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At age 95, Laura Patti Kincannon Morgan spends most of her day napping in her room at Traceway Retirement Community in Tupelo, where she and I and Elvis Presley were born. She still has a bit of her sense of humor and likes some small talk, but, aside from "Wheel of Fortune" each evening, she has snuggled into a cocoon safe from the wider world.
I called her the day after Katrina rolled through Tupelo, her winds by then just a mean tropical storm.
"Heard you had a bad storm last night." In fact, I had heard a dining room window blew out.
"Well, I hadn't heard anything about it," Mother said in her genteel drawl. Then allowed, "They may have."
She was looking forward to my arrival Labor Day weekend. It's a drive I've made about three times a year since 1976, when my father died. The visits have given a rhythm to my life, especially since the journey has become as predictable as the five days with Mother in Room 222 of the Mitchell Center, the assisted-living building.
I-75 to I-10 to U.S. 231 to U.S. 65 to U.S. 78 to Tupelo. Past the sickly welcoming palm planted too far north at the Florida state line. Past the Sikes and Kohn Outlet Mall near Troy, Ala. Past the billboard on the road to Birmingham that reads, "Go to church or the devil will get you."
Then, it's mornings with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 10 to noon, while Mother naps. Lunch in the dining room with Mrs. Rye and Mrs. Marecle. Nap from 1 to 3. Supper at 5. "Wheel of Fortune" at 6:30.
Mother likes the predictability. In her heyday, she spent considerable energy worrying about me and my older brother, Jim, especially if we were on the road. She was terribly afraid of cars but learned to drive in her 50s. She grew to like stoplights because they gave her a chance to rest.
So, had she known how Katrina had changed the landscape -- both physically and figuratively -- she would have been torn between wanting to see me and wanting me to stay safe.
"Someone might knock you in the head," she would say.
And she'd be completely panicked by my side trip to see Cousin Augusta Day in Jackson, Miss., where gas had virtually dried up.
Being a world-class worrier myself, I did not let my fuel gauge drop below the three-quarter mark from Tampa to Montgomery, Ala., where I turned west toward Mississippi. (My usual route, Interstate 10 to Gulfport, was closed.) My Saturn could get 350 miles a tank, I figured, which would get me to Jackson and then back to Alabama for fuel, if necessary, before heading north to Tupelo. To make sure, I slowed to 62 mph, turned off the air conditioning and opened my windows to a blistering day.
Katrina's tracks became evident as soon as I crossed the Mississippi line. The wind had peeled away parts of road signs, rendering them gibberish. The Mississippi welcome station, where honey-accented greeters normally pour on the Southern hospitality, was shut down. "Restrooms closed" declared a spray-painted sign at the entrance.
All along the route, plastic bags over gas pump handles told motorists to keep looking. But at a station near Meridian, just inside Mississippi, long lines had formed. Save Rite was one of the first stations to get electricity restored.
Manager Gene Egloff, in white shirt and tie, smoothed the crush by arranging a one-way traffic flow through his pumps.
"We've got a great crowd," he said. "Everybody understands we've got them going the same way. It's just hot and slow, but no problems -- everybody's wonderful."
It was a day to measure luck in the smallest increments, and each little bit was a cause for celebration. Like when Caboris Jones discovered his gas cap was on the passenger side of his Chevrolet Corsica, a ticket to the short line.
Along the 80-mile stretch to Jackson, towering pines lay in heaps. Thick oaks were snapped in two. Katrina was still a hurricane when it hit the capital city of 184,000 about 180 miles north of New Orleans.
"In our neighborhood, there wasn't a road that didn't have a tree across it," said my cousin Ann Becker, Augusta's daughter. "Every street had trees down. Every house, every yard had a tree down."
Ann staked up a fallen crape myrtle in her yard. She believes it will survive.
She had filled up her gas tank the night before Katrina and graciously volunteered to drive me around some of the old neighborhoods, including hers. As she'd promised, the fallen giants were everywhere. Dead power lines draped bushes and tree limbs like bunting. Squads of power trucks from other states were putting them back together. Ann was surprised to see them so soon and asked a crew chief why they weren't on the coast.
"They realize there's no point going to the coast," she relayed; "there's nothing there to repair."
While Jackson escaped the devastation farther south, it was not without its own tragedies. At a stately home in Ann's neighborhood, an oak had crashed through the upper floor, crushing an elderly woman.
Neighbors called 911, "and the ambulance never came," Ann said. "They took her to the hospital themselves."
The woman died.
But there was humor here, too. Augusta joked that the new status symbol in Jackson was the generator. She recalled an exchange between another cousin and a neighbor.
Neighbor: My new generator is a real gas guzzler.
Cousin: Mine's old and secondhand but it hardly uses a bit of gasoline. Mine's a Coleman.
Neighbor: Well, does it have wheels? Mine has wheels.
My cousins were thankful for their minor worries when, just 2 1/2 hours away, corpses were bloating in fetid water and desperate citizens had turned barbaric.
But Ann fears Jackson may yet have darker days. She sees a bleak business year ahead and, as executive editor of a city magazine, worries about advertisers.
"How do you sell advertising to people who, they're sitting there probably thinking, 'Am I even going to be in business by the end of the year?' "
Word was out that gas was available in Vaiden, 80 miles north of Jackson. Windows down, air-conditioning off, I drove slowly north. Another 100 miles and I was back in Tupelo.
In 1936, a tornado leveled Tupelo, killing nearly 300 people. It was the city's worst calamity. Katrina, meanwhile, knocked out power to only about 15 percent of residents, and crews had it restored within 24 hours. The 100-year-old oak behind Calvary Baptist Church had fallen.
Elvis' birthplace in East Tupelo didn't lose a shingle. Tour guide Judy Schumpert said she fielded a post-storm call from a worried fan in Oklahoma.
"Is that little house still standing?" the caller asked. "Oh, thank goodness. I was going to bring my mother, and I was afraid it had blown away."
Tupelo Hardware, where Elvis' mom bought him his first guitar, was likewise intact, along with the rest of downtown.
This time, it seemed, Tupelo would serve as a place of refuge. About 100 coastal evacuees moved into the BancorpSouth Center, a concert hall downtown, and city volunteers were feeding another 200 to 300 a day. These were people who'd been placed in motels and other quarters around town. Thirty-three evacuees, residents of an assisted-living center in Biloxi, were bused to Traceway.
After five days, Edward H. Nettleton, 95, was ready to go home. He missed his 67-year-old daughter, "my lifeline." It took her a day to reach him by telephone and assure him all was well with the family.
"I was worried, I don't mind saying, because I didn't know if my grandchildren were safe yet," Nettleton said.
Much as he was ready to leave, Mr. Nettleton was an especially welcome guest at Mitchell Center -- he could play the piano in the dining room. He entertained residents with well-loved old favorites like "Stardust" and "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."
Mother, happy to see me, hadn't been worried at all. I joked with her about not paying attention to the news.
"I don't know anything unless someone comes in here and tells me," she said with a smile.
On Saturday night, we settled in to watch some TV. After "Wheel of Fortune," I flipped to a special report on the Katrina aftermath. The TV showed flooded neighborhoods, floating bodies and trapped residents crying for help.
"Where IS that?" Mother asked.
"New Orleans," I said.
She watched on in silence with troubled blue eyes.