply and demand.) People who didn't have flood insurance, regardless of race, are scrambling to figure out how to rebuild their homes.

So Mayor Nagin, when he talked about the Chocolate City, was trying to say that he believed the city would be majority black once again when it is finally repopulated. I wish he would have come up with a different metaphor, one encompassing the many races and ethnicities that make up this city. Someone suggested Rocky Road ice cream would be more fitting, a mix of chocolate, marshmallows, and "nuts." New Orleans has always been famous for nutty people! (For the uninitiated, I suggest you read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.)

Ray Nagin is not a professional politician. He was an executive with Cox Cable before he became mayor. I hope they will give him his old job back, because I think he just ended his political career with that speech. But considering all he has been through in the last five months, I wonder if he would even want to be re-elected. I sure wouldn't want to be mayor of New Orleans right now, although it appears there is no shortage of potential candidates.

Back when Andrew Young was mayor of Atlanta, in a moment of exasperation with the white business community, he called them "a bunch of smart-ass white boys." First thing you know, every business executive's desk in Buckhead sported a coffee mug with the initials "S.A.W.B." Already people are selling T-shirts that promote Mayor Wonka and the Chocolate City.

This morning, I tuned in the local PBS station (it's good to have them back on the air) and discovered they were having their big fund-raiser on the Sunday before Valentine's Day. Guess what? It's called the Fourth Annual Chocolate Sunday, a to-do at a swanky downtown hotel where people pay $$ to sample chocolates and support the station. I wonder if Chocolate City will help or embarrass them?

Going to the movies

I have a confession to make. I really, really didn't like Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Too much torture, not enough theology. This week I saw a movie that did for me what Mel Gibson's intended to do but fell short (in my humble opinion): the Disney version of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe."

Now, the movie wasn't really promoted as a Christian witness. It was more of a kid's movie with battles and other adventures. It's not a movie to convert someone to Christianity who has never opened a Bible. But oh, my, it had me in tears before the opening credits -- and THAT is saying a lot.

If you haven't read C.S. Lewis' seven books about Narnia, go out and do so immediately. They are easy to read and quick to get through, just the thing to do on a few winter's nights. Lewis supposedly wrote these books for his nieces and nephews, but they are easily appreciated by adults who are young in heart. And if you HAVE opened a Bible here and there along the way, you'll find the Christian allegory -- and maybe, just maybe, it will make more sense to you than reading some heavy-duty books on theology.

The Lion in these books is Aslan, son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea (we never do meet Aslan's father, but the reference is hard to miss). "He is not a tame lion," we are told throughout the books. And when the characters meet Aslan, they are in awe of him. In the movie, all bow before the Lion as he emerges from his tent. I darn near got off my seat in the theater to bow, too.

One of the children, Lucy, hid in a wardrobe in the spare room and discovered she could move through the fur coats stored there into a grove of fir trees in the snow, and that is how she and her three siblings ended up in Narnia. Lucy met a somewhat fearsome looking creature -- a faun -- by the name of Mr. Tumnus. She ended up going to his house and having tea. Now, I would worry about a little girl going to have tea with a faun. Later, her brother Edmund came into Narnia and ended up meeting a beautiful woman who gave him hot chocolate and sweets. You would think, from her appearance, that the beautiful lady would be more trustworthy than a faun. But the beautiful lady is the White Witch who has kept Narnia in a spell for a hundred years, where it is "always winter and never Christmas." But Edmund wants so much to please her that he tells her all about his sister's encounter with the faun. He ends up betraying Tumnus "for sweets."

Yo! Theology class! We have here a lovely allegory! In Genesis, the serpent persuades the man and woman to eat of the tree that God told them not to eat of. In the Gospels, Judas betrays Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Here Edmund is persuaded by an evil witch who plies him with sweet treats to spill the beans, tell her all about his siblings, and betray Tumnus. Edmund, who we might think of as just a kid trying to please a grownup, presents us with Original Sin.

So the Secret Police capture Tumnus and imprison him and eventually the White Witch turns him to stone. When the Witch has a showdown with Aslan, she demands that he give her Edmund as a sacrifice. The Law demands it. Aslan and the Witch go off into his tent to negotiate. When they emerge, the children are told that Edmund's life will be spared. Sounds good, huh?

Except that night the Witch and her minions lead Aslan to the Stone Table, shave off his beautiful coat, tie him to the table, and kill him. And the two girls, Lucy and Susan, watch from a distance, crying. Do I need to spell out the allegory here?

After Aslan's death, after the Witch and her minions are gone, the two girls go to Aslan's body and weep until they fall asleep. It is the middle of the night. It is dark and cold.

And then, just before dawn, the Stone Table cracks (read: the veil of the temple torn in two, the stone rolled away) and death itself works backwards. Aslan is alive! And he is leaping around with the girls in the dawn light, and then they go off to defeat the White Witch. Spring returns to Narnia. The human children reign at the castle called Cair Paravel. The oldest brother, Peter, is High King. (Peter...get it?) And Aslan walks away, down the beach, but the children are told that he will be back, but they won't know when to expect him (do I need to spell that one out too?).

Well, maybe I have given the ending of the book/movie to you, but there are six more books to read! I doubt that Disney will make all seven into movies, anyway. "The Magician's Nephew," as I recall, is a wonderful retelling of the creation story in Genesis. And the final book, "The Last Battle," has its roots in the apocalyptic literature of the Old and New Testaments.

My tears at the beginning of the movie were for Lucy, such a little girl, being sent away from her home and her mother on a train to escape the Blitzkrieg in London. And it is Lucy who weeps in the last book, as night falls on Narnia. But I am WAY ahead of myself. Go read the books. Go see the movie. It's theology: law and sin and grace and redemption. And it's a wonderful story. And it's Disney, not Quentin Tarantino (or Mel Gibson). The violence is there, all right. But we don't have to see it in all its goriness.

Roof! Roof!

It's noisy in Cattown this week. Two of my neighbors are getting new roofs. Yesterday the crew arrived at 8 a.m. (better than 7 a.m., anyway) to begin taking off the old slate roof of my neighbor's house across the street. I know she was really proud of that old slate roof -- they don't make 'em like that anymore -- and sorry to see it go. But the slate roof on my house had to be replaced 40 years ago after Hurricane Betsy took most of it off, so my neighbor got 40 more years out of hers than my family got out of its slate.

And slate makes a LOT of noise when you are throwing it off the roof. There is a dumpster out on the street where they are throwing the roofing materials. Ah, dumpsters. When we were renovating the downstairs of my house two years ago, we took out plaster in seven rooms, including the walls of two staircases. We filled THREE dumpsters. And let me tell you, no matter who is paying for a dumpster, it is public property. I still would like to know who threw the sofa in mine. I know one of my neighbors was landscaping his front yard at the time, and he took the opportunity to hurl dirt and pieces of concrete into "my" dumpster. It was a no-brainer to figure out who did that; they were in his yard one day and in the dumpster the next.

I have a huge pile of trash in front of my house that has been accumulating since October. It started out as the remains of my alligator pear (aka avocado) tree that keeled over during the storm, fortunately in a direction away from the house, plus my neighbor's attic turbine that landed in my yard. It now includes a fig tree that keeled over (with a little help from the termites in its trunk), a box spring and mattress, and a lot of junque from the house. I keep hoping the city will come one day and pick it up. They are slowly picking up trash in the area, but the order in which they are doing it remains an arcane mystery. But in the meantime, until they do, there is that nice dumpster...

Naah. I am in no mood to pick up a mattress, much less all those tree limbs. But it is a temptation.

A new year

I am preaching this morning at a suburban New Orleans church. One of the scripture texts for the day is from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it is set in a time when the Jewish exiles living in Babylon were allowed to return home to Jerusalem. There has never been a time more appropriate for a text about exiles returning home. Over the last couple of weeks, the exiles from New Orleans have been drifting in with children in tow. The fall semester ended, and wherever the kids were going to school during the last four months, they are now coming home to New Orleans and its suburbs to return to their own schools (some of which are holding classes in locations different from where they were B.K.). The college students are coming back -- again, not all to the same campuses where they began the fall semester a few days B.K.

I read in the paper that the estimated population of New Orleans is now about 100,000, or a little less than a fourth of what it was B.K. But that population is crammed into the areas that didn't flood -- and 80 percent of the city flooded. Now, if I do the math, it still works out to about 20 percent of the people in 20 percent of the land area, but the crowds jamming the grocery stores, the malls, the restaurants, the banks, and the roads belie those numbers. On Friday I spent 40 minutes in the drive-through at the bank, and I don't think that police car parked on the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground (median) was there to deter bank robbers -- it was to ward off fights breaking out over who was trying to get into which line.

The exiles are returning from Babylon, wherever Babylon happened to be. Last week I drove to Houston for the first time, giving an exiled friend a ride back to her temporary home. Going to Houston for the first time is like the story of the blind men who encounter an elephant. One touches the leg and decides it's like a tree. One touches the tail and thinks it's like a snake. One touches the tusk, etc. I saw one small part of Houston and had to drive all the way across town on I-10 to get there, and I lucked out that I missed the worst of rush hour. (Also, it was the week between Christmas and New Year's, when a lot of people are on vacation.) I decided Houston was a lot like Atlanta, except the downtown connector in Atlanta probably has one or two more lanes. It's all about expressways. If you don't have a car, you're out of luck. And the friend I brought back to Houston doesn't have a car, which is probably going to be the chief motivator to bring her back to New Orleans. In New Orleans you can get around pretty well on public transportation -- and right now, A.K., the buses are free.

So, Houston. To this one-time visitor -- like a blind person's first encounter with an elephant -- it was a lot like Atlanta. Only without hills. And with a climate like New Orleans'. It was nice, but it was also good to come home.

So, a new year. 2006. My wish for the new year is "No more hurricanes." But doggone, one popped up in the Atlantic on Dec. 30, making a record 27 named storms for the year. And I keep reading that this pattern is going to go on for the next decade. Congress, please note. We need those category 5 levees. NOW.

Here's to a better new year.

Pastor Kathy

The green parrots of Uptown New Orleans

I understand there is a book, or a movie, or both, called "The Green Parrots of Telegraph Hill." I am here to tell you, there are green parrots in Uptown New Orleans. At least there were, B.K. I had thought they were some urban legend until I saw them myself, perched on the telephone wires above my street. My neighbor on the corner put a bird feeder in the tree beside the street, and they were always down there, feeding and making a raucous noise.

Some people told me they were parakeets -- in fact, I think it was someone from the Audubon Institute (which operates the zoo, the aquarium, and the Louisiana Nature Center). But I never saw parakeets this big, or this noisy. Where they came from I don't know: escaped from the zoo? from someone's home? stowed away on a ship from Central America, hidden among the bananas? I don't know. I just know that they like to stay high; you never see them on the ground or a low fence. So they don't have a lot of natural enemies and they DO multiply.

That was B.K. And people comment how, when they came back into the city A.K., how quiet it was. There were no birds. Did they flee the city too? Did they get swept away by the winds? Did these huge parrots get slammed into buildings and killed?

I will say this: A.K., the first birds that came back were the pigeons. Actually, I think they never left. I remember a CNN reporter in the hours before the storm noting the pigeons around the downtown area and wondering why they hadn't left. Well, pigeons roost under eaves. They probably found their safe spots out of the wind and hunkered down and rode it out. When I returned to the city, I could hear their soft cooing. Urban pigeons are tough old birds, and if you've ever tried to get rid of them, you know what I mean.

But the green parrots were gone. I never did find any dead parrots by the sides of buildings, so my theory -- that they were hurled into buildings by the winds -- didn't hold up. Perhaps they did leave. But where did they go? The winds out of the north would have blown them into the marshes of south Louisiana. They wouldn't have gone to the north anyway, because they are tropical birds. I mourned the colorful Uptown legends and figured we had seen the last of them.

Guess what? They're b-a-a-a-c-k! I thought I had heard their distinctive raucous squawks (there is nothing pretty about the sound a green parrot makes), but this morning I saw them for real. The cats were looking out the back screen door and I could hear something pinging on the roof of the garage. I went out to look, and there they were, in the Chinese tallow tree, feasting on the berries and scattering leaves and berries (and other stuff) all over the garage and ground. They are big, way bigger than any parakeet I ever saw in a cage. They are green on top and kind of whitish gray underneath. And they squawk.

They are probably a little miffed that the bird feeder my neighbor put up was a casualty of Katrina. Actually, the whole tree was a casualty of Katrina: it is all piled up on the curb, waiting for the last three months for someone to haul it away. I put a little bird feeder in the Japanese plum tree, but so far, not even the sparrows have shown any interest. I think they are waiting for the Japanese plums, which will be ripe in the spring (yes, it is December, and in New Orleans the Japanese plum trees are blooming) and are always a big hit with the local avian community, not to mention anyone who might be passing on the street and spot them.

So the green parrots of Uptown New Orleans, evacuees from the storm, are back. Where are the rest of you Orleanians? Shivering in some city Up Nawth? Hey, it's going to be 70 degrees here today. Y'awl come home.

Pastor Kathy

A moving experience

I hate moving. I suppose just about everybody hates moving, unless they happen to be in the moving business. But I have been offline for the last ten days because I have been up to my eyeballs in packing boxes.

This move was a little different from most because I was moving into a house that was already furnished. With storage units just about nonexistent in New Orleans right now (and IF you can find one, the per-square-foot rental is more than an apartment; about $12 a square foot at one place I called), I decided to do the time-honored practice of converting the garage into a storage unit. Nice idea, except after a heavy rain I discovered that water gets into the garage, especially in the ruts created by eighty odd years of parking cars in the one-car garage (the concrete has long been broken all over the place). So I managed to locate three wooden pallets to put stuff on, which helped. Did I mention the garage also has no doors? So I ended up nailing a 12 x 9 tarp (purchased on my last trip to Atlanta, because most of the tarps in New Orleans are already on roofs) across the opening to keep the rain out (secured at the bottom with bricks). This won't stop a thief, of course, but it beats the heck out of paying $240 a month for that amount of space in a storage unit.

So...stuff had to get moved out of my grandmother's house into the garage to make way for the new stuff coming in from the country house. And some of the stuff from the country house ended up in the garage (I am saving it for a friend who lost her stuff in the flood). And this week all the stuff of two houses and several people's lifetimes ended up crammed into one house. It's a little cramped right now. And you should have seen all the stuff that got thrown out before the move.

There was stuff that was my grandfather's, my grandmother's, my uncle's, my mother's, two second cousins', and mine. If I get to see my ancestors in the afterlife, I am going to catch hell from them for throwing out their stuff. One of my neighbors came by and picked a lot of old photos out of the trash pile. She was astonished that I was throwing them away. But they weren't identified and I didn't know who they were, and I have several hundred that didn't go on the trash pile. My neighbor said she would make collages out of them. I feel a little better.

The day after I moved out of the country house, we signed the papers for its sale. The new owners had been flooded out of their home in St. Bernard Parish and had been living in the Midwest since the storm. They had found the house on the Internet. Even as we signed the papers, they had yet to be inside the house. That's pretty scary. I apologized for all the dead bugs that showed up against the walls when we moved the furniture out -- I didn't have time to vacuum -- but hey, at least they were dead. (I did remove the partly eaten, very dried out dead lizard that my hunting cat managed to push under the stereo cabinet.)

I hope the new owners enjoy living in the country house. It was a place of refuge for me after the storm, and I hope it will be a place of refuge for them. I hope they let the grass grow in the back yard in the spring so they can see the wildflowers. I wish them all the best as they try to rebuild their lives. It won't be St. Bernard Parish, but I hope it will be home for them.

Back to Cattown, U.S.A.:
The cats were locked in their cat carriers in the dining room as the movers carried furniture and boxes around. When everyone had left and it was quiet again, I let them out. They recognized "their" furniture pretty quickly. Their sofa, their chair, their bed, their porch furniture! They forgave me for locking them up and settled in for their late afternoon naps.

And now it's Christmas Eve, and I'm off to a small town across the lake for a preaching gig. I will sub for another minister for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning services, so he and his wife can visit relatives out of town. Time to take a deep breath and get back to being Pastor Kathy again.

Merry Christmas!

On leaving

I am packing up my country house outside the small town where I served a church for the last several years. We have a buyer and are scheduled to close next week. I no longer have a church, the horse has gone to Georgia, and there is really nothing left for me in the small town except this country house. I really enjoyed living here. But it is time to go.

Each day I drive up from the city and clean up and pack up. This week it has been sunny and the afternoons have been warm. I can still sit out on the back porch and look out over the grassy pasture and eat lunch. No wildflowers this time of year! The grass is neatly cut and, while still green, isn't growing. The vegetable garden that produced such a bounty of tomatoes and squash in the early summer is now overgrown with tall weeds, killed by a light frost a few weeks ago. A good round with the tiller, and the garden will be ready to go again. I hope the new owners will plant a garden here. I will really miss it.

In the evenings as I pack up to go, the stars are bright in a black sky. The moon is waxing and will be full in a few days. Venus is huge in the west these days. You can almost tell it is a planet and not a star. Mars is yellowish red, high in the east in the early evening. Orion's belt also rises in the east. I'm not sure about the other constellations. But I won't get to see this vivid display when I go back to the city. The houses are too close together, and yes, we do have streetlights again -- at least in my neighborhood, and I am NOT complaining about having them.

I will miss my quiet mornings sitting on the porch at daybreak with my coffee, surrounded by the cats. I will miss the sun streaming in the kitchen window and the Knockout rose I planted in the bed outside the window (recommended by my friend the Consulting Rosarian with the American Rose Society). I hauled it home from a nursery in Georgia a few springs ago, when I got sick on the road and spent a weekend holed up in a hotel room feeling too bad even to go outside. Not too many hotel rooms have their very own potted rose bush by the sliding glass door! My friend the consulting rosarian says to get another Knockout rose for my yard in New Orleans. Thanks, I think I will. P.S., the rose is blooming right now, in mid-December, in South Louisiana.

I hate moving. But I don't know anyone who admits to liking it. I will be glad when this is over.

Pastor Kathy

Proud to call it home

Back in the 1990s, when the murder rate was about one a day and the economy was in the tank, there was a bumper sticker campaign to boost pride in New Orleans. I have no idea who started the campaign or where people got the bumper stickers, but they proclaimed in black and purple letters on a white background:

New Orleans:
Proud to call it home.

You still see the bumper stickers around. Over the years, some variations have cropped up. There's a French version:

La Nouvelle Orleans:
C'est chez moi.

A Spanish version, the words of which escape me.

A Yiddish version:

New Orleans:
Oy! Such a home!

And my personal favorite,

New Orleans:
Proud to crawl home.

(Note to Fatlanta readers: this has nothing to do with driving on I-285.)

This past week I saw a new one:

New Orleans:
Proud to swim home.

I am still proud to call it home, dammit, in spite of everything. I don't know if the city is going to make it or not, economically, at this point. I have too many friends who have decided not to come back, or who have come back and packed up and left. But I do think the city is worth saving, President Bush and Congress please note. We are Americans too, in case you have forgotten.

The lights are on in City Park for Celebration in the Oaks, a Christmas display of lights in the grand old live oaks that survived the storm. I haven't been there yet for the walking tour, but I plan to go. It's not as big as in years past, but the simple fact that a section of the park has been cleared of debris so the celebration can be held is a tribute to the can-do spirit that is present here in the city in these days. If only we could get the lights on in those darkened neighborhoods. It will happen...but it needs to happen very soon or we will lose too many people.

Mark your calendars. February 28 is Mardi Gras. It's going to be very special this year. Hope you can come. As for me, I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Pastor Kathy

Fatlanta

They used to call it Hotlanta. Maybe still do. I know that .38 Special had a song by that name some years back. After five days in metro Atlanta, during which I put about 400 miles on my car, I have another name for it: Fatlanta. When I first moved there in the 1970s, the metro area was five counties. Last time I checked, it was 15. Could be more by now, for all I know. I can tell people I moved my horse to "Atlanta," but actually he is two counties north of Atlanta, in a rural area at the edge of the mountains. And that "rural" area is crammed with new subdivisions, shopping centers, and traffic, traffic, traffic.

Georgia Highway 20 (not to be confused with Interstate 20) is a two-lane, rural highway that snakes its way along a curving and hilly path east to west across the north metro area, probably 25 miles or so north of I-285, the infamous Perimeter around the city. I discovered, as I tried to get to my horse's new home after dark on Friday night, that 18-wheelers are using Ga. 20 as a bypass to get from I-85 to I-75. When I left Fatlanta for south Louisiana in 2000, there was talk of building a new highway, to be called the "Outer Perimeter," about 20 miles outside of I-285. The last I heard, the feds were balking at providing funding because Fatlanta couldn't meet air quality standards because it had too many cars and too many roads already. The federal government was willing to fund bike trails, but not another interstate.

Bike trails! Well, that's nice. But you can't bike your way across a 15-county metro area as an alternate form of transportation to a car. Not even public transit works well with that kind of sprawl. So we have 18-wheelers creating their own outer perimeter on a two-lane state highway. I don't know what the current status is on the Proposed Outer Perimeter (although I am sure I could find out with a Google search), but I do know that as of right now, it's not built.

And then I talked with a friend who now lives in southern California, and he told me his commute to work was 60 miles one way. (He rides in a van pool.) Okay, maybe Fatlanta isn't quite that big -- yet. But there's a reason they stopped calling it New York of the South and started calling it L.A. of the South.

My friends hope I will move back to Fatlanta. Frankly, it makes sense. There are jobs there. The economy is doing well. You can buy all sorts of exotic things in the supermarkets. (I still can't get over the display in one store that dispenses, oh, half a dozen or more different flavors of Jelly Belly jelly beans. Coffee dispensers, yeah, we have them in New Orleans. And B.K., we had grain dispensers in Whole Foods, where you could buy bulgar wheat and golden flaxseed and all sorts of things in bulk. A.K., well, Whole Foods is taking orders over the phone for pickup, but the stores are still closed.)

But New Orleans is my home. And that's a powerful reason to stay.

More on that later.

Pastor Kathy

A.K.: Cinder goes home

A.K., After Katrina. I have a horse named Cinder. He has been my best buddy for the last 19 years. Now age 29, he has survived two colic surgeries, four episodes of founder, and three hurricanes. Some things I can't protect him from, but I can get him out of hurricane country. Up until four years ago, Cinder had spent his whole life (as far as I know) in northern Georgia. And so, two days ago he left Louisiana to return home to Georgia, where he has a new home in an equine retirement community at the edge of the north Georgia mountains, with four other horses and a 50-year-old pony for companions. (No, I had no idea a pony could live that long either!) I'm not sure Cinder is ready for the old folks' home quite yet. As I prepared him for the seven-hour trailer ride, I tried to put shipping boots on his legs (padded wraps with Velcro fasteners to protect his legs while he was on the trailer). I got them on his front legs, but when I tried to do his back legs, he decided to object. He took off and ran up and down the pasture, and the wraps on his front legs started to slip down toward his feet. If he tripped on them, he could easily fall and break a leg -- or his neck. Finally I was able to persuade him with a carrot to stop. He blew clouds of frosty breath into the morning air -- that was the most running he had done in a LONG time -- and we came to a compromise. I took the shipping boots off, but he had to go on the trailer anyway. If he can still run like that at age 29, well, maybe I could even think about riding him again. I haven't riddden him in four years, not since before he moved to Georgia. Hmmm. Apologies for this long paragraph, dear blog readers, but sometimes the blog creator won't let me make new paragraphs, and this is one of those times.

B.K. and A.K., part 2

A little over a year ago, I had a delightful week's vacation in my favorite vacation city, San Francisco. I rode the California Street cable car from my hotel down to the Embarcadero. I toured the new shops in the Ferry Building. I rode the "new" streetcar line down to Fisherman's
Wharf, chuckling all the time about those new-fangled ideas the people in San Francisco had come up with (I live a block and a half from the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line in New Orleans). I toured Fisherman's Wharf. I looked at all the wonderful posters of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Aiplane and Janis Joplin concerts at the Hard Rock Cafe. I rode the ferry to Sausalito. I ruined my pledge to eat healthy when I hit the chocolate shop at Ghirardelli Square. I took a winery tour up to Napa and Sonoma. I shopped till I dropped at Union Square. I had a wonderful dinner with my friends Michael and Eydie Robertson. (It was through reading Michael's blog on blogpot.com that I started my own.)

And by the end of the week, I realized that what I really wanted to do was to be a tourist in my own home town. Every tourist attraction in San Francisco I compared to what we had available in New Orleans, and I was really pleased to see that New Orleans could hold its own in the world tourist market for classy attractions. And so when I left the small-town church this past summer to come back home to New Orleans, I made a vow that I would play tourist at home.

The first week in August, I went with some friends to an event called White Linen Night. On the first Saturday evening in August, an area of town where my family once owned warehouses is now known as the Arts District (or the Warehouse District). The old warehouses have been converted into trendy apartments (quickly going condo), art galleries, a children's museum (in a building my mother once owned), restaurants and shops. On White Linen Night, people dress up in white (linen if possible) and cruise the galleries.

My friends and I rode the streetcar from my house. We wandered around the galleries, toured a glass-blowing factory, ran into friends, and ended up having dinner at the Riverwalk Mall, where you can get redfish courtbouillon in the food court (not your typical mall food court) and a glass of wine and sit outside on the deck overlooking the Mississippi River at dusk and watch the lights come up.

We rode home after dark on the streetcar. It started to rain. The wind blew the cool rain in the open windows at the back of the car (until the conductor walked down and shut them, darn it). Steam rose from the pavements. It was the most romantic scene I had encountered outside of the movies in a long time.

And that was B.K., before Katrina. Three months A.K., the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line is still a jumble of downed poles and power lines. The streetcars, housed in the old car barn off Carrollton Avenue near the river, survived. But the new Canal Street cars, all 24 of them, were housed in an area that flooded and were ruined, to the tune of $1 million a car. Darn, I had planned B.K. to take a ride on them when the weather got cooler.

And I had also planned, B.K., when the weather got cooler, to visit the Aquarium of the Americas, where I had a membership. The aquarium lost all its animals, except for a sea turtle and a couple of others, when the generators supplying oxygen to the tanks ran out of fuel. The Audubon Zoo only lost a couple of animals. The zoo reopened last week, and I was there. The heroic folks stayed with the animals throughout the storm and in the days after. And the cleanup crew that got all the downed branches from the live oaks cleaned up did a remarkable job.

I also had planned, B.K., to take one of those Gray Line tours of the Garden District. I used to see the tour buses, and I would see people lined up outside Anne Rice's (former) house, and I thought this is something I would like to do, (again) when the weather got cooler.

Well, the weather is now cooler (thank God!), but it's now A.K. and everything is different. I have no idea when the St. Charles Avenue streetcars will be running again. And I don't know if they will replace the Canal Street cars. How sad, because the new line had been open less than a year, if I recall. But the Aquarium of the Americas will reopen one of these days, and I dare say the Gray Line tours will be back.

And I can't WAIT for Mardi Gras!

Brace yourself, San Francisco. New Orleans is coming back.

Pastor Kathy

B.K. and A.K.

If you haven't looked at my blog for awhile, you may be surprised to see it has a new name. Yes, it is still Pastor Kathy's blog, but Pastor Kathy has been through some changes since her last post in June.

For one thing, in July I left the small-town church I had served for more than four years. It was not a happy departure. I have learned in the last few months that there are a lot of ministers out there whose first pastorate out of seminary was, shall we say, difficult. It's a complicated topic and one I don't plan to deal with in this blog. Suffice it to say I learned a lot from the experience, both good and bad.

So, I was boogeying along, looking for another church, starting to wrap up my business in the small town. The ecclesial authorities told me to go take this week-long class to be qualified to work as an interim minister -- the one who serves a church while they are looking for a new "permanent" minister. And that's what I was doing when life as we knew it in my part of the world ended forever.

When I left New Orleans on a hot, sunny Friday morning at the end of August, a TV news truck passed me on the interstate. I figured they were on their way to Florida to cover this hurricane that had just crossed south Florida as a category 1 and was expected to make another landfall around Apalachicola as a category 2. And that was my last thought about it until the next morning, in Atlanta, when someone called me and asked what I was doing about the hurricane.

WHAT hurricane? And suddenly this minor storm cutting across south Florida was a category 5 hurricane headed right for New Orleans. And my cats were locked up in my house, expecting someone to come over and feed them twice a day until I got back.

There was no turning around and going home. The interstates had all been redirected to head out of town. There were a couple of two-lane highways still open into the city, but where was I going to find gas? I almost did go home. I thought seriously about filling a bunch of five-gallon gas cans, putting them in the back of my SUV, and going home for the cats, probably asphyxiating myself in the process. Over the next several days, I wished over and over again that I had. But instead I went on to my conference in North Carolina and stayed there for the most horrible week of my life, not knowing what was going on at my home. Was there water up to the roof? Did the whole block burn to the ground? Did the looters break in and trash the house and kill my cats?

The short answer is "No." And ten days after the storm, I was able to slip into the closed city and rescue my felines. Sadly, a lot of people did have water up to their roofs, and some did have their homes burn to the ground. The looters for the most part were breaking into commercial establishments, not into private homes. (And if you think this would never have happened in your town, I beg to differ. What happened in New Orleans is what would happen anywhere if you were actually able to cut off the supply of illegal substances coming into the community. When the substance abusers ran out of substances, they went nuts. And they didn't get those automatic weapons in Wal-Mart. They already had them.)

So, life for me -- and for all of us affected by the storm -- is now divided into two time periods: Before Katrina and After Katrina, B.K. and A.K. for short. We have all been changed forever by this experience. Whatever our plans were B.K., they're different now. Our priorities, too.

So this blog, formerly known as A View from the Other Side of the Hill, is now The Daily Cattown News, in honor of my first journalistic effort when I was eight years old. I have left the small town of my first parish ministry to live in the Uptown New Orleans house that once was my grandmother's. At the moment I don't have a job. God will provide, in God's own time. My next job may be another parish in ministry, or it may be something else. In the meantime, I am back at the kitchen table, writing. And preaching from time to time. And ministering to folks whose lives, like mine, have been changed forever. Stay tuned.

Pastor Kathy

The Circle D Revisited

I was a child in the era of the great television Westerns. I watched them all. "Bat Masterson," starring Gene Barry, was my favorite. I would also get up at 6:30 on Saturday mornings to watch the Roy Rogers show. To be honest, I probably watched them because I was horse crazy, and Westerns were pretty much the only place on tv you could see horses. But I digress.

Somewhere in there as I learned Western lore, I learned about brands and how they branded horses and cattle. (Today they use microchips under the skin -- my horse has one -- but I am digressing again, bad habit.) And somewhere in learning about brands, I created one for my imaginary ranch. I called my ranch the Circle D. I have no idea why D and not A, B, C, or something else. But it was the Circle D. And being a creative child, I made up a song to go along with it. It used all of seven white notes on the piano. "Circle D (D, D), Circle D (D, D), it's the best ranch in the land." Well, I was six or seven years old, and I was no Mozart.

My mother's brother, however, WAS a musician. And his last name started with D. Whether he thought I came up with the Circle D as homage to my maternal family or what, I don't know. But he composed a grand piece of music to my Circle D melody. It was awesome.

My Circle D imaginary ranch went by the wayside as I grew up. I hadn't thought about it in years. But then we bought this material at church for Vacation Bible School, and the theme is the Circle G Ranch: "Where God is at the center and the love never ends." I admit it was a while before I made the connection between the Circle G and my old Circle D, but there it is. The Circle G Ranch, like mine, has its own theme song, something about "There's a place for you at the Circle G ranch." Much more inclusive than my song, which I have to admit was somewhat more grandiose in its theme.

As I write this, I am not sure what is going to happen to our Vacation Bible School. We haven't had a lot of registrations come in so far -- the opening session is two weeks from today -- and I don't know if we will have to cancel it or not. (More on that in another blog.) If push comes to shove, we will have "Vacation Bible School" in the worship service that Sunday (it's my one chance every year to sneak in a little contemporary worship) and use the material that way. I hope we get to do the whole program we have planned. It looks like so much fun.

Circle D. My musical uncle recorded the Bat Masterson theme for me off the television, circa 1958, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and had a 78 rpm record made of it. I still have it. In fact, I sent my old turntable to a company on Long Island for repairs some years ago just so I could play the 78s I still have (they don't make many turntables any more, and the ones they do make only have 33 and 45 speeds). I should hook up the turntable and play my Bat Masterson theme song, just for old time's sake. This in an era of MP3s and iPods and all-digital music. Yeah, yeah. In this age, it's as big a challenge to get the old technology to work as it is to get the new technology to work. And that, too, is a subject for another blog.

Pastor Kathy

Wait a minute...

My denomination is struggling, as are many mainline Protestant churches. Somewhere along the way, probably back in the 1960s, we lost touch with the people in the pews. The ones who are still there are dying out, and the young ones just aren't coming in the way we wish they would. There are all sorts of theories about how-come-we're-declining, but the bottom line is, we are. Some individual churches in my denomination are growing, particularly in areas of the country that are growing. But the sad truth is, many of them are small and getting smaller every year as the older members die. They struggle and they seek ways to grow, but it's an uphill battle. Meantime, new churches start up -- many of them not in denominations at all. And we mainliners watch them (with envy) and try to figure out what they are doing right and try to copy them. (Sorry, for some reason the program is not letting me make paragraph indents today, so this blog is going to be one long paragraph.) I serve on a committee of my regional body that is trying to "re-form" in light of new realities, and we have been reading, reading, reading. One of the church consultants (yes, the church has management consultants just like secular businesses do) we read insisted that the purpose of the church is to grow numerically. Period. He cites Matthew 28:18-20, "Go therefore and make disciples" -- it's known in church circles as the Great Commission. Yes, grow. Growth is good. But then this consultant goes on to trash ministers who do anything else but work at growing their churches numerically, and I have a problem with that. He refers to ministers who like to visit people in hospitals and nursing homes, etc., as "enablers." He quotes one of the ministers who read his advice as saying, "Oh, thank God! I no longer have to feel guilty because I don't like to do those nursing home visits." Whoa! Wait a minute! This consultant needs to keep reading his Bible to see what Jesus had to say about feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and those in prison, clothing the naked and so on. Growth is good, but growth without a purpose isn't. Termites and cockroaches grow numerically, too. OK, I am sure God has a purpose for them, but he has yet to reveal it to me. Anyway, if that consultant is going to call the ministers who are pastors "enablers," then I have a name for his idea of "evangelists," too: sales managers. Sorry. Just a rant.

The end, again?

I got into this blogging business last year after a conversation with my friend Michael Robertson in San Francisco. I had dinner with him and his wonderful wife while I was out there on vacation, and he told me about this blog he had started as part of a project he was working on while on sabbatical from his teaching position at the University of San Francisco. I started reading his blog and decided to give it a try myself. And here I am.

Michael's blog went through about three iterations, if I recall, changing its name and its focus (the identity-crisis thing). Finally it emerged under the title of "Darwin's Cat," which sort of echoes Pavlov's Dog, but I am not sure the blog ever had anything to do with cats, and as a cat person, I can tell you that cats do not salivate unless they are about to throw up. But I digress.

At any rate, after a year of writing his blog, Michael has given it up. I guess it was a project with a finite life and that life is now complete (I think it was originally intended to be research for a book on writing newspaper columns, but Michael quickly learned that a blog is not a newspaper column but its own animal entirely.)

But doggone it, what poor timing! Look at all the endings I have had to deal with in the space of one month!

May 13: Star Trek ends, after a 17-year continuous run on television
May 19: Star Wars ends, after a 28-year run since the first movie came out
May 30: Darwin's Cat ends, after a year's run.

Now what am I supposed to do for entertainment???

It is going to be a long, long summer...

So I guess I will have to start writing more often in this blog, for my own entertainment if nothing else. Sheesh.

As we say in the church, I am sure God's hand is in this somewhere.

Pastor Kathy

Are you still here?

That's a line from the television series Babylon 5. The Centauri ambassador, Londo Mollari, asks his aide Vir, "Are you still here?" It's more in the sense of "Haven't you left yet?" although, if I recall, he asks him this in more than one episode, and later in the series it's more like "So you haven't deserted me like everyone else has." At least it seemed so to me.

At any rate...I notice I haven't posted here since, gulp, April 4. Any readers of this blog would think I had abandoned it. Frankly, I was starting to wonder myself. Maybe I need to re-think what I am writing and how and when. My posts were turning into sermons. It's tough enough to write one sermon a week, but one a day is way too much.

So, maybe this blog will take a turn and be more about life on the other side of the hill rather than pontifications from a preacher who sometimes takes this whole business of ministry way too seriously. And maybe the entries will be more frequent and a little bit shorter. Maybe.

Life on the other side of the hill: I notice that sometimes I will mis-read something and on a second reading discover that I was only a letter or two off the mark, but what a difference a letter or two makes. Yes, thank you, I do wear glasses, and yes, I have had my eyes checked recently. Chalk it up to reading without paying particularly close attention. Or being on the other side of the hill.

Anyway, yesterday as I was sitting at a traffic light, I noticed that the car in front of me had something written on the license plate holder. "Born broken," it said. Wow, what a powerful theological statement. In the Christian understanding of original sin, we are all born broken. We're not perfect coming out of the womb, only to screw up our lives as we grow up. At least not in my Calvinist upbringing. No, we are born broken and sinful and in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, because we are never going to be perfect in God's eyes, but through Christ we are forgiven.

Born broken. What a wonderful confession to put on the back of one's car. Truly this must be a humble person, someone who acknowledges God as the ultimate healer of our brokenness.

And then I looked again and realized that the B was really an H. "Horn broken," it said, and added below, "Watch for finger."

As Roseanne Rosanna-Danna would have said, "NEV-er mind."

One person's weed is another person's wildflower

April is high spring in South Louisiana. Apologies to those of you who live in the frozen North and won't see spring for another month. (I went to school in the frozen North and well remember seeing a six-inch snowfall in April. The horror, the horror.)

In the frozen North people look forward to spring because they are so sick of winter. In South Louisiana we enjoy spring while we've got it, because things are about to get pretty awful. By May the lovebugs will be here (they have two seasons, May and mid-August through cool weather, and in the late summer they cover the air like clouds; you can't believe what it's like until you've lived through it), not to mention the mosquitoes (which never completely go away), the gnats, and the big black grashoppers the size of locomotives. And the heat and humidity, which go on until mid-October. And then there's hurricane season.

So we love spring while we've got it. And now that I live in the country, I really appreciate it. I live down a country road on three acres. I'm only ten minutes from my church, four miles, but some of my parishioners think I live WAY far away. Oh well.

Life in the country is a huge change for a city girl like me. I still don't understand much about my well or my septic system, except that when the power goes out, I don't have any water. Don't know much about that big silver gas tank in the side yard either, except that you have to be very careful when you lift the lid to read the gauge, because wasps like to nest under there. (Oh, yeah, I left off my list of favorite insects the wasps and the fire ants. I know God put them on the earth for a reason, but God has yet to reveal that reason to me. Maybe to keep me humble.) I do have some of the big-city conveniences like electricity, phone service, Internet access and cable TV. Good thing. I don't think I'd survive without cable and amazon.com.

At any rate...this city girl knows better than to try to keep three acres mowed by herself. I hire someone with a tractor to cut it for me. Last spring was so rainy that I couldn't get the yard cut until it dried out a bit. (We are on the edge of the swamp, too, which doesn't help matters any.) And so last year I discovered, when I couldn't get the yard cut until mid-April, that it would turn into a wildflower meadow in the spring.

Now, I don't really know the names of the flowers. There are little yellow daisy-looking flowers and white sort-of daisy looking flowers with yellow centers, only not big enough to be daisies. And there are some lovely bell-shaped blue flowers, mostly growing in the ditches on the sides of the road. And these wonderful spiky plants I wanted to call wild artichokes, but I found out they are called thistles. Nasty, stay-away-from-me jagged leaves, but the most beautiful cream-and-purple flowers (that look a little like artichokes) that, I discovered the other day, must be scented or sweet because they are full of bees and what look like chinch bugs that fly up in your face when you get too close to the flowers. So the wild artichokes/thistles are best viewed from a distance.

All my neighbors are cutting their yards. I hear tractors and riding lawnmowers all weekend long. It's a drier spring than last year. But I haven't called my yard man yet. Whenever I look out at my back yard full of wildflowers, I am loathe to see them cut down. I am sure my neighbors think I am nuts. (Wouldn't be the first time. For seven years during the 1990s, I had two red Camaros sitting side by side in my garage, and I considered it a mark of how nuts my neighbors must have thought I was, because none of them ever asked me about them.) Where I see beautiful wildflowers, my neighbors in the country just see weeds run amuck: they probably think I should have cut them down before they bloomed and started spreading seed pods everywhere.

But I am going to enjoy my wildflower meadow for another week or so. People pay money to travel to see fields like this in the springtime. I have it right out back of my screened porch. If this is life in the country, I'm going to enjoy it for a little while.