Retail therapy

Shopping in the weeks after Katrina took on a whole new dimension. Before Katrina, a trip to the mall was a mundane experience, blandly punctuated by a soft pretzel or some people watching, culminating in the purchase of something from a sale rack somewhere. After Katrina, a trip to the mall was a pageant of disoriented, displaced, glassy-eyed wanderers. You could tell who they were. In the mall at Lafayette, Louisiana, close to where we had evacuated after the storm, the Katrina evacuees paced up and down the restroom and customer service hallways in the mall; they pooled together in the food court to trade accounts of what they'd heard about this neighborhood or that neighborhood; they squatted against the marble planter and talked anxiously about what to do next. We all seemed to share the same state of mind: addled, hot with cabin fever, and discombobulated. While standing in line for a sandwich at Quizno's, I met someone who worked at the same company I do (I had never met her before), and lived down the street from me. We immediately shared the latest information we knew: Was the street flooded? Any trees down? Have you seen photos?

Little encounters like the one in the Quizno line repeated themselves across southern Louisiana - in restaurants, Wal-Marts, and gas stations. Everyone was so starved for information, and the media was playing the same video loops of rescues off of rooftops. But I kept hearing gratitude - lots of gratitude. After stumbling upon yet another pocket of evacuees in the local Wal-Mart, one woman from Slidell told me that friends of friends had taken her family in. She shook her head and said, "And they didn't even know us."