Clifton K. Prince (Carleton '87): I am in Jackson, Mississippi, where I now live and work. I experienced a category 2 or 3 hurricane even this far inland, and the city of Jackson had power outages lasting as long as a week in some neighborhoods, but the city is up and running as normal again. The longer-term change here in Jackson appears in the grocery stores and on the interstate on-ramps, where the signs of a fully doubled population (from 200,000 to 400,000 according to FEMA) are evident. I invite friendly correspondence at cliftonprince@bellsouth.net.

Update: by the end of October, my parents have removed from Hammond and Baton Rouge back to the city of New Orleans. Their neighborhood of Mid-City received water only to street level or just above, so their house is unflooded. Several fences are down, yet even the refrigerator looks to
be salvageable. They are living out of suitcases in the Sheraton on Canal Street, and working out of the Associated Press's newsroom in the "W" Hotel in the French Quarter. I shipped a FedEx package to them there and it arrived overnight with no problems, so some services are becoming reliable again. There are tourists in the Quarter, and residents living and working in Uptown; Fritzels had live music on the weekend of October 15th, so all is not yet lost.

My folks' neighborhood is still officially unopened, and because natural gas service has not yet been restored -- nor will it be for some time -- their house remains without heat or hot water as winter approaches. Nevertheless, their employers may tire of buying top dollar downtown hotel rooms, so future removals seem possible. Mom and dad are in their sixth hotel room since the storm!

We had the chance to visit Lakeview West and Chalmette to see some friends' homes, which will be gutted or simply bulldozed, so we're not complaining one little whit. I remain in Jackson, with business as usual here at University Press of Mississippi. I've learned that I like less stuff more than I like more stuff; that the poor are always with us, and are the measure of our (and our government's) humanity; that the free market should never be applied to services that can never be profitable in the first place; that jazz may live on, but a city's and a community's habits are all too quickly passed on to boring places like Houston and Atlanta; and that MRI's are extremely caloric!