AUSTIN, Texas, August 30, 2005 — While people survey devastation and dig out across a swath of our country, we go about our dilettante life.

I stay in bed until nearly eight. I write and fiddle with my computer and drink coffee and read the newspapers until nine-thirty. Dad calls before I can call him. Just to check in. He wants to remind me to make some food for his church Seniors on Friday. Sure.

I wander off to the club. FFP and I exchange greetings by the pool, he on his way in, me out.

I do fifty minutes on the bike reading The Beak of the Finch. I do some weights. I sweat a lot. I go home. I feel good, I have no obligations until tonight at seven. It's a party that has something to do with wine. So I could whine, but why? Some days the regular routine (get up, work out, shower, dress, brush teeth, do chores)

I eat some lunch, salad with salmon and, not long after, some nachos. I watch tennis, switching back and forth to the tragedy channel. It unfolds into a worse and worse scenario until you realize there are many uninhabitable places. That may not be habitable for a while. A city's worth of people (and more from other parishes and states) homeless and on the move. Meanwhile we have food and air conditioning and the busted main in the yard is just a dribble still so it may not have damaged our house or drive permanently yet. It's only been visible for a week now.

Meanwhile we are invited to a wine tasting at one of Austin's most dramatic homes. The entry looks like you could walk down Town Lake, the disappearing edge pool leading the eye directly down toward the lake far below. The skyline with the new Frost Tower is visible. We greet, eat and taste a couple of great wines. At one point the sunset is reflected on a couple of the downtown towers like a bright orange light.

One feels far away from the tragedy in the gulf. It's really hard to appreciate other people's hardship. I remember when Shoal Creek flooded in 1981. Driving north and south of our house there was devastation. We'd escaped with a busted fence and a bit of water in the garage. (This was before we'd taken measures to keep water from trying to go from gutter to creek through the garage which is on a slab below the level of the house. However, there was so much water that night I doubt that this would have helped.) Cars were leaning high against trees where they'd stuck when water receded, houses had been flooded to the eaves. We were spared. I remember calling my mother, waking her and saying "When you wake up, remember: We are fine and our house is dry." She was confused but when she heard the news she knew we were OK. Telephone circuits were jammed. One always wants to know that one's friends and relatives are OK. I remember the Northridge earthquake. Miraculously I tracked my friend who lived there down elsewhere in California before it became difficult to call there.

We come home from the party and flip on the PIP with tragedy and tennis alternating. Andy Roddick loses. It's hard to feel that it is significant given the other channel. Good match, though. I predict Muller will lose in the next round. (My prediction will probably guarantee him an improbabl title.)

Sleep comes. I will dream of arguing with people who are tearing up things while not fixing my water leak.