We dodged a bullet. For a while it looked like Rita was coming our way.

I wish I had tried to contact Anson beforehand. I don't know where he was. I sure hope he was home, and not in the Gulf or Indonesia or somewhere like that. I'm sure there were people in from Houston who were halfway around the world drilling for oil while their families were left alone to face Rita. It's tragic for the towns that Rita did hit, but I am glad that it did not hit one of the bigger cities where so many more people would have been affected.

That's not a reassuring way of looking at things really. I remember talking to Gus on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. To me, death and destruction on that scale is horrible, without any redeeming factor. And then Gus said that the bombing saved his life...he was a prisoner in a Japanese camp in Indonesia, and was scheduled to be shipped off the next day to a forced labour camp...a mine, I can't recall the name...that was simply a black hole, a place where no one survived. It gives you perspective. Rita not hitting Galveston and Houston means ruined lives elsewhere.