Where to start. I left New Orleans last Saturday early, driving home to North Alabama and to my graduating class’s 48th anniversary that evening. Sunday, I preached twice at the First United Methodist Church there in Double Springs and again Monday night. Home Tuesday. Saw lots of old friends, made some new ones, and ate far more than was wise. My 94-year-old father beat me in the first five hands of rummy, until I finally took two. He shows no sign of dulling. My nearly 90-year-old mother asked me one hundred and twenty five times what else I wanted to eat, and wouldn’t I like some of this and a little of that.

I told anyone who would listen that 1958 was the best class ever to come out of Winston County High, and that “if given an opportunity to select your graduation date, you’d do well to choose fifty-eight!” One thing our class agreed on is that things are changing. When we were kids, you would see pictures in the paper of these elderly people celebrating their 50th high school reunion. No longer. They’ve finally let the youngsters claim those big numbers.

While I was away from New Orleans, it was the same old same old. Mayoral candidates having what they call debates almost daily now, including one tomorrow at First Baptist-New Orleans. Crime re-emerges in full force in the city. Hurricane preparation occupies half of every day’s paper.

Columnist James Gill in Wednesday morning’s Times-Picayune tells what happened at a mayoral debate the other day, one that was sponsored by an organization of preachers calling itself ACT, meaning All Congregations Together. I suppose there are some non-Blacks in this assembly, but have not seen any in the photos the paper runs of their doings periodically. What the leaders of ACT did was present both candidates a pledge to sign. They would be agreeing to attend an ACT retreat with their leaders within 45 days after the election, and then meet with them on a bi-monthly basis thereafter. Gill wrote, “ACT further required to be consulted over all major appointments. Here was an opportunity to play the man and refuse to betray the voters by ceding the powers of the office. But our two noble leaders meekly attached their monikers.”

Brother. Talk about courageous leadership. Not even the slow pace of the recovery of our neighborhoods depresses me as much as seeing this kind of passivity, cowardice, and fear among those vying for leadership roles. How does that old line go: “There goes the crowd. I must rush to the front, for I am their leader.”

George Shinn is becoming as popular in New Orleans as he was in Charlotte. That’s tongue in cheek for: not very popular. The owner of the local NBA team, the New Orleans Hornets, which relocated to Oklahoma City and failed to make the playoffs but which was wonderfully supported by the Oklahomans, as they were by the New Orleanians in the 3 games they played here, does not want to move back here. In the newspapers I missed and read last night, he was lauding the Oklahoma City folks, the culture, the family-ness, and panning the local situation. “I haven’t seen much progress in the rebuilding of the city,” he said. He wants to move that team to OK so badly he can taste it. But he has a problem.

He has a contract that keeps the team here through 2012. And NBA commissioner David Stern vows that that contract will be honored. Some locals say Shinn wants to make us all so angry at him we will not support the team when they play here, a few times a year, so he can make a case to Stern and the NBA that there’s nothing else to do but to relocate.

Mr. Shinn needs to learn the lesson that the airlines are learning: there’s more to this city than what’s inside the city limits. At this point, in metropolitan New Orleans, the population probably runs around 700,000. Which is down 300,000, of course. These are my round numbers. People from a hundred miles in every direction drive down here to see the Saints and the Hornets, and possibly the Zephyrs, too, our AAA baseball club. (The airlines were slow to add flights back to their local schedule, but everytime they do, the plans fill quickly and it’s hard to find a seat in or out of the city.)

Tulane professor and widely read historian Doug Brinkley has written a book that is being widely discussed. “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast” is his 716-page account of the events taking place in one week, August 27 to September 3. Wonder how long it would have been if he’d written about a whole month. He got lots of local ink from reporting what Governor Blanco said about Mayor Nagin just after the storm, how he was bewildered, sleepless, and dazed. Supposedly, she told him to get some sleep and then come see her.

About the mayor, Brinkley says, “There’s a moment I talk about in the book that Maureen Dowd calls ‘the golden hour,’ that moment in a crisis when leaders can really move and make a difference… But to pretend that Mayor Nagin behaved responsibly that week, when he never went into a rescue boat, refused to go to the Superdome or the Convention Center…how can that not bother you? It’s the symbolism.”

Reporter Susan Larson writes of Brinkley, that he was there. “When he writes about the Rev. Willie Walker of the Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church setting out in his boat to pull people out of the water, he does so with firsthand knowledge. He was in the boat.”

Willie Walker. He’s one of our pastors. Here’s to you, Willie.

Larson continues, “When (Brinkley) writes about Diane Johnson, an elderly African-American member of Walker’s congregation who was evacuated from here to Houma and on to Florida where eventually she died, it is with a memory of his phone conversations with her. And when he writes about her funeral at Walker’s temporary church, it is with the real grief of a person who was there.”

Doug Brinkley says, “I went with Rev. Walker and we were pulling people out of buildings off Carrollton.”

Get that? The historian subtlely boasts that he was with the preacher in the lifeboat. I love it.

God, deliver us from sitting in our offices, and yes, at our computers, pontificating on who’s right and who’s wrong, while others are in the lifeboats rescuing the perishing.