[Things Are Changing]

Things are changing around here. A lot of things. This morning, my wife and I drove over to CC's Coffee on Highland, a block up from the gates into LSU. We wanted out of the house, where it seems we have no choice but to let the TV run all day long, informing us again and again of how much hell has broken loose seventy-five miles down I-10.

We climbed out of the car, and saw overhead yet another formation of Blackhawk helicopters, this group headed away from campus, back to the rescue ops in New Orleans. We're in the flight path to the triage headquarters for the relief effort, the Pete Maravich center—called the "P-Mac" around here—less than a mile from our home. The thick hack of heavy sound helicopters give off, whether those Blackhawks or the bright orange Coast Guard ones or even the smaller ones with television call letters plastered on the side, has already grown routine, and we no longer run out of the house to see how close to the treetops they are as they move in or out of campus.

On the walls in the coffee shop—a store not at all unlike a Starbucks, but with better coffee and better pastries—were the ubiquitous black and white photographs of New Orleans you see on the walls of restaurants everywhere in Louisiana: the street band portrait, the jubilant funeral marchers led by a man in a tuxedo and holding an umbrella, the wrought-iron balconies laced with afternoon light. And I thought: Will we ever see any of all that again?

Trivial things have changed, too, in addition to the possible loss of cultural panache caused by a hurricane and the breech of a levee. There's the added layer of nightsound my neighbor's generator makes, the machine giving out a steady thrum pitched something like a lawn mower doing its job, and because lawns eventually get mowed, the sound begs and begs to end, but it doesn't. I'm worried that sound may never end, and wondering at the same time what to do with the vague guilt I feel at the fact I have electricity and he doesn't, though he lives across the street.

Even the mundane chores of a day have changed. Today, instead of doing our own laundry here at home, we're doing that of some of the refugees housed in our church, so that they might at least feel cleaner while their futures remain unknown. And tonight there will be new people in our home, here for we are not sure how long: my wife's best friend's husband's sister's in-laws are without a home, and we have the room.

Then there are the bigger changes, such as that heralded by the email memo from the chancellor of LSU that I and everyone at the university received today, a memo that begins, "There have been confirmed reports of civil unrest in the Baton Rouge area this morning." Then, a little farther down the screen, after words about how important safety on campus is and how confident the chancellor is in our security personnel, there's this: "For those on campus who would feel more secure in their homes, we urge that you leave campus in an orderly fashion. Please be aware that these incidents of unrest in the community make travel an unknown risk at this time."

Now that's a memo you don't see every day.

And there is the impending change to the entire fabric that is Baton Rouge itself. Early yesterday, while our dogs performed their morning rituals in their respective yards, my neighbor from across the street—the neighbor, yes, with the generator—said rather ruefully, "A year from now, the population of Baton Rouge will be 100,000 more than it is right now. Imagine that," he said, and shook his head. "They'll be coming here, and they won't leave. There won't be anything to go back to."

I tried to imagine what that great a...