I am gratified to see that someone else noticed that our dear President did not stoop to mention the Katrina recovery in his recent State of the Union address. A few minutes devoted to former basketball player Dikembe Mutombo, sure. Katrina, nothing.

I guess Mr. Bush figures he has paid his Katrina dues. After all, he spent a day in Louisiana in August. My heavens, what more can a man be expected to do? There is so much brush to be cleared on the ranch in Crawford, and with the press around, he can’t hire illegal immigrants to cut it like he used to.

For those of you reading this from distant parts of America who wonder how this matters to you, consider this: FEMA did a horrible job in the aftermath of the storm, is doing a horrible job now with the recovery, and yet the President has done absolutely nothing to correct these problems and improve disaster preparedness in this country. If you live near a coast, or a fault line, a nuclear power plant, or a volcano, you should be afraid.

I didn’t expect G.W. Bush to say, “We’re sending another $100 billion to New Orleans.” We got money last year. There are a number of things I still think could be addressed with further funding (namely, much better levee construction), but the federal government has committed a substantial amount of money already. But I do expect him to say, “Disaster preparedness is a very important part of our national security. We need to make wholesale changes to FEMA to make certain Katrina never happens again.” He is not doing this. He don’t seem to care. And many people could die very soon because he doesn't.

My understanding is that we are fighting the Iraqi war because 9/11 happened. If we accept this argument, then this implies that it is proper for the U.S. government to spend hundreds of billions to protect its citizens from harm. Disaster preparedness is certainly an important part of national security too, and a person would have to be a fool to continue, even after Katrina, to aggressively pursue anti-terrorism to the near-exclusion of disaster preparedness.

I live in a small town in Mississippi. The chances that my town will ever be a terrorist target is almost nil. The chances that I could lose my home in a flood or tornado or hurricane is much higher. So why is all my tax money going to support the war against terrorism, and nothing to disaster preparedness?

Katrina was a mess. But I’ll admit it; people can screw up. I have seen many terrible screw-ups, and been the author of a few myself. What counts most is not the screw-up, but what you do after the screw-up to make sure it never happens again. I’ll leave it to the reader. Do you think the government has taken enough steps to make sure that Katrina never happens again, to us Gulf Coasters or to anybody else? If you think it has, go back and read the State of the Union address and show me where you are finding evidence for this belief.

In the Roman Catholic calendar, the feast of St. Stephen is the day after Christmas. The day after Christmas is also the best way to describe the mood in New Orleans these days. Last week was a breathless run up to the NFC Championship game (yes, this is a sports essay, not a religious one, though in this part of the South it could be argued that the two are the same). The Saints versus the Chicago Bears for a berth in the Super Bowl. References to the Saints were everywhere, in every television commercial and every newspaper ad. Storefronts festooned with Saints signs and decorations. Houses with team flags on their porches, and every car with a bumper sticker or sign in the window. Even restaurants were adding Saints-inspired items to their menus.

Now it is all over, after a 39-14 beating at the hands of the Bears, and it feels like the day after Christmas. All the presents are opened, the parties are over, family and friends have left and it is time to go back to work. And intensifying the depression is the thought that such fun will not come around for another year. It is an adrenaline withdrawal, a hangover, a time when Saints fans around the city are packing away their jerseys and fleur-de-lis sweatshirts and taking the Saints flag off the porch like so much Christmas paraphernalia. All that remains is the consolation that there will be next year.

This consolation, though, wears better in this town than in most others. After Katrina, there was real reason to wonder if there would ever again be a next year. Not just for the Saints, but for the entire city.

There is something unnatural about affection for sports teams. It seems like wasted love, to pour out all one’s emotions upon a group of professionals paid millions to knock the living hell out of each other. There is no reason necessarily to think that the powers of an athlete reflect in any way the virtue of a city. Yet many people do think that, and the thought is one of the oldest themes in Western literature. Achilles, the star of Homer's Illiad and still the greatest war hero of all, probably never existed, but remains the Hellenistic champion for all time. Every time I watch a Greek compete in the Olympics I think to myself, this man wants to be Achilles. He is Achilles. That Homeric glory never, ever, goes away.

The city of New Orleans wanted the Saints players to be their Achilleses (what’s the pleural of Achilles?) because it has had no champion as of late. Although there were many individual heroes lurking in the folds of the Katrina story, there was no overarching hero, no gallant leader that spoke to the heart of great suffering. After city, state, and federal leaders earned firm Fs for their performances after the storm, they have since gathered themselves together, shaken off the mud and grime of failure and risen to a solid D+.

(A friend of mine in college maintained that a D+ is the worst possible grade. You can earn an F, he said, with no effort whatsoever, but a D+ means you tried and still failed miserably. I think I agree with him.)

Then, after a year, along came the Saints with an A effort. An A effort that eventually translated into an A performance. New Orleans was not just happy about the football. It was happy the someone around here showed that excellence is still possible. Hopefully someone else is taking notes.

A few weeks ago another one of those educational rankings came out. Louisiana and Mississippi were both ranked 49^th and 50^th, or 47^th and 49^th, or 46^th and 49^th, or something like that. I can’t remember, and really don’t much care. That is about where our students stand in achievement tests every year. I will not draw out a long proof here, but will stipulate what should be painfully obvious – our lousy educational system has a whole lot to do with the problems New Orleans has. It is probably more responsible for Katrina than Katrina, if you get what I mean.

As usual, people came forward and blamed the problem on not enough money for public schools. Louisiana spends roughly $7,500 a year per public school student, which is not California money but not chump change either. By expenditure per student, Louisiana ranks 34^th among states, not great but not all that bad either. (Mississippi pays about $5000 per student, putting it in the bottom 10.) This may seem a little arrogant to say, but if I had 30 children in a room each paying me $7500 to teach them, I think I could make some progress. That would be $225,000. You can do a lot with that kind of money. Not everything, but a lot.

I was educated in Louisiana. When I went to college in Virginia, my grades suffered not because I was unprepared but because I was over-prepared. The work was easier than I was used to and I quit studying. I took my first semester Chemistry final exam without opening the textbook, and, though I regretted doing that while I was taking the test, I still got out of the course with a B. It is possible to live in Louisiana and learn something.

The reason I learned in Louisiana when most kids didn’t was because I and my parents expected me to learn. Not learning was unacceptable. To be fair, I had a better social situation than many and my parents sent me to private schools. But my parents were not rich. They paid for my education because what the public schools offered was not acceptable. I was not well-educated because we were rich. I was well-educated because that was our family’s goal.

Children in Louisiana and Mississippi could have better schooling if their parents simply demanded it. The answer to “We need more money for schools” should be “Do better or you will lose the little that you have.” It is amazing how much better service you can get when you refuse to accept what is offered the first time around. “Not good enough” should be one of the most common phrases uttered by a good citizen to the government. Not enough money is never, and I mean never, an excuse for incompetence. If you accept the job you must live up to its demands, underpaid or not. A person who does sloppy work for $10 certainly isn't likely to find his competence just because $100 is now on the table.

Which leads us back to the Saints. The funk this city is in now has beneath it a foundation of trust. Saints fans asked for better, and better is what they got. Much, much better. New Orleanians, as much as theyare disappointed about not going to the Super Bowl, appreciate what they got. All of the Saints home games next year are sold out already, and thousands have signed up on a waiting list.

It is hard to tell which happened first: Did the fans raise their expectations and the Saints feed off of it, or did the Saints start playing better and the fans respond? With positive feedback cycles like this, it is often hard to tell where the upward spiral started. It doesn’t matter, really. What matters is that once trust is established between two groups, both sides invest more and more emotion and energy.

Right now in the educational system around here, and in politics, the opposite is occurring. Leaders don’t lead because they do not think citizens will step up and make the sacrifices necessary to bring about success. Citizens do not respond to leadership because, well, they have a functioning memory.

Making progress means one side, either the political leaders or the citizens, needs to start doing more and expecting a whole lot more from the other side. Since the political leadership is, in my opinion, a bunch of nitwits, my hope lies with the citizens. New Orleans has always had citizens who, while eccentric and altogether too resistant to change, are nonetheless vibrant and very concerned about their unique culture. Perhaps they will demand more, and get it.

But that still does not take away the St. Stephen funk. Though New Orleans may feel this week is like the Feast of St. Stephen, we will hope it does not go too far in imitating the ancient saint. St. Stephen, you see, proclaimed the Gospel Truth to the religious elders at the Jerusalem Temple, and was stoned to death for it.

The week before last, we had a spell of warm, springlike weather. The thermometer rose to a near-balmy 75 degrees F, and fooled the camellia trees in our front yard into thinking it was Spring. Two of them suddenly exploded in pink and white, beautiful in themselves, but even more beautiful still against the brown grass and bare oaks nearby.

 A few days later the temperature was down in the thirties again, but the flowers fight on against the cold. One at at time they surrender, and our driveway is now carpeted with petals. If royalty or saint came to call on us they could find no more perfect path to walk on than this.

 McComb is drenched in colors like this each spring. Now I know that northerners take great pride in the annual autumn colors, and I have seen the change as it sweeps across the Shenendoah valley many times, but in my humble opinion it does not compare to this. Whole neighborhoods adorned with millions of flowers like silent prayers.

These two trees reminded me of what is to come. Spring is very nearby here -- mid-March at the latest -- and it is a time when it is very much worth it to be a small observer in a quiet corner of Mississippi.

It was a little further down the country road than Marvin had expected. The receptionist he had spoken to on the phone told him to get off the interstate, turn west, and keep going. Really it wasn't too far, she had told him, but it might feel like it was. It was not the place one would expect to find a doctor's office. The office was there for tax reasons, the receptions had sunnily explained when he asked why it was in the middle of nowhere. It was just over the county line, where the property taxes were lower.

His car flew around one curve, then another. Finally he saw it, off to the left. He pulled his old Mercury around a turn and into the asphalt parking lot. Off to one side was a manmade pond. He wondered if anyone stocked it with fish. Maybe the doctors cast their lines in it between patients, or when business was slow.

He came in, wrote his name on a sheet, filled out a lot of papers, and eventually made his way to the back. As the nurse led him to the examination room, he balanced a little fib on the tip of his tongue. He had determined long ago that he was going to lie. He had lied already on the phone when he gave his reason for the doctor's visit, and there was no reason to change course now. So when the nurse directed him to a seat and took his temperature and blood pressure, he went ahead and lied.

She had two fingers on the artery in his wrist, and was silently counting out the pulses. "I'm here for a cold," he said, without provocation. He considered faking a cough, but he was no actor, and anyway, he doubted he owed her that much. So he let it stand. She wrote his complaint down on the top of an examination sheet.

The door closed and stayed closed for longer than he would have liked. He heard voices on the other side, a woman talking, then a man, then a different woman. He thought he even heard a dog bark. Maybe not. After awhile a knock, then the door swung open, and the doctor strode in. He wondered why the doctor felt compelled to knock. It was his house. Marvin never knocked on the doors of any of the rooms in his own house.

The doctor smiled a perceptible bit, then sat on a rolling stool on the other side of the room. He seemed a little far away for a  medical conversation, but considering what Marvin had to say, maybe farther was better.

"What's the problem? You have a cold?" the doctor asked. He hadn't even looked up from the chart yet.

"No, doc, that's not it," Marvin started out. "I have, well, you know, problems."

"What kind of problems?"

"Oh, you know, man problems. I can't, like, be with my girlfriend. You know what I mean?"

The doctor looked up from his papers at last. "Yes, I think I do," he said. "You are having sexual dysfunction?"

"Yeah, that's it," Marvin said.

The doctor then preceded to ask Marvin a series of excruciating questions. How often, he asked. How long? At first Marvin was offended by that question, but then he realized the doctor meant how long had the problem been going on. Has it ever happened before? Do you wake up aroused in the morning or in the middle of the night? He answered each question, and after awhile he began to wonder if the doctor enjoyed torturing him.

"Doctors can probably always get it up," he thought. "And even if they can't, they just reach into their supply cabinets and pull out handfuls of those magic blue pills that make every flaccid chump a porn stud. Is he a porn stud? Dammit he doesn't look like a porn stud. But man, they got pills for everything these days and God knows what you can do if you know how to use every single one. Every single one! This guy knows how every pill in the drug store works. He knows which ones will give you the ability to stay up five days straight, and which ones will allow you to please your woman five nights straight."

As he thought these thoughts, Marvin's mouth was telling his story. He had this girlfriend. He had never been with her before, not in six months of dating. He met her at church, which was the reason he waited so long to make a move, but he didn't tell the doctor that part. Finally things got intimate one night and their clothes were in a heap on the floor and then nothing happened. It started to happen -- at first he was busting out -- but then everything stopped. In midair.

The doctor listened for awhile, nodding his head as if he cared, though he may not have. Who can tell. Marvin didn't look at him too often. As he answered the tough questions he would gaze at a plastic model of the human spine that sat on the windowsill behind the doctor. That plastic spine was worn down around the edges from a lot of handling. Probably this doctor saw a lot of patients with back pain. Then he wondered what other kinds of models this doctor had. Any for his problem?

Finally the doctor asked his last question and went to the physical exam. He checked Marvin all over, including the area of concern. While the doctor was examining him, he asked general questions that made no sense, such as where did he work and how many cigarettes did he smoke. Then the exam was over. Marvin sat up on the exam table, and the doctor returned to his rolling stool.

It was time for the doctor to talk. The doctor told him there was a pill he could prescribe that would possibly cure the problem. He needed to take the pill about an hour before sex.

"Yeah, yeah, doc," Marvin thought. "I've seen the commercials. Why is this taking so long? Can't you just write the prescription so I can get out of here? I have good insurance. You'll get paid either way. Just give me the pill."

But no, he was still going on! "This kind of problem," he was saying, "can be the symptom of a medical problem. I can give you the pill, but it will cover up the problem, not solve it. We need to find out what is wrong. You could have diabetes, high blood pressure, a nerve problem, a circulation problem, or a hormone problem. I want to find out, and I am sure you want to find out too."

"Sure, sure, doc. I definitely want to know what is wrong. But I am getting the pill, right?"

"Yes, yes, you will get the pill. Anyway, I will order you a set of tests. Nothing more than blood work. But it will tell us a lot -- it will tell us if you have anything to worry about. I cannot find anything wrong with you on my exam, so that is encouraging. But let's do the tests."

"No problem. Whatever you want."

"Okay. I'll write up your medicine and get the nurse. She will draw your blood." And with that the doctor was gone.

Marvin sat in the room for a few minutes. It would be a good idea to find out what is wrong. The pill will help. But there is nothing wrong with a blood test. Nope, nothing wrong.

He looked at his watch. Three o'clock! He had been here two hours. How long would this blood work take? Maybe he could come back another time. But there was no way Marvin was leaving without that prescription. He had a date with Alice tonight, and he wasn't going through that humiliation again. No way. He was healthy. If you are sick, shouldn't you be able to tell? His mom had diabetes, and she felt bad whenever her sugar was too high or too low. He felt great. He couldn't have diabetes. High blood pressure? Nah. He never had headaches or dizziness. Hormones? He had plenty of hair on his chest.

The nurse came in with his chart and his prescription. She handed him the prescription. It was what he had hoped for: that magic pill on the TV commercials. This was going to be great. He would have Alice in ecstasy until dawn. Perfect. He couldn't wait to get to the pharmacy.

The nurse said, "Wait here. The doctor wants to get some blood work. It will only take a few minutes. I'll go get the things I need and be right back."

Marvin looked at his watch again. Three-fifteen. It was too late. Didn't the pharmacy close at six? Anyway, he had somewhere to go. He couldn't think of where that was, but he was certain he had somewhere to go. He got up from the seat in the exam room and looked out the door. The hall was empty. Neither doctor nor nurse in sight.

He decided to make a run for it. Stepping quickly down the hall, he turned and went through the door to the waiting room. Without stopping at the front desk, he headed straight out the door, bounding like a deer across a clearing.

"They already have my insurance number," he said to himself. "They'll get paid."

His car wheels threw off rocks from the asphalt as he escaped from the parking lot. It occurred to him as he sped down the leafy road that if the pills worked he would need more. Since he bolted from the office without getting the test, he doubted this doctor would ever write him another prescription.

"Well, that's all right," he said. "I'm gonna be a porn stud tonight."

This weekend past I took my daughter to see the movie "Charlotte's Web." I thought the film was quite good, and very faithful to the original book. It was, as Hollywood productions tend to be, a bit too sentimental -- more so than the book, but that is not the worst thing in the world. Any film made in the U.S. is bound to go for the tear ducts. It is in our cultural makeup: The mere sight of a flag snapping in the breeze or a grieving family placing flowers on a tombstone is all it takes to render the average Yank misty-eyed.

My movie review ends here. The film was fine; go watch it. It was worth the $7.50. The reason I mention "Charlotte's Web," and the reason I was unlikely to miss it (aside from the fact that my daughter had been begging me to take her for the past three weeks) was that I am an unqualified admirer of the book's author, E.B. White.

Charlotte's Web is by far E.B. White's most famous book, though some readers may also recognize the title Stuart Little, as well as the well-known writing guidebook, The Elements of Style, which White wrote with his mentor, William Strunk. I did not read Charlotte's Web as a child. I think I skipped it because its protagonist was a little girl, and as a little boy, I preferred books about boys. I also only had a passing interest in children's books. For some reason, when I turned eleven I decided to jump directly into adult literature, beginning with Hawthorne and Twain and then moving on to a lengthy romance with the Greek myths. So I missed a joyful stage of reading, missed Charlotte's Web and Peter Pan and The Jungle Book and Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland. It was a mistake. Sometimes you get too smart and grow up too fast, and miss some very fine things. Come to think of it, not missing the finer things of childhood is one of the things Charlotte's Web is about.

I aged into my thirties oblivious of my loss, until one day after a first-year medical school lecture, as I was packing away my notebooks, I noticed a friend of mine handling a red hardback volume. I asked him what he was reading. It was Essays of E.B. White. Eventually I talked him into lending it to me, and I found the writer of my admiration.

E.B. White was primarily an essayist, working for New Yorker magazine from 1929 until his retirement in 1976. From the very beginning White gripped me with his sharp, clear style. His writing is very accessible, and peppered with humor and wisdom. One of the entries in that book Essays, "Farewell, My Lovely," is a reminiscence of the vagaries of the Ford Model T. It is, in my humble opinion, the best short essay I have ever read. The literary greats -- Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky -- always seemed  unattainable to me, but somehow the crisp, friendly language of White was so close that I dared to want to be like him. I have always thought that if I could trade another writer's talent for my own, I would take E.B. White's. He may not be the all-time best, but he is dearest to me. His style is the one I would have as my own.

After I filled myself with that first book, I read another, One Man's Meat, and then a few other essays. Eventually I alighted upon Charlotte's Web. It is rightfully a cherished and remembered book, one of the few American children's stories that stacks up against Kipling, or Alice in Wonderland. The story, if you do not know it, is about an ingenious spider named Charlotte that saves the life of Wilbur, a pig otherwise destined for the slaughterhouse, by spinning clever sayings about him into her spider webs. The webs are seen by the humans in the story as a miracle, and as a result the farmer that intended to turn him into Christmas bacon relents and keeps him on as an eternal family pet.

Like all excellent children's stories, there is much in it for the adult to appreciate. The process in which Wilbur is saved is, in a vague way, a meditation on the inevitability and cyclical nature of life and death. The spider Charlotte dies after saving Wilbur. This is an interesting contrast: Wilbur is saved from death but his savior dies as a matter of natural course. White does not say much about this incongruous fact. I think this is because (1) trying to resolve it would just ruin the plot with excessive philosophizing, and (2) there is really nothing to resolve. People die when it is their time. Charlotte's time had come, Wilbur's had not, and that's that.

Since I was already christened a doctor by the time I read Charlotte's Web, the part I responded most strongly to was when Mrs. Arable, the mother of the little girl who owns Wilbur, pays a visit to her family doctor. Although the particulars are different, the conversation they had sometime echoes in my ears when I talk with with real patients. The doctor is a very wise soul, and has thoughtful things to say about impossibilities.

    "Have you heard about the words that appeared in the spider's web?" asked Mrs. Arable nervously.
    "Yes," replied the doctor.
    "Well, do you understand it?" asked Mrs. Arable.
    "Understand what?"
    "Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider's web?"
    "Oh, no," said Dr. Dorian. "I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody's pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."

Ah, now that is the doctor I want to be. The conversation goes on, and Dr. Dorian closes with a statement that should be engraved in gold in in the lobby of every medical school on earth.

 

        "I suppose so," said Mrs. Arable. "I never looked at it that way before. Still, I don't understand how those words got into the web. I don't understand it, and I don't like what I can't understand."
       "None of us do," said Dr. Dorian, smiling. "I'm a doctor. Doctors are supposed to understand everything. But I don't understand everything, and I don't intend to let it worry me."

Amen. Not every question has an answer to it. Sometimes we induce way to much misery in ourselves trying to find one.

In both the movie and the book, Charlotte's Web closes with one of E.B. White's finest paragraphs, a short epitaph of high praise for the spider, Charlotte. But all of us White fans also feel the words aptly apply to the author himself.

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.