My hand hurts quite a bit right now. I have been playing video games entirely too much. We got Amplitude again and I have been playing it with a vengeance. I can count the things we lost in the storm on two hands, Amplitude being one of them. We let friends borrow them and they lost everything. So it goes. I got the letter back from our insurance adjuster and the cost of damages is enough to make anyone who suffered any damage sick. We only had $1,200 worth of damage, and that’s only because the adjuster stretched to get us as close to the deducible as possible. I would say the real damage is about three to four hundred less than that. We didn’t meet the deductible. Not even close. How did we become the luckiest damn people on the Coast? We have home, we have money, we have jobs, and we have each other and our animals. What am I going to have to do to repay this karmic debt?
I drove in Pass Christian today to see if anyone was at the library. I hadn’t been too far in before, just enough to get to the temporary library, but no further. I decided to drive down to where the library building is and see what was going on. I had to pass Market Street to get there and I stopped in the middle of the road. Market Street was…well it wasn’t there, nothing but trash and lumber and debris. My favorite restaurant in the entire world (Tigre’s) was on the corner of Market and Second, and I couldn’t tell if it was ever there. It was under the roof of the building behind it. A “Storageville” truck from the storage place across the street was in the middle of where the bar used to be. I could see from Second Street down to where the Pass harbor used to be when old town Pass Christian blocked the view before. I thought at least a structure, a frame, something to show me that there were businesses here, but nothing. Nothing. I hear and use that word entirely too much and it has taken on a completely different meaning. You don’t believe at first when someone tells you there is nothing left of their home, and then you go and see it, and nothing indeed.