On Thursday morning at about 4 am I woke with the signs of a headache coming on. Decided to get up and see if a cup of tea would help. I felt my way to the bathroom. When I flipped the light switch, nothing happened. I then went to get a flashlight and saw that other buildings had lights. I realized the street light was on, which was sufficient to find the bathroom, for goodness sake. The failure confined to our building and a truck was in the alley doing repairs.
As I became more completely awake, thought that is what is happening to Katrina victims, waking up, reaching for something familiar and not finding it.
I went back to bed then woke up with a more intense headache, probably a good thing. They seem to be coming about every three weeks, so bearing with it now may mean that I will escape one next week when I am planning to move. The lights were on by then and through the pain tried to appreciate the blessings of shelter, clean and abundant water, and food.
All week I watched news reports on TV, even watching in the morning when I usually work and listen to the radio. One of the most compelling happened on Fox news Tuesday or Wednesday evening when after showing scenes of people waiting for help, they then showed some video of flooded apartment buildings where abandoned dogs were sitting on balconies waiting for their owners to return. The angry words of a refugee that they were being treated worse than animals suddenly hit hard.
It was a week of horror after horror appearing on TV, each day worse than the one before as the tragedy unfolded. It was hard to not watch. How were people able to get in and broadcast when it seemed next to impossible for relief efforts to arrive? I applaud those brave journalists though. If they hadn’t been there to embarrass the federal government into action, who knows how much worse things might be today.
For months I have been whining to anyone who would listen: with so many of our National Guard deployed overseas, what would happen if there were a disaster here at home? My heart goes out to people far away who must be wondering if they will see family and friends again or have a place to live when they come home.
During the week I got caught up in a chat session where people were drawing comparisons to 9/11. As bad as that was, survivors could get medical help, shelter, water, and food only a few blocks away. A few weeks ago we had a supercell which took out much of the town of Stoughton. It was a kind of storm that hadn’t been seen in Wisconsin before, more typical of Oklahoma or Kansas. There was only one death though and local help was readily available. No one went hungry or thirsty. The scope of the tragedy and suffering this week is so hard to grasp, especially when people are proceeding with vacations and the farmer’s market is full of the abundance of the harvest and the weather has been almost perfect.
I spent most of Friday in bed. Got up to check email and have a cup of tea, then cancel an appointment. Felt so bad that I went back to bed with over an inch of tea left in the mug. I drew the blinds and pulled the sheet over my head and slept until after 2 PM. I felt better for it, but still felt pain if I moved around, so went back to bed again, then watched TV when the news came on in the evening.
Yesterday I resumed packing again, still spacy and dizzy from the headache but the nausea was gone.
Besides raising a lot of dust, have come across some things:
- My American Federation of Teachers (AFL-CIO) union card from 1982
- A post card mentioning Georgie the parakeet whose name I remembered and Chitters the gerbil whose name I had forgotten
- Reports from a series of complaints from when I worked for an academic department, put in a box high on a shelf
- The newspaper ad that resulted in adopting Ling Ling
