A Natural Disaster - Hurricane Katrina I grew up on Wilton Drive in downtown New Orleans. From the living room window in my parents' house, I could see, across the street, the Filmore Apartments; the shape of which always reminded me of the little plastic hotels from the board-game Monopoly. From the time I was five, John and I would ride our bikes-mine was a black Mongoose; his was a chrome Pacifica- to the park around the corner from the Filmore, a small park where John pushed me on the swing and the merry-go-round. That park is where I started playing football when I was seven. John and his friends, who were 14, let me play only because my daddy forced me upon them. Daddy worked at a series of hotels, the last The Embassy Suites in the CBD, the central business district. He was tough on us, in a good way; he always pushed us to go harder and not give up. One time when I was playing basketball with him at the hoop in our front yard, I lost a game to him, and he said, “You’re gonna play me till you beat me; you’re not going inside till you beat me.” Winning took me three more games. I was worn out; it was summer, it was hot, I was sweating. The sun had drained me, but I found enough energy to win. I know my daddy was happy that I hadn’t just given up and walked inside. When Daddy told John to let me play football with him and his friends, John just nodded his head and said OK, but was he happy? Naw. Now 27, John, a department manager at Lowe’s Home Improvement on Elysian Fields, is a graduate of John F. Kennedy High in New Orleans, which no longer exists. The city tore it down after Hurricane Katrina. Both of our parents graduated from Joseph S. Clark, also in the downtown area, where they first met. Both my daddy and my brother played basketball in high school-my mama ran track-but I’m the first football player of the family. I get my inability to quit from my daddy and my speed from my mama. When I got to Warren Easton High in ninth grade, we had no football team because of Hurricane Katrina; enrollment was too low, and the storm had messed up a lot of the equipment. If Katrina hadn’t come, I would probably have gone to John F. Kennedy, following in my brother’s footsteps. I was familiar with that school-I even knew the hallways, because I explored them when I was waiting for John’s basketball games to start. My mama and my daddy and I always attended those games; we were John’s big support system. Before Katrina, I played one year of park football-not at the little park near my house, but one of the multiple Little League parks, this one far from my house in New Orleans East-until I broke my leg when a guy on Bunny Friend tackled me, dove head on at my leg. (Our team was the Joe Brown Spartans; even at nine, I preferred playing running back for the Spartans, not just because of the team name, but because we were better than most of the other teams.) Three weeks after I began eighth grade at Francis W. Gregory Junior High-which is downtown, near the St. Bernard Housing Development (the projects)--Katrina hit. Not just downtown, where we lived two blocks away from the London Avenue levee breech, but everywhere. Two days earlier, my mother came home at 9 from Church’s Chicken where she is the general manager, and said, “Pack your bags; we’re leaving.” She knew the weather was getting bad; I, however, wasn