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A month after Hurricane Katrina,I returned home in New Orleans.There lay my house,reduced to waist-high rains,smelly and dirty.Before the trip,I’d had my car fixed.When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill.she noticed my Louisiana license plate.“You from New Orleans?”she asked.I said l was,
“No charge.”She said,and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet.The next day I went for a haircut,and the same thing happened.
As my wife was studying in Florid,we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage(抵押贷款)on our ruined house.We looked at many places,but none was satisfactory.We’d begun to accept that we’d have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while,when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kennedy in California.He’d read some pieces I’d written about our sufferings forState,an online
magazine and wanted to give us(“noconditions attached”)a new house across the lake from New Orleans.It sounded too good to be true,but I replied,thanking him for his exceptional generosity,that we had no plans to go back.Then a poet of the University of Florida offered to let his house to me while he went to England on his one-year-paid leave.The rent was rather reasonable.Imentioned the poet’s offer to James Kennedy,and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months.
Throughout this painful experience,the kindness of strangers backs my faith in humanity.It’s almostworthlosing you worldly possessions to be reminded that people really want to be kind when given a channel.