ONE OF THOSE DAYS

Yesterday I was in funk for most of the day. In the morning, Grandpère found the notice to the left hanging on our front door. Encephalitis in the neighborhood! On my street?  In my town?  Panic began to rise. Then I read all the fine print.  "Mosquitoes that can carry ENCEPHALITIS have been found in your neighborhood and we need your help."  The local newspaper published the news that West Nile virus had been found in mosquitoes in Lafourche Parish, where I live, and it's a good thing to remind people not to leave standing water around where mosquitoes can breed, but the notice could have been worded in a way that would not frighten people so.  Still, my first panicked questions would not have come up had I read the fine print.

 Here's how West Nile fever works.  Humans contract the virus from a bite from an infected mosquito.  Most people who are infected with the disease either have no symptoms at all or suffer a very mild illness.  However, in rare cases, and we have had a couple around here, the virus "can cause encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) or meningitis (inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord)."  It does not matter where in a community the cases of serious illness develop, because the disease does not pass from person to person.

What the notice did was push me to decide that so long as the threat of West Nile lasts, I will walk in daylight, when it is hot, but when the mosquitoes are not so much on the move, rather than after sunset, when it is cooler.  

Later in the day, I called the Circulation Department of the Times-Picayune to cancel our subscription. I have not been reading the paper since the announcement of the cutback to three days a week for the paper edition beginning in October and the layoff of half the staff.  The newspaper is already turning into a shell of itself, and I don't want to watch the decline until October.   I thought we'd do better to get our refund from Advance Publications now rather than wait for our subscription to run out.  The customer service rep asked why we were cancelling, and I said one word, "Newhouse," and she understood.  I felt so sad after I cancelled, because I've been reading the Times-Picayune my whole life since I could read, starting with the comics, or the funnies, as we called them in New Orleans. I missed the paper for three years while we lived in Mobile, but as soon as we moved back to Louisiana, we subscribed again.

We also subscribe to the Baton Rouge Advocate, which will place permanent staff in New Orleans to cover the news there. Several groups and individuals, the latest being Tom Benson, owner of the New Orleans Saints, have offered to buy the paper from Newhouse, but they refuse to sell.  We will surely support any worthwhile effort to set up a rival daily newspaper, and we will not subscribe to Newhouse's pathetic web version.

As you see, the day was already a downer when I read that Kenneth Roop, the man who shot Nick Rainey, the door-to-door meat and seafood salesman, had been on trial for pointing a gun at a meter reader some years back, but he was found not guilty of improper exhibition of a weapon.  The prosecutor at the trial said Roop was a ticking time bomb.  The bomb ticked for quite a while, but it finally went off.  Not long before reading the account, I saw the meter reader for my neighborhood pass by my window to read our meter. It made me think.  A jury of his peers did not think pointing a gun at a meter reader and terrifying her was an improper exhibition of a weapon, and Roop was permitted to continue to own a gun, with the result that another innocent person is dead from gunshot.

Some days I just want to give up, and yesterday was one of those days.