Things I Lost in Hurricane Katrina

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, I see no point in revisiting the misery of that week for me and my family, for venting outrage over the government response, or weeping over the wound New Orleans suffered. Instead, a  list of a few things I lost in the storm, and miss still.

1. My Gibson Challenger Guitar. Gibson doesn’t make the Challenger any more. It was a starter model, certainly not top quality, but it had excellent action and reliable pickups. It was a gift for my 16th birthday, and I learned most of what I know about music today on it. I left it behind in the trunk of my car, a place safe from the wind, but the water overtopped the car and soaked the guitar, ruining It.
2. All the papers I wrote in college. The residue of four years of college English was a formidable stack of essays about almost every aspect of English literature. Not that most of them were anything to brag about, but it was the only record I had of four years of collegiate thinking.
3. A rocking horse. Belonged to my wife, a toy she played on as a child in Africa. It was plain wooden with painted-on eyes and mane, and it had the words “Made in the U.S.S.R.” stamped under the saddle. My wife has no idea where it came from, or how her parents got it.
4. Patches of Godlight: Fr. Tim’s Favorite Quotes. This Jan Karon book is a notebook of quotes by Father Tim, fictional hero of a series of Christian novels. I have never read the series, but the book was given to me by my grandmother shortly before she died. She had marked the passages she said reminded her of me with paper clips and post-it notes. (Most of the quotes she marked were about literature and the reading life.) I had kept the book in my car, but one month before Katrina I brought it into my house. For safe keeping, I thought.
5. Swingset in the back yard. I bought a kit from Home Depot and built the thing out of pressure treated wood myself, with the help of several family members, over one weekend in 2004. My accomplishments in carpentry in this life have been few. I took more pride in that edifice than it probably deserved.
6. A New Orleans Brass Hockey jersey. Believe it or not, New Orleans used to have a hockey team. Sometime around 2002 the team announced it would be changing jersey styles, for legal reasons I will not get into. I loved the old design and disliked the new, so I bought the old-style jersey before they were gone forever. The jersey survived Katrina and I was able to dig it up from under a layer of muck in my bedroom closet, but it fell to pieces when I tried to clean it.
7. My sheet music collection. After 20 years of guitar lessons and many teachers, I had amassed a collection of handwritten sheet music for hundreds of popular songs. My teachers had transposed the music especially for the guitar. Although it is always possible to buy sheet music, the songs here included guitar riffs and special fingerings that you can never find on music store shelves.
8. My medical school notes. When I finished my last lecture in medical school, I took all my lecture notes and handouts and stacked them up. The stack measured 5 feet, 5 inches tall. In that 5 feet were pages of notes, diagrams, and photocopies that I spent the first two years of med school trying to commit to memory. I have since forgotten a good part of it. Sometimes, though, I have to fight a twitch to go back to my notes to help me remember what they tried to teach me way back when.
9. A ukelele. Bought on our first big family trip to Hawaii. The thing was almost impossible to keep in tune, but once there, had a very pleasing sound. I never really learned how to play it, though.
10. An unopened champagne bottle from our wedding. In our refrigerator, which ended up face down in the kitchen. By the time we re-opened our house, the power had been off for over a month. I wouldn’t have dared try to open the fridge, and shudder to think of what was growing in there. We were saving the bottle for our 10th anniversary, which is this year, by the way. Better that we made it to 10 than the bottle, but I wouldn’t mind having the bottle too.
11. Our baby’s crib. Two kids slept in that crib. It was one of those things couples spend more money on than necessary when they are expecting their first child, thinking they will hand it down to their children when they have children of their own. Silly things newlyweds think.
12. Photos from our San Francisco honeymoon. I have backup copies of my digital photos in so many places I could never lose the entire collection. But we went to San Francisco back when digital cameras still cost over $1000, which is another way of saying I didn’t have one. I brought a Minolta film camera with me, and all the photos and negatives are gone.
13. My white coat from medical school. It was hanging in one of the bedrooms of my house, and the pockets were stuffed with the same notes, pocket-sized reference books, and the reflex hammer I had when I took it off after my last day in medical school. I finished before the days of the smart phone, and thus, in one pocket was a first generation Palm Pilot loaded with a searchable drug program on it that bailed me out of many jams on rounds.
14. A photograph of my grandfather. It hung on the wall in the foyer of the house, and was taken when he was in his twenties, probably around 1935. It was the only picture of him I had that explained why everyone in the family old enough to know said I looked like him.

One thing you learn when you lose everything: how little you really need to get by in life. Then you get a new job, acquire more stuff than ever, and start rooting against natural disasters more than ever before.