The Last Page

Signs and portents abounded that Good Friday in New Orleans as our group of New York City high school students, parents, and teachers rolled in to spend the spring break doing "relief" work. Lawns and green median strips sprouted campaign posters for the upcoming primary. Houses displayed signs for the twenty-two would-be mayors and numerous City Council wannabes. At times, they overwhelmed the lush magnolias, honeysuckle, and azaleas flowering even as the city struggled for new life. That anyone would want to be mayor of a soon-to-be-bankrupt city should have been a sign of hope.

But it was the other signs during this Passover week that reminded us why we were there. Each house searched by rescue crews carried an X with a circle around it. In the triangles were notations: the date of the search, the initials of the crew, and the number of casualties, if any. Most of the time there was a zero, but sometimes a number stood as a memorial.