Flashback

Two years ago, I really needed a vacation. I'd scheduled two weeks off around Labor Day and everything was in place so I could go. Then this nasty named Katrina popped up on the horizon. By the time I was scheduled to leave, it was pretty certain the vixen wasn't headed to Beaumont and people were pouring in from the east to escape here. My competent crew was helping out with the local agencies and things were in order, so the dog, the cat, and I also headed west for a visit with my mom.

In the days to come, we (Mom and I, the dog and cat weren't particularly into tv) watched transfixed as Katrina came ashore, completed her devastation, and faded into nothingness. Original plans to visit with friends further west were put aside because traffic and gasoline costs were horrendous. The next days were spent almost paralyzed as we watched helplessly while people in New Orleans died, awaited rescue in miserable conditions, were abandoned on 24-hour national tv. One helluva way to spend a vacation.

Then the dog and I returned home. Still wrapped in a sense of the surreal, I went about my business. The cat had stayed at mom's because I had a week-long meeting to attend in a couple of weeks, so there was no sense in disrupting her catly routine twice. As I left Houston for the meeting at the appointed time, Mom had a hissy fit about an almost tropical storm that was off the coast of Florida. Our part of the world had a ridiculous high parked over it, so I wasn't worried and I left.

In a total otherworldly experience, the entire meeting from California became a watching of news reports and wondering what this second nasty named Rita would do. Again I watched helplessly as my friends, family, church members fled in long, unmoving lines while this at one point category 5 virago bore down on my home. In some respects, I've been in a bit of a fog ever since.

Then came Hurricane Dean.

I've been in an even deeper fog since the moment Southeast Texas was in even the outer edge of the cone of probability. My head said he wouldn't come our way. *shrug* My head had said that about Rita. Again I watched helplessly as Dean clobbered Jamaica and Mexico, poor areas devastated and nothing I could do.

I just realized last night that I was completely and truly trapped in a flashback as Felix came so quickly after Dean and roared up to category 5. I think I've been paralyzed for almost two weeks now, functioning more or less at the zombie level, again trapped in the helpless feelings of two years ago.

Then oddball stuff bubbled to the surface. When I do finally get into my home, it won't be the same home I left two years ago. It'll be a much better home. More completely mine, in the sense that my choices will have been imposed on it. Yet so much less mine, because it isn't the house I left two years ago and, somehow, I just want to return to THAT house, not this one. Don't know if that makes any sense, but it's what I'm feeling.

Somehow I think it's time for me to holler for help. I'm fortunate. The resources are there. Now I just have to pick up the phone and do it.