Perfect Days in the City That Care Forgot

Since Tuesday afternoon at 3:35, I have been in New Orleans, and at my brother John's home there since 4pm.

And I must tell you, I must have needed to be right here at this exact time, because God obviously decreed that "these shall be perfect days in the City That Care Forgot."



It started with the train trip.(Amtrak, left, as it passes along the eastern edge of downtown Lafayette, Louisiana)

Ah, the train. My paternal grandfather was an engineer on the old L&N (Louisville & Nashville) Railroad, working freight from 1915 to 1965.

He worked in various locales from New Orleans (where he grew up on BurGUNdy) to Mobile, Alabama (where he eventually moved to and lived for most of his life and where my father was born -in 1925- and grew up), and all places in between (in fact, grandpa and grandma were married in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where he was working at the time with the L&N).

So I have traveled on trains, I am told, since my birth. But each train trip, like each snowflake, is different. ALL ABOARD !

After boarding the train in southwest Louisiana (Lafayette), I rumbled past the myriad sugarcane fields that dominate the view from the train.

The fields appear to "run alongside" the train because of the optical illusion that the long, straight furrows create for the human eye. Smoke arises from those cane fields while they are being "burned over" (after the cane is harvested, the stubble is set ablaze to help partially prepare the field for the next sugarcane crop's planting cycle - and you can smell/see it for miles).

A train passenger is almost always within sight of these fields all the way from Lafayette to New Orleans. Every now and then, you can even see a sugar cane mill huffing and puffing smoke as it creates sugar from the stalks of sugarcane - those mills are anomalies among mills - in the sense that they run entirely (get all of their energy requirements ) off of the energy produced by the waste product of that which it processes.

That waste product (called "bagasse"), mainly the leftover sugarcane plant after the sugar is squeezed from it, is burned to produce the steam which produces the electricity which in turn runs the entire milling operation.

But the sugarcane industry is said to be in trouble due to world sugar prices and the complicated set of regulations, tariffs, and politics surrounding it.

Soon the trip takes on its own rhythms, from the gentle rolling and pitching of the cars to the click-clacking of the iron wheels on the steel tracks. It makes you sleepy unless you can find diversions. Let's find some.

The Lounge Car is inviting. Huge picture windows offer an unparalleled view of the countryside rushing by (well, if you can call a 50 mph avg speed "rushing"), and the company is so varied that you are bound to see someone you can feel comfortable about approaching.

I did.

This particular someone was a nine-year-old boy, ("Chip") on his very first train trip. We spoke of his love of trains, and I thought of my own son (11-year-old Christopher), who took his first cross-country train trip at 18 months of age when we traveled from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. (in a sleeper, or "Pullman" car) to walk in the first annual Children's Walk on Washington in June of 1996.

What this 9-yr-old liked best was "being high up"and "having lots of room to move around." I agreed on both counts. West of the Mississippi, trains can be higher, I told him, due to the construction of higher tunnels and bridges in the western USA than exist in the east, where these types of structures were older and built lower.

I was a trove of train trivia. He didn't care. After a few more minutes talking to him, neither did I. He was far more interesting to listen to than to talk to. I took this realization as an object lesson in human relations.

This little boy's mom was a late twenties-something "Cher" lookalike (like my cousin Sandy - who could easily have been Cher's red-headed half-sister), and was much more interested in chatting up a serviceman on his way to duty in New Orleans than in keeping track of her son.

From the moment Chip and I started talking to each other, he was focused on one thing: crossing the Mississippi River on the train. And in New Orleans, this is a mighty feat indeed.

Leading up to that crossing are the longest approach structures for trains in the world, I am told: each is one-mile long, gradually sloping and curving (which is why it had to be so long) trestle that both sets the multi-ton train down on and then gently lifts it off of the Huey Long Mississippi River Bridge.

We topped that bridge at 3pm - and could see, in a sweeping panoramic view: downtown New Orleans, Lake Ponchartrain, the Bonne Carre Spillway, the Louis Armstrong International Airport, area suburbs, and both upriver and downriver as the Father of All Waters wiggled and wended both toward and away from us, carrying ocean ships and barge traffic to and from ports.

In another 35 minutes, we were stepping off of the train at Union Station. I fulfilled a boyhood dream by standing alongside the Conductor at the very rear of the train's last car with the door open and the breeze in my face as it backed into the station (meaning I was moving forward). Simple as this necessary maneuver is, this was thrilling to this little boy.

Me, I mean.

It was sunny , breezy, and 72 degrees. Perfect. I even had a friend to meet me there and whisk me away, like some VIP, to my local destination. One ensconced at brother Johnny's home, I took it easy in the Big Easy.

The rest of the next 65 hours (until right now, 9am Friday morning, Dec 30th) were heaven-sent. Each day I mostly walked walked walked. To Audubon Park. To the French Quarter. Within my brother's uptown neighborhood.

I spoke to shopkeepers, grocery store clerks, bicyclers, moms and dads and kids, policemen, national guardsmen, waitresses, movie ticket sellers and popcorn vendors (at the Prytania), and anyone else who seemed approachable, and almost everyone did.

Their mood, without exception, was upbeat. This in and of itself was a seachange from the typical big-city cynicism that pervades metro areas world-wide. But it's self-selecting: Those who have chosen to come back and live here are those with the most positive attitudes, about themselves and everything else. The feeling I came away with was: This city's gonna make it.

The weather stayed spring-like, with highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s, and the highlight of these first 65 hours were the fleeting conversations I enjoyed with my baby brother John as he zipped through his days as senior paralegal at a law firm.

The longest concentrated period of time I saw him was just before he left for a trip out of town for New Year's, and we rambled through two hours of talking about subjects ranging from the dynamics of human attraction to our family history.

My second-favorite moment was at Felix's Uptown Oyster Bar - a satellite of the world-famous French Quarter establishment (not yet reopened, incidently, since the storm four months ago).

Uptown Felix's opened in October - two months after Katrina's wet kiss; it's a few blocks east of the Prytania Theatre. Inside, the featured oyster shucker - one of those cafe-au-lait creoles whose skill at cracking open the bivalves is surpassed only by his skill at making customers feel special, is hard at work but is so smooth and graceful he seems to be hardly working.

I approach him at the oyster bar and, seeing the place full, ask if i can get half a dozen and still make my movie down the street in 20 minutes. "Stay right where you are, I will put them right in front of you," he assures me. "I'm Paul."

Over the next 15 minutes, he continues to fill, at an even pace (never rushed, never stalled), every single one of the numerous orders for shucked oysters that others are barking at him.

Yet - get this - he asks what size I prefer (large) and then immediately chooses and then opens my first couple of "two-bite" oysters and sets them down in front of me while intoning: "Make yourself some sauce and grab some crackers. I'll keep one ahead of you."

During the next quarter hour, he regales me with stories of his family's experiences, both before and after the storm; informs me of his 60 years of working at Felix's (he started at 12); and speaks, in endearing terms, of his 14 grandchildren "by two wives and a girlfriend."

All the while he is keeping up with the constant requests to fill half-shell orders of sixes and twelves AND staying one ahead of me so I can eat and get out of there in time to keep my date with a big monkey down the street.

As my time with Paul drew to a close, I realized that I had just been part of an historic performance of classic proportions - that he has displayed every single night, six nights a week, for the past 60 years.

I tipped him twice the price of the meal and told him I would remember him and also mention him to others (which I now have). "I will remember you , too !" he said, smiling from under his Irish tam.

I then excused myself to the restroom, and when I went past him on my way out to catch King Kong at the Prytania a couple of blocks away, I noticed he was chatting up another walk-in customer - but as I passed he glanced my way and said - in his perfect rhythm of keeping his orders up and "one ahead" of his new customer, "enjoy your night, and come come back to see me."

Think Long, think wrong

The title I chose for this entry (above) is something my grandfather J.E. "Acie" used to say to me all the time.

He was refering to my choice of a card to play against him in a game of casino or bourre or five hundred. But the longer I thought, I found, the greater the odds became that I would choose the wrong card (or at least not the best one).

Later, I heard him use the phrase again in another context. So my young mind concluded that it must be a rule he had for choice-making in the world at large. Turns out, it was a pretty good rule, as the article below suggests.



The New York Times
December 29, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
By TIMOTHY D. WILSON

Charlottesville, Va.

IT'S navel gazing time again, that stretch of the year when many of us turn our attention inward and think about how we can improve the way we live our lives. But as we embark on this annual ritual of introspection, we would do well to ask ourselves a simple question: Does it really do any good?

The poet Theodore Roethke had some insight into the matter: "Self-contemplation is a curse / That makes an old confusion worse." As a psychologist who conducts research on self-knowledge and happiness, I think Roethke had a point, one that's supported by a growing body of controlled psychological studies.

Not sure how you feel about a special person in your life? Analyzing the pluses and minuses of the relationship might not be the answer.

In a study I conducted with Dolores Kraft, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Dana Dunn, a social psychologist at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, people in one group were asked to list the reasons their relationship with a romantic partner was going the way it was, and then rate how satisfied they were with the relationship. People in another group were asked to rate their satisfaction without any analysis; they just gave their gut reactions.

It might seem that the people who thought about the specifics would be best at figuring out how they really felt, and that their satisfaction ratings would thus do the best job of predicting the outcome of their relationships.

In fact, we found the reverse. It was the people in the "gut feeling" group whose ratings predicted whether they were still dating their partner several months later. As for the navel gazers, their satisfaction ratings did not predict the outcome of their relationships at all. Our conclusion? Too much analysis can confuse people about how they really feel. There are severe limits to what we can discover through self-reflection, and trying to explain the unexplainable does not lead to a sudden parting of the seas with our hidden thoughts and feelings revealed like flopping fish.

Self-reflection is especially problematic when we are feeling down. Research by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a clinical psychologist at Yale University, shows that when people are depressed, ruminating on their problems makes things worse.

In one study, mildly depressed college students were asked to spend eight minutes thinking about themselves or to spend the same amount of time thinking about mundane topics like "clouds forming in the sky."

People in the first group focused on the negative things in their lives and sunk into a worse mood. People in the other group actually felt better afterward, possibly because their negative self-focus was "turned off" by the distraction task.

What about people like police officers and firefighters who witness terrible events? Is it helpful for them to reflect on their experiences?

For years it was believed that emergency workers should undergo a debriefing process to focus on and relive their experiences; the idea was that this would make them feel better and prevent mental health problems down the road. After 9/11, for example, well-meaning counselors flocked to New York to help police officers, firefighters and rescue workers deal with the trauma of what they had seen.

But did it do any good? In an extensive review of the research, a team led by Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard, concluded that debriefing procedures have little benefit and might even hurt by interrupting the normal healing process. People often distract themselves from thinking about painful events right after they occur, and this may be better than mentally reliving the events.

What can we do to improve ourselves and feel happier? Numerous social psychological studies have confirmed Aristotle's observation that "We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage." If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves.

Social psychologist Daniel Batson and colleagues at the University of Kansas found that participants who were given an opportunity to do a favor for another person ended up viewing themselves as kind, considerate people - unless, that is, they were asked to reflect on why they had done the favor. People in that group tended in the end to not view themselves as being especially kind.

The trick is to go out of our way to be kind to others without thinking too much about why we're doing it. As a bonus, our kindnesses will make us happier.

A study by University of California, Riverside, social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues found that college students instructed to do a few acts of kindness one day a week ended up being happier than a control group of students who received no special instructions.

As the new year begins, then, reach out and help others. If that sounds suspiciously like an old Motown song or like simplistic advice from one of those do-gooder college professors, well, it is. But the fact is that being good to others will ultimately make us kinder, happier people - just so long as we don't think too much about it.

Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is the author of "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious."

###

Christmas Feast

{ Siblings John and Suzanne with cousin Charlie


{Nephew Simon with his mother, my sister, Jackie




{Brothers Joseph and John









{Mom during her final hours Saturday August 6, 2005.

{Mom, Cousin Ann, Dad during Spring 2005 visit.

My large family met at our father's home Christmas day for a feast of food and conversation.

Five of Dad's eight children were there, along with four of the eight grandchildren and the sole great-grandchild. Even two in-laws showed (this takes courage) !

Though we'd lost mother in August, there was no lingering sadness in the air, though Dad of course mentioned that this gathering "would be the last time this many of us got together here (at his home at 565) until the day I die."

Being back at 565 at the same time as so many other siblings brought back a tumble of memories that sparked conversation ranging from the humorous to the poignant.

We have a huge kitchen area, and the discussion rambled from where we all sat at our round dinner table with a lazy susan to the childhood games we played on that lazy susan to the tricks played on one another there involving food.

Food.

This was one of the best feasts ever produced and brought here to enjoy. We had (from a brother and his wife) baked pork roast laced with lots of garlic, a turkey breast roasted with killer gravy, a batch of spicy turnips, some mustard greens, a vat of chicken gumbo and rice, and brownies (i have probably forgotten some things).

From one sister: lemon squares, raspberry crumbly squares, chocolate raisin peanut clusters, kumquats, and a green bean casserole to die for.

From another: Her special oyster dressing (an old family recipe - from another family !), and deer sausage and venison roast (from her boyfriend).

From another brother: a bread pudding.

I conjured up some fresh broccoli that I'd grown from tiny black seeds over the past couple of months and zapped that in the microwave just for a minute to retain crispness and green-bright color , then made up a batch of bechemel sauce to top it with.

There was some serious eating done that day.

There was also something that happened in our backyard that had not happened there in decades: a ball was kicked around. Some grandsons did the kicking of a soccer ball found there - from a nearby yard.

After some famous family stories were re-told and some limited catching up was done, the event was over after only a couple of hours - short by our family's past standards - and we dispersed.

There were mixed feelings that lingered inside me.

Although there was just a touch of the wild tumultuous atmosphere that's marked previous family get togethers, to keep things interesting, there's obviously only faint hope there will ever be any more of these kinds of gatherings - especially since mother's death, Dad's impending decline (he's 80), and the gradual but ever-so-steady loosening of those family ties that used to hold us so close.

We'll periodically have small, intimate gatherings i suppose - involving only a few (three or four at most) siblings - but the days of the large, boisterous, rambling get togethers seem to have passed into history for us.

It is a sentimental thought, a grasping for something that once was legendary, and now spent.

Cameron Parish Relocation Plan

---

December 27, 2005

One Parish

With Coastline in Ruins, Cajuns Face Prospect of Uprooted Towns

By JERE LONGMAN

GRAND CHENIER, La. - Cameron Parish, where generations of Cajuns have hunted ducks and pulled up redfish, lost about 400 people to Hurricane Audrey in 1957. Last fall, when Hurricane Rita destroyed thousands of structures and flattened the coastline, some state officials began to question whether life there was still worth the risk.

Now Louisiana planners are proposing an idea that would have been unimaginable here a few months ago: moving an entire string of seaside towns and villages - and the 4,000 longtime residents who live in them - 15 or 20 miles inland to higher and presumably safer ground.

"If we could get 100 percent participation, which admittedly is extraordinarily difficult, if possible at all, we could conceivably take the entire population of Cameron Parish largely out of harm's way for future events," said Drew Sachs, a consultant to the Louisiana Recovery Authority. He has been asked to develop bold suggestions for rebuilding the state's coastal region in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The idea, of course, is already encountering resistance, particularly among younger residents. The tightly knit group of Cajuns who have lived here in unincorporated villages like Cameron, Johnson Bayou, Holly Beach, Creole and Grand Chenier are fiercely independent and self-sufficient. They have resided for generations on inherited family property in the state's southwest corner, 160 miles to the west of New Orleans, living off the land and giving resonance to Louisiana's nickname as the Sportsman's Paradise.

"My grandfather would roll over in his grave if I sold our land," said Clifton Hebert, 44, operations chief of the parish emergency operations center. "He'd haunt me the rest of my life."

But others admit there may be some wisdom in a move, as painful as it would be. Wanita Harrison, a retired biology and chemistry teacher from Grand Chenier, loves the way the marsh fills with pelicans when a cold front pushes through. Her husband, Lee, relishes the splendid rural isolation and the ability to run off to Houston for a week without bothering to lock the house.

With their ruined belongings now piled along Highway 82, however - the piano is somewhere back in the woods - the Harrisons are actually considering the idea. Mrs. Harrison, in fact, says that if she goes north, it will be beyond Cameron Parish.

"It's a good idea to consider moving inland," said Mrs. Harrison, 70. "I love my area, but we have to face reality."

No one died in Hurricane Rita, which struck early on Sept. 24, thanks to a vigorous evacuation plan, but the storm destroyed or rendered structurally unsound about half of the 5,400 parish homes and commercial buildings examined by the Army Corps of Engineers, parish officials said. They caution that many more structures may also have to be condemned. In the lower part of the parish, as few as 20 of 1,000 residences may be inhabitable, according to the most dire estimates. Residents remain scattered.

There is a great fear here, residents say, that the hurricane destroyed not only property but a way of life. Many of the parish's 10,000 residents say they feel both neglected by the federal response and suspicious that outsiders will dictate their future with prohibitive building codes and flood insurance requirements. They worry that even if they want to return to lower portions of the parish, they may not be able to afford it.

What will it cost to elevate houses 11 or 14 or 20 feet off the ground? asked Kenton Bonsall, 35, an equipment operator for the State Wildlife and Fisheries Department, echoing the concerns of many about new elevation requirements being imposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. How will aging parents and grandparents climb those stairs? Will anyone provide flood and homeowners' insurance? At what cost? What if the hospital is not rebuilt? Or the school? Or the convenience stores? Will he have to drive 50 miles for an aspirin and a gallon of milk and gas?

"I'm afraid that everything I've known to be true is going to change and be gone," Mr. Bonsall said, sitting in a convenience store amid a lightning storm.

Hurricane Rita's storm surge of 17 to 20 feet again made clear just how vulnerable this low-lying parish is to hurricanes. The marshy area below the Intracoastal Waterway has become a ghost land of structural skeletons. Many houses are gone entirely, except for a concrete slab. All that remains of the post office in the village of Cameron is a pile of bricks and a spray-painted address.

Homes and buildings that remain standing seem to have been hollowed like pumpkins by the force of the water. The Hibernia Bank in Cameron is nothing more than a frame and a vault. The gym at Cameron Elementary School has basketball goals with nets but no roof or cinderblock walls.

Referring to Cameron Parish's seven elected officials, known as police jurors, Representative Charles Boustany Jr., the Republican who represents this district in Congress, said: "You can see fatigue in their eyes and concerns about whether or not they will have a community in the future. At the same time, there is a grim determination to get things back together."

James Lee Witt, a director of FEMA in the Clinton administration who is advising Louisiana officials on recovery, has urged the state to think creatively in seeking to reduce the risk of wind damage and storm surge to its most exposed areas.

One possibility, Mr. Witt and his associates say, is that the federal government could buy out private and commercial properties - at pre-Rita market value - along Highway 82, which runs along the Gulf of Mexico in lower Cameron Parish. About 4,000 people live in this area, parish officials said. Conceivably, entire communities, with their churches, businesses, schools and hospitals, could then relocate to better-protected areas in the north-central part of the parish.

Financing would come from the $2.5 billion to $4 billion that Louisiana expects to receive from FEMA in "hazard mitigation" money. State recovery officials stressed that participation in any relocation effort would be voluntary and that oil and gas and fishing enterprises requiring access to the coast could remain in place. Land at the coast could still be used as it is now for farming, hunting and fishing, said Mr. Sachs, an associate of Mr. Witt's who specializes in storm risk reduction.

"We'd be able to keep the community largely intact," Mr. Sachs said in an interview in Baton Rouge. "But they would be located in a part of the state that would be of lesser risk."

There are some precedents for relocating entire communities. The village of Valmeyer, Ill., near St. Louis, was moved several miles from a flood plain to a bluff after it was inundated by the Mississippi River in 1993. The population has grown to 1,100 from 900, and Valmeyer now has a new school, new churches, more modern utilities and increasing property values, said Jeff Berry, a city councilman at the time of the relocation and now a consultant to the village.

"We had weekly meetings, and I think it made the citizens feel like they were part of building the new town," Mr. Berry said. "We knew we'd lose residents if we didn't build quickly, in three or four years. Time was a big element."

Cameron Parish must complete its recovery from Hurricane Rita before it can seriously consider long-term plans for rebuilding, parish officials said. Nearly three months after the hurricane, an evacuation order remains in effect. Only in the last two weeks did a federal program begin for debris removal from private property.

Much of the lower parish seems untouched since the hurricane and persists as a safety hazard, officials said. Houses remain shoved against the highway or tossed into the marsh. Containers of hazardous material wait to be recovered, as if in a toxic Easter egg hunt. Cars are hidden under crushed homes and fallen trees. Plastic is draped in trees like Spanish moss. About 50 of the 300 coffins that floated out of the ground remain unaccounted for, said Theos Duhon, the parish sheriff.

At a community meeting in Grand Lake, many residents said they wanted to be left alone to rebuild as they did after Hurricane Audrey. Many voiced a long-held belief, unconfirmed by anyone, that the federal government preferred to turn the parish into a wildlife refuge.

"The hurricane took a whole culture away," said Kevin Warner, 30, a water company employee from Oak Grove. "They say it's going to be bigger and better. I'll have to see it to believe it."

Others are not waiting around to be bought out by the government. Mona Theriot, 65, who said she floated on creosote posts for 11 hours before being rescued as a teenager during Hurricane Audrey, has sold her property in Hurricane Rita's aftermath. She plans to rebuild with her husband, Daniel, some 30 miles north in Lake Charles.

"We're tired of running," Mrs. Theriot said of frequent storm-related evacuations along the coast.

At Holly Beach, Alma and Raywood Landry sat with their two dogs and a box of fried chicken and surveyed the slab and pilings that remained of their home and several hundred other residences on this shattered beachfront. Their home had burned several years ago and was rebuilt, only to be demolished again by Hurricane Rita, said Mr. Landry, 74. Mrs. Landry, 71, said she would consider a government buyout to move inland.

"This is the second time I've lost everything," she said. "This is a beautiful and quiet place, but I've had enough."

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The Art of the Gift

Measured by anticipation, nothing outranked Christmas for us eight kids. Not our birthday, not Halloween (though it came the closest), not Easter, not Fourth of July. Christmas was the big kahuna of ritual celebrations we looked forward to.

It was totally selfish. "What will I be getting?" was our only focus. And we not only wanted as much as we could get, but also wanted to make absolutely certain no sibling got more than we did. So with one eye on our own presents as we ripped them open, the other eye gawked and measured everyone else's gifts and did a quick "value comparison" just in case a protest had to be mounted.

All gifts were hidden before Christmas in various places in the house (we found some, guessed some, and were surprised by some), and then wrapped and placed in the living room under and around the tree after we went to bed Christmas Eve.

Mom and Dad locked the living room door after setting out the gifts, and warned that anyone found sneaking in would be placed last in line to open their gifts. That threat kept us out until after church Christmas morning. As time went on, we were permitted to open one gift before church, and, eventually, all gifts were opened at the crack of dawn Christmas Day.

In less than 15 minutes, all gifts were opened - gift wrap spread everywhere - and we were busy either playing with our favorites or trying to get a sibling to permit us to play with one of theirs.

AS we aged, we did start spending money and time choosing gifts for others, and, like with most immature gift-givers, we either bought for others what we wanted ourselves or spent way too much on gifts not well thought out.

There were a few gifts (so very few) that stood the test of time, and one of my proudest moments was when a three-foot tall carved wood and blown glass hourglass (cost: $40 back in 1965) that I gave mom and dad was immediatley out to use as a side table next to an easy chair in the living room.

It stayed in use there for more than 33 years. I finally reclaimed it after Dad starting getting rid of stuff in the family home after mom moved out, when I was in my late forties. It still spilled sand from one chamber to the other - and had been used for all those years, mostly to h old an ash tray full of cigarette butts. Yep, that was my best gift to others ever, in terms of being useful.

Funny how important getting gifts was back then, and I bet none of us (or anyone of you reading this) can name even a few Christmas gifts from childhood. Oh, everyone can recall a couple - for whatever reason, but hardly anyone can name more than three. Three! Of the hundreds of gifts received - so very few are remembered. What did you get for Christmas 10 years ago ? Five ? Three? Last year ? Point made.

Yet funny again how I recall more than several of the gifts I gave to others. A wooden sculpture of my grandmother's name (given to her in the late '60s), a pair of earrings for my mother, a brass baseball and plaque for Dad, an ashtray for Grandpa, cobalt blue candle holders for each of my seven siblings. As I got older, I considered it a worthy challenge to figure out the perfect gift for everyone on my list.

Now I feel great if I can choose one gift for each of those I have been close to over the past year that somehow "fits." What makes a gift "fit" can be any one of a number of things, but mostly I try for something personal, beautiful, hand-made, or useful. When I can combine several of those it's a home run. But that's rare. Mostly, I just want folks to know I was thinking about them in a personal way.

I never fail to be touched by others who give me gifts. Even though i am notoriously easy to buy for (have many interests, love many different kinds of things), i am still amazed at how perfect almost all gifts given to me are. I cannot recall the last time I even felt the urge to return a gift.

This year, I mostly grew things for folks (basil plants) - i started them way back in the summer from little bitty black seeds. That was especially nice for me, as it lead me to be thinking about the recipients of those growing gifts all through the plant's nursery period and young mature period.

Other gifts were very personal in some way - personal in the way that the recipient would think of some aspect of themselves when they looked at the gift (or used it) - and how i connected with that part of them.

Having lived through 55 Christmas seasons now, I have come to the same place my maternal grandmother Lillian was when she would talk to me about the art of gift giving (she was in her fifties then). She once told me that I would remember gifts I gave rather than gifts I received, so to spend more time thinking about the former rather than the latter; she was right.

She was right.
###

Different Christmas Perspective

Here's a perspective of Christmas with a Buddhist twist. Enjoy.

 

 faith-based
Eluding Happiness
A Buddhist problem with Christmas.
By Jess Row
Posted Thursday, Dec. 22, 2005, at 1:08 PM ET

I grew up in a white, liberal, East Coast family, Unitarian with Presbyterian roots, and we celebrated Christmas in a typical American way: the tree, the school pageant, the Burl Ives carols, the Claymation Rudolph on television. Most of my memories of the holiday are happy ones. But one year—I was 9 or 10—things took a bizarre turn: I woke up and raced down to the tree, inspected all the gifts, and found, to my horror, that out of all of them only two or three were marked for me. My brother (it seemed) had gotten six times as many. It was the younger child's worst nightmare: left out, given the scraps.

I burst out crying and threw a screaming fit. I was shown the little packages underneath that contained the things I really wanted—a Swiss Army knife with my name engraved on it, a Bruce Springsteen tape. But it took an hour to placate me, as I remember.

I'm sure most American adults can dredge up a similar story from their childhood. Of all the holidays we celebrate, Christmas is the one with the highest stakes, the most payoff, and no one understands this better than children. The threat of lumps of coal in the stocking is, in a certain perverse way, very real to them: not because they fear getting nothing but because they fear not getting enough. Parents, too, understand instinctively that presents on Christmas are a test of their love and act accordingly.

Anthropologically speaking, there's nothing unique about our slightly mad celebration of abundance and good fortune at the darkest point on the calendar, with its attendant hangover. I witnessed this some years ago when I lived in Hong Kong during the lunar New Year, which the city celebrates with the same brazen commercial fever it applies to everything else. The highlight of the celebration for children is the distribution of red lai see packets filled with money.

For the last 11 years, I've been a student of Korean Zen, and as an American Buddhist I'm not quite sure how to feel about Christmas. It's not that I feel disloyal celebrating the holiday. Mahayana Buddhism, the larger tradition to which Zen belongs, encourages coexistence among religious traditions. When I asked one of my teachers recently how he feels about Christmas, he said, "When I'm at the temple, we celebrate Buddha's Enlightenment Day [the first week of December]; when I'm with people celebrating Hanukkah, I celebrate that; when I'm with people celebrating Christmas, I celebrate Christmas."

In many ways, I love Christmas, and not just because I generally enjoyed it as a child. There are many parallels between the Christmas story and the story of Buddha's birth. East Asian Buddhism even has a figure strikingly analogous to Santa Claus—Budai, or Hotei, the enormously fat laughing monk, whose name literally means "cloth sack," a reference to the beggar's bag he carries. Budai's bag is said to be always be full of presents for children; he is often pictured with tots climbing all over him. In China and Japan he is a symbol of abundance and sometimes even overindulgence.

But at the same time, I can't help feeling that something is intrinsically wrong with the contemporary American version of Christmas. It's not simply that the gift-giving has become unmoored from the religious content or that the holiday has become "commercialized." (As Leigh Eric Schmidt's book Commercial Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays makes clear, Christmas in the United States has always been a commercial ritual.) What's awry, from a Buddhist point of view, is that for the most part we've lost the ability to let gifts make us happy. The means—gifts—and the ends—happiness—have become detached. Overwhelmingly today, we assume that the way to make people happy at Christmas is to give them what they have told us they want. This is true of children and adults. The whole process of wish lists, of clear and defined expectations, is in a sense what makes the contemporary American Christmas possible.

Wish lists, however, mean that the giver takes no responsibility for—no ownership of—the gift. From a Buddhist point of view this is inherently a mistake. Whatever we give to someone else we also, in a sense, receive ourselves. The gift itself has only the existence and meaning we assign it. Another way of saying this is that gifts are an extension of our karma.

The most obvious examples of this are gifts that are dangerous or inappropriate—a rifle for an 11-year-old, a car for a 16-year-old who hasn't learned to stop at stop signs. But consider a more benign example. Say that you have a 16-year-old daughter who is dying for a pair of $500 skis. You can afford it; you've budgeted that much to spend on her; and buying them will make her extremely happy, in the short term. On the other hand, you feel it's inappropriate—even outrageous—to spend that much money on a present for a teenager.

Well, so what? It's not the end of the world to have a daughter who has expensive tastes. If you look at the gift simply as a transaction—I have this money, what would you like me to do with it?—it makes no sense for you to censor your daughter's desires. Nonetheless, after you buy these skis, the world will be slightly altered. She will feel validated about receiving extravagant presents as tokens of love, and you, by participating in the transaction, will have affirmed her choice. Nor do your guilt and frustration just disappear: They become part of the exchange itself, part of the price of her happiness. Your relationship is shaped by the gift, instead of the other way around. It's such a subtle shift that you may not ever be aware of it, but the consequences, ultimately, are real.

There's no easy way to extricate ourselves from these binds of obligation and reassurance. For those who want to cut down on expense or shopping there are now many Web sites dedicated to making the season simpler—a worthy goal. But Christmas isn't just about being virtuous; it's about feeling lucky to be alive and grateful for the abundance we share, without letting that abundance drive us crazy. This requires a sense of proportion—an instinct for when more becomes enough. I'm certainly no paragon here: After reading this essay, my wife pointed out that my Amazon wish list has 79 items on it. Many of those titles have been up there for years, and I don't really expect anyone to buy any of them. But the little boy in me wouldn't mind at all.

Jess Row's The Train to Lo Wu: Stories will be released in paperback next month. He is a dharma teacher at the Chogye International Zen Center of New York.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2132724/

"It is high time that the ideal of success be replaced with the ideal of service."  A Einstein. www.3deye.blogspot.com 

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Yahoo! for Good - Make a difference this year.

Death of New Orleans ?

December 11, 2005
Editorial - The New York Times

Death of an American City

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a major American city.

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

Testing New Technology - Audio Blog !

A Week at Warp Speed

Whew !

Since last I posted here (the Friday after Thanksgiving), eleven days have passed ! That is the longest I have gone so far without a personal post - and the reason is simple enough: so many things have happened.

Here is an abbreviated account:

My last post was about anticipation, because my eleven-year-old son Christopher was going to be visiting the next day for a couple of days (he lives in another state with his mother) and it had been awhile since our last visit.

That visit was fabulous, and I will have a special post about it within the next week.

THEN there was three days of frenetic activity as my "FrAussie" sister JC and her children MC and HA wrapped up their three-week visit to the states with a pair of birthday celebrations (each child turned a new age while here) and last-minute visits with family and friends.

THEN I was fortunate enough to be accompanying those three FrAussies to Los Angeles and Disneyland for a day before helping send them on their merry way back to Oz late Friday evening ! There will be an entire post devoted to this visit soon !

Whew !

More later !

Anticipation

Anticipation.

There's magic there.

There's danger there.

There's the gamut of emotions, from anxiousness to hope to fear to joy to confusion to exuberance to anger to satisfaction to disappointment.

It's both energizing AND exhausting.

It fills our life's waiting moments, when we are looking forward to something happening or not happening, like so many rain drops seek and find each nook and cranny in a flower bed, an old barn, an unprotected body walking briskly.

It leads to soaring high and dipping low.

It is never neutral.

It accompanies each plan as it's createad, each step toward the realization of that plan, and each moment we think about that plan.

It can rise with the incredible speed of light, for that's how fast a thpought travels inside our brain.

It can be deflated with equal dispatch, for that's the speed of a hope dashed.

It can enlarge our hearts, sharpen our vision, increase our appetities, and sensitize our souls.

It's heuristic - leading us to further exploration.

Mostly, it's omnipresent, and must be dealt with or else.

Or else miss out on one of the most delicious life experiences.
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Living a Thankful Life

Thanksgiving.

Nice name for a holiday. But a far, far better name for a lifestyle.

There are so many people, feelings, ideas, events, places, and other things for which to be thankful that to name even a few means leaving out more than can be included.

Many folks in my home area of Louisiana will be happy to see 2005 come to an end, and are struggling in one way or another right now with the effects of the two category five hurricanes.

Those twisted sisters, Katrina and Rita, cut paths of destruction, devastation, and turmoil and even now continue to weigh heavily on those affected.

So I understand this year's ambivalence many of my fellow Cajuns and New Orleanians and Louisianians feel toward celebrating "Thanksgiving."

Normally, we are an exuberant and resilient people who are known world-wide for our "joie de vie" (love of life) and "savoie faire" (skill at living life) - as evidenced in our famous celebrations - from deep winter's Mardi Gras to Spring's Jazz Fest to summer's lazy days at a beach to fall's full festival season in the rural parishes (counties).

I am giving thanks today mostly for my Dieu-donne {pronounced d'YOOH daw NAY - "God-given"} disposition.

Ever since I can remember, I have felt optimisitc about things, and that did not change with the coming of the hurricanes this year - or with the death of my mother only three weeks prior (on Aug 6th).

New Orleans now has an opportunity it might never have had to remake itself, literally from the ground up.

And each of us who live here have a similar chance to remake ourselves too, from the soul out. We need to become experts at living fully again.

"How do you become an expert," I once asked my Uncle Mose.

"To become an expert," he said wryly, "you have to make 5,000 mistakes.

"Get busy."
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A "Master Gardener"

Tonight I completed all the course work in order to be certified a "Master Gardener" by Louisiana State University (LSU). But in my heart and mind - my maternal grandfather Joseph Essie Bernard ("Acie") will always and for evermore be the only genuine "Master Gardener" in our family. Lucky for me he lived just across the street as I grew up. More about him on another day.

Our class had been meeting each Monday for the past several months - and we all have one more meeting to attend (though it's not a class - just a final meeting) and some volunteer work to do before we are certified, but it has been one of the most enlightening semesters of study in my life.

I will add more to this entry later (as in days later) - so check back if you are interested in this topic.

I just wanted to mark this day in some way, so wrote this after returning from my final class. I feel like Johnny Appleseed must have felt when he started out walking across America : full of hope and big ideas and enthusiasm and the desire to plant things and help teach others to do the same.

I already know that my specialty and focus will be Organic Gardening.

I love not only the results of OG, but also - and more importantly i feel - the whole lifestyle and spiritual side of OG.

I already feel empowered by this semester's work and study, and hope to be sowing my new-found knowledge, enthusiasm, and desire in as many fertile locations as I can find - be that actual gardening beds or people's minds and hearts and souls .

Have hope, will travel !

The Spoken Word

The thin line between being glib and being profound is often not appreciated by those claiming to speak "the truth." This beautifully-written column describes this phenomenon. Enjoy.
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November 20, 2005
Lives
The Unwhole Truth
By LYDIA MILLET
It was during a winter of long, dreary parties to which the same people came week after week. My best friend and my boyfriend and I went to the parties hoping there would be new people, but there were always only the old people. And always, when I saw them again, my heart would sink at the realization that this party would be a thankless repetition of the last party, at which nothing of note occurred.

Passing in a crowded kitchen, these other guests and I would lift our drinks and grimace painfully, recalling how little we had to say to one another. I kept busy by pretending I had goals; I made a vector of purpose as I crossed a room, to discourage unwanted conversational sallies.

We stood in corners in an invisible fortress, my best friend, my boyfriend and I. The three of us had strong opinions and we had high standards - standards we ourselves rarely met.

"There are those analytical philosophers again," I might say, nodding at a group of three nebbish grad students at the window. "From that housewarming in Cobble Hill."

"Philosophers," my best friend would muse. "Were they even smart?"

My boyfriend shook his head grimly. "Actually, quite stupid."

Not that we meant to be snide. We meant to be honest. In a fallen world, a world of dire futures and world leaders less educated than bridge builders, one thing we could do for ourselves was be honest. We found solidarity in judgment.

Finally my friend started seeing someone, and the routine of dull, sarcastic weekends was broken. The new man was kind and did not feel the need to build invisible fortresses. It was the end of an era, and I suspect we were all privately glad.

And then one night my friend called me in tears. Her new boyfriend had suddenly ended it. Could I come to see her? Of course, I said, and went out into the cold with a bottle of wine.

I found her alone in her apartment, sobbing. We sat on the couch and wrapped blankets around ourselves and I alternated between patting her blanketed knee and rubbing her shoulder, in the awkward way people have when they know a comforting touch is called for but are feeling self-conscious.

"I just don't understand," said my friend, again and again. "It really seemed good."

I would pat more on the knee or the arm and try to say something different from what I said five minutes earlier. I wanted her to feel comforted; I wanted her to feel that the new and now-ex-boyfriend was wrong and more than that unworthy, and that I was the ambassador from the rest of the world, there to illuminate this for her with startling clarity.

As the evening wore on, we drank more wine and began to speak in generalities, getting in a few jabs at the new and now-ex-boyfriend; and finally there came a moment when she looked placid, if not exactly cheerful.

"I know it'll be fine eventually," she said softly. "I just don't feel like being by myself right now."

"Well," I said, leaning forward with what I imagine was a sage, world-weary face - rather premature since I was 26 - "think of it as a rehearsal. I mean, really, we all die alone."

She stared at me and started to cry again.

On the subway headed home I felt a sense of shame. I realized I had long clung to a simple axiom: say what comes into your head, for this is called honesty. Honesty was good; and if we were honest and therefore good, others would be good, too, and out of this honest conversation a miraculous truth would arise. But here I was, ashamed, alone and full of cheap wine and gazing at an ad for Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, scourge of pimples throughout the five boroughs. It occurred to me for the first time that truth was not the same as impulse.

This recognition was real but initially fleeting. Later my friend ribbed me for what I'd said. When her ribbing irked me, I retorted: "Well, it's true, isn't it? I mean, we all do die alone."

She shook her head and smiled. "Honey," she said, "true has nothing to do with it."

She said this with her usual calm forbearance, but in the turn of an instant I went away from youth. Being young I had needed judgment to make myself distinct; because honesty was the way to judgment, I said whatever came to me, thinking the speed and plenty of my words made them true. I'd confused honesty with expedience.

And the way to the future was illuminated. From now on the task would no longer be separation and difference, no longer the sculpturing of a self to be distinct from other selves. From now on the task would be to find happiness in a crowd.

Lydia Millet is the author of several novels. Her most recent is "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart."



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Having Good References

One of the challenges and great opportunities and even pleasures of having multiple blogs is the variety they offer.

Be sure to check my other blogs from time to time for a variety of good writing on many different subjects.

As the list of links to the right indicate, I have a blog about some of my favorite things and a blog for articles about the rebuilding of New Orleans (my ancestral home) and a blog about gardening issues.

These other blogs are mostly extraordinary articles written about a certain subject, with a brief introduction as to why I am posting it.

All it takes is one "click" to explore these articles.

Enjoy.

Power in New Orleans

The New York Times
November 19, 2005
New Orleans Utility Struggles to Relight a City of Darkness
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 18 - From his temporary headquarters on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency here, Daniel F. Packer, the chief executive of Entergy New Orleans, has a perfect vantage point for viewing the problem confronting his beleaguered utility company: lights twinkling in dozens of neighborhoods, but darkness spread across 40 percent of the city.

Those vast stretches of New Orleans without access to electrical power represent the magnitude of work the utility must perform before the city can recover. Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina, the afflicted areas include not only devastated sections of town like the Lower Ninth Ward but also neighborhoods that suffered relatively little water and wind damage.

To be sure, it is not just a lack of electrical power that is hindering the city's revival. Almost half of New Orleans lacks natural gas for cooking or heating, according to Entergy, even as temperatures here have fallen sharply in recent days, dipping below 40 degrees at night. Toilets in roughly half the homes are still not connected to the city's sewer system, municipal officials say. About a quarter of the city is still without drinkable water, they say, and some isolated patches have no running water at all, a circumstance that could prove disastrous in the event of a fire.

Still, no other ingredient is quite so critical to the recovery as power. And even in areas where the electricity or gas is back on, some customers have to wait for a city inspector's approval before getting it. The city requires such approval of any home or workplace that suffered wind or water damage from the storm, and several members of the City Council acknowledged that an inspector's arrival could take weeks.

"We're trying to get the city up and running so we have a viable tax base," Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell told Entergy officials this week at a meeting of the Council's Utilities Committee.

Under pressure from the Council and residents, Entergy has developed a plan to be providing electricity to at least 80 percent of customers by year's end, and gas services to 80 percent by mid-January.

But the company declines to attach a target date to the restoration of power in areas "too devastated to even make a reliable prediction," Mr. Packer said. That includes parts of the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, two predominantly black areas of the city, and Lakeview, a largely white middle-class community.

In the period immediately after the hurricane, Entergy encountered the ordinary post-storm headaches, like downed power lines and fallen utility poles, and also the extraordinary, including the severe damage that was done to substations when floodwaters covered much of the city. More than half of the utility's 42 substations in the metropolitan area were flooded, Mr. Packer said, along with two of its power plants.

So in the first weeks after the storm, Entergy brought in scores of extra workers to help repair its crippled system and, Mr. Packer said, was soon "ahead of the game." Then, on Sept. 23, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and at that point terminated all its contracts for outside workers.

Entergy had had "all this power available to people living in certain areas," but, with much of the city deserted, "there wasn't anyone here to take it," Mr. Packer said. And because of all the work, "we were burning cash at a time we couldn't afford to."

The utility's repair crew of roughly 200 workers, about evenly divided between electric and gas repairs, also had to contend with the damage the storm had inflicted on the maze of gas pipes that crisscross the city. The water that rushed into those pipes has been one large obstacle confronting Entergy workers as they labor to return gas service; pipes that cracked when buffeted by the floodwaters have been another.

The estimated cost of repairs to the utility's infrastructure is $260 million to $325 million, Mr. Packer said. Insurance will cover a part of that loss, but it remains unclear how much - or how the company will pay for the rest as it struggles to replace lost revenue.

"They're suffering from this double whammy," said Clinton A. Vince, a lawyer with Sullivan & Worcester in Washington who works as a consultant to the City Council's Utilities Committee. "They have these enormous recovery costs, but they don't have the customer base to cover it."

That base has been made all the smaller because many of the customers who would now be receiving power simply have not returned to New Orleans. Only about 30 percent of Entergy's electricity customers are now drawing power. For gas customers, the figure is less than 20 percent.

"To be without 70 percent of your electricity and gas customers more than 80 days after a storm is an unprecedented occurrence in the utility industry," said Curt Hébert, an executive vice president with Entergy New Orleans's parent, the Entergy Corporation, the country's fifth-largest power company.

The Entergy Corporation posted $350 million in profits in the three months ended Sept. 30, a 24 percent increase over the corresponding period last year. But company officials say regulators prohibit them from using money from any of its four other utilities to bail out the fifth. Entergy has granted its New Orleans subsidiary a $200 million line of credit, but the loan must be repaid.

Mr. Packer, the Entergy New Orleans chief executive, has made at least three trips to Washington, one this week, to meet with White House officials and members of Congress. He is in search of a $450 million bailout, for infrastructure repair and the expected amount of revenue loss, that is similar to the relief package requested by the New York power provider Consolidated Edison after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Con Ed asked Washington for $350 million and has so far received $93 million.) Mr. Packer's pleas, and those of the City Council members who have joined him, have elicited sympathy but as yet no dollars.

Without federal relief, Mr. Packer and others say, the utility may have to raise its rates 140 percent.

"We're not asking for anything different from what the folks in Manhattan got after the tragedy of 9/11," Mr. Hébert said.

Mr. Packer also warned that if relief did not come soon, the city might have no choice but to take over the company. That might seem good news for consumers, he said, but the utility would no longer have the buying power it enjoys in the energy market as part of a large conglomerate .

Several weeks ago, Entergy announced that large parts of the city would not have electrical service until mid-2006. The resulting roar of complaints spurred the company to shift strategy. On Thursday, the City Council approved an Entergy plan to use $11.2 million that had been earmarked for other purposes, including $6.8 million in a fund devoted to improving customers' energy efficiency. The extra money will allow the company to more than double the size of its repair crews.

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