One of our newspaper columnists was absent for a number of weeks. I didn’t know what had happened. One day this week the column reappeared and he admitted he’d taken his family away on an extended vacation. We wanted to go someplace normal, he said, somewhere you could go a whole day through and not once hear the word “Katrina.”

We all know the feeling. Consider the following and see if we make our point.

The front page of Friday’s Times-Picayune was made up of these lengthy articles:

1) “Road Home gap hits $5 billion.” This federal program of providing up to $150,000 to each homeowner whose residence suffered extensive damage from Katrina or her floodwaters has been known to be seriously underfunded, but the amount keeps escalating. Now they’re saying we will need an additional $5 billion, a staggering amount. And while the governor and state leaders have been crying for Washington to make up the difference, leaders in our nation’s capital have pointed the finger southward, suggesting that since Louisiana is projecting a budget surplus, we ought to come up with much of the money ourselves. The front page article suggests state legislators working on the 2008 budget are feeling the pressure to do just that.

2) “State rejects 5-year storm model.” A California company called Risk Management Solutions, Inc. comes up with projected costs of damages and insurance rates in hurricane-prone states for a five year period. In this case, the rate of increase in the dollar cost of damages and insurance is so alarming that the state of Florida has rejected the RMS projections and Louisiana is following suit. These were guidelines to have been used by the state insurance commissioners’ offices in making projections about rates, etc.

3) “June 1.” Yep, that’s the big bold headline. Underneath are these: “It’s hurricane season: Six months of bracing for the worst while hoping for the best.” “Corps chief promises 100-year protection.” I’ll spare you the details.

4) “Katrina death rates murky.” Recently Mayor Ray Nagin said “people are dying” in the city because the health care system is broken. However, a state health officer has disputed that, saying the death rate for New Orleans residents is roughly the same as before Katrina. In Nagin’s “State of the City” message Wednesday, he said the death rate had escalated by 47 percent. That number was drawn from the city health officer’s analysis of newspaper obituaries. It turns out the “authorities,” if you want to call them that, are analyzing entirely different evidence. The state guy takes into consideration only death certificates, which are issued only when someone dies in this area. However, the local guy considers people who died outside this area and whose bodies are brought back for burial. They should count, too, he pointed out, even if they were too weak to move back to New Orleans and died elsewhere.

5) “3-D scan keeps tabs as storm’s intensity shifts.” The National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Naval Research Laboratory are taking the images from Doppler radars already in place at various sites along the Gulf coast and feeding them into their computer in order to turn into 3-D pictures. By getting the image of a hurricane in three dimensions, things not obvious before are visible. For instance, it turns out that at the time Katrina slammed ashore in 2005, it actually had two separate eyewalls. The first, wider and slightly weaker, went ashore across Louisiana-Mississippi-and-Alabama. The second ring was compact and featured more intense winds, and followed the first center over eastern Louisiana and western Mississippi. This explains, we’re told, why such intense damage reached well out from the center of the storm.

6) and 7) have to do with a local federal judge returning to the bench after a criminal investigation and the passing of the threat of indictment, and a mini-scandal caused by the state’s liberal tax credits given to Hollywood people who come to Louisiana to make movies. Some people have figured out ways to take advantage of that system–who would have expected that?–and a grand jury is looking into it.

So, five of the seven front-page things are about hurricanes and Katrina. And it’s that way almost all the time. It’s coming out our ears!

We completely understand columnist Chris Rose’s wanting a respite from the constant barrage of such news. Everyone down here is so saturated with it, we probably turn a deaf ear to much of it.

For instance, in the same Friday edition, the front page of the Living section focuses on the stress of living in this hurricane-prone city with the ongoing issues of our recovery as well as preparation for possible future storms. Locals who glance at it and move on will miss reading about Tana Barth, a local veterinary technician–whatever that means–who in her preparation for the next hurricane went out and bought herself a school bus.

The last hurricane–that would be Katrina–she chose to stay, she says, because of all the pets she was responsible for. “I wasn’t going to leave them,” she says. That’s why she has bought a bus, to give her room to take all the pets away in the event of another hurricane. She says, “I consider myself more prepared than the levees.”

According to the article, Ms. Barth is doing precisely what experts advise to de-stress yourself as hurricane season dawns: get proactive and prepare. Focus on the elements we can control. Anxiety results when we focus on what we cannot control. Plan your evacuation route, destination, and activities en route and once you get there. Plan what to take along and what to leave.

Eventually, columnist Chris Rose admits he began missing elements of this city not replicated anywhere else on earth. A street sweeper who sings well enough to turn pro. Food, food, food. Music. And the characters. The smells. The sounds. The music. The shops. The museums. The festivities. The feel. And the music, did I say that?

Former pastor Jim Nalls, now residing in Havana, Florida, and pastoring across the state line in Bainbridge, Georgia, brought his bride Linda to town this week for the next round of chemotherapy treatments at Ochsner. The two of them have worked out a routine that goes like this: While Linda sits in her recliner with the IV in her arm, taking the medicine, her buddy Leanna Mohr sits and visits with her; meanwhile, Jim and his buddy Joe McKeever have lunch together and talk preacher talk for an hour. It’s a form of therapy for each.

I tell you this to tell about our conversation over where to have lunch. Jim called Tuesday morning, per our agreement, and said, “Where can I meet you?” I thought of a little restaurant I like but haven’t visited in a year and said, “How about the I-HOP in Metairie.” Long pause. Very long pause. Then: “You want to eat lunch at the I-HOP?” I said, “Sorry. I forgot what I was doing there for a minute. You want some New Orleans food, right?” “Of course,” he said. “That’s the whole point.”

We ate at Deanie’s Seafood on Lake Avenue in the Bucktown section of Metairie.

Since I live here, I forget what people who move away miss about the place. When Larry Black of Jackson, Mississippi, comes to town, he won’t leave until he has beignets and cafe au lait at Morning Call in Metairie. If Sandy is with him, they have to go to the Magnolia Grill on Carrollton Avenue.

I don’t actually miss New Orleans, obviously, since I’m over my head in it. What I miss at mealtime is my Mama’s good cooking from the Alabama farm: the corn and peas, the okra and squash, the canteloupe, the fried chicken, the biscuits, the cornbread, the buttermilk, and the blueberry cobbler or chocolate cake. That’s why I sometimes stop at the Cracker Barrel restaurants on the interstate. They cannot begin to approach what Mom or my sisters Patricia or Carolyn can do in a kitchen, but it’s in the ball park.

With my 13-year-old grandson in tow, I ran by the World War II Museum on Magazine Street Thursday. I just wanted to expose him to the place. To no one’s surprise, he found it boring. Thirteen-year-olds find everything boring. But the day will come…. As for me, though, this is one of the New Orleans essentials I would desperately miss if we moved away. So, sometimes I run by just for 30 minutes. Just long enough to breathe the air and walk around the Spitfire hanging from the ceiling or study the old German motorcycle in the corner, then browse the gift shop.

So much to love about this place. So much to dread.

Things are getting back to normal, I suppose.