Today's tips are for Molly

[randy_byers]

When I made my regular stop at the Cafe Allegro this morning to get a cup of coffee, there was a display on the counter: snapshots of a young woman in a bikini and denim cut-offs, and of a boy (or maybe a girl? maybe both?) running through a sprinkler, maybe one of a dog too. In my regular morning daze, it took me a while to notice that the tip jar was in the middle of this, with a note that explained: "Today's tips are for my friend Molly." The barista gave me my coffee and said, "Today's tips are for my friend Molly. She lost everything to Katrina."

"Does she live in New Orleans?" I asked, as she got me my change.

"She lives in Biloxi, Mississippi."

"Yeah, Biloxi ..." I said, trying to indicate that I knew Biloxi had been hit more directly.

"Except there's no Biloxi anymore," she said. "Molly's house is gone. She lost everything."

I put five dollars in the tip jar, which didn't seem adequate to "everything".

"Thank you," she said with a smile, as she turned to the next customer.

And now the disaster has a blurry, but more personal, face for me.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I'm increasingly irritated, to the extent that I let wholly obvious stuff irritate me, that Biloxi and Gulfport are practically second page compared to the main news that New Orleans is in a world of trouble. Gulfport is gone. Biloxi is toast. But that's Mississippi, where Southerners partied, not New Orleans where everyone partied.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

There's a story about this in, of all places, The Australian: Forgotten Biloxi belts out the blues. I can't claim to be very informed about what's going on in Biloxi or Gulfport either, and even the scope of the disaster in NO didn't start to dawn on me until yesterday.

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

It's all horribly, horribly sad. And whilst not directly preventable, there are questions to be asked regarding the diversion of funds from drainage and defence projects, the lack of National Guard support available, the stripping of natural defences and why so many people - the tens of thousands of car-less - were essentially abandoned to the elements.