As I write this, five teenagers downstairs are reading David Sedaris aloud. At least they are reading, right? “I just wanna go back to school,” one of them said. “Me too,” another answered. Hey, me too! My favorite moment this morning was when I went to borrow a rake from my neighbor Steve to finish cleaning the yard, and Sam’s friend Jenny called across the street:  ”Mimi, do you have a hairbrush?” 

I think we may be kind of close to the edge here, even though, compared to Galveston, Houston is paradise, especially today, with the cool front and the clear blue sky. I actually turned off the a/c and am airing out the house, which makes it that much easier to hear all the chainsaws. I personally reached the breaking point early this afternoon when, having commandeered four guys from El Salvador to chop up and stack the huge tree sweet gum branches in the back yard–he who has the chainsaw is king, or at least can charge $150–I spent an hour driving around looking for…cash. I’d gotten $100 before the storm, but by today, I couldn’t come up with $150, and neither could any cash machine within a five to ten mile radius. None of them seem to be on; after all, they run on electricity. With the gas gauge in my Honda dwindling, I finally called Sam, who had returned home from yet another social engagement and who could ask the guys to take a check. They said Si. 

Cell phone service is not very good–most calls don’t go through–and there are a lot of very testy people in gas lines, or lining up with red plastic gas cans to fill up. Many of the stations have cops directing traffic, and I heard a guy complaining on the radio that the police who had left his gas station needed to come back, because people were cutting in line and some of them had guns. Guess this is the dark side of Houston’s entrepreneurial spirit. Lots of  convenience stores are opening without power, selling whatever is on their shelves that didn’t melt or spoil without refrigeration. My neighborhood Kroger also opened with the same deal–they are just selling whatever people want to buy, probably red gas cans. The line of shoppers went way outside the door. Ditto Panda Express, a sure sign that things are really bad. 

You could say we have now progressed from the 19th to the 20th Century. We have no cable, but the old black and white tv works fine–with just four channels. (Of course, we just watch PBS anyway.) Old fashioned telephones worked while portables didn’t when the power was off. People now want their newspapers, because they don’t have tvs. They listen to the radio. (They listen to the tv bands, though, where reporters say things like “You won’t believe what I’m seeing!” and then they don’t describe what they are seeing for the listeners. They might want to review Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. Then again, maybe not.) And, fortunately, businesses are taking checks, though there still aren’t any banks open that I’ve seen in which to cash them.

There are downed saplings all over downtown, peeled up by their roots from below–like an angry diety reached under the grass and scooped them up, even out of some metal grates– and many of the old pines and oaks split and fell at Bayou Bend. There are alot of injured birds, too, some who were hurt in the storm and some who were cut by flying glass downtown. An hour or so ago I saw a dove with a broken wing hopping across my back yard. Maybe I can get him before the cats do.