I am an Expert Post Digger and a Minorly Good Roofer

I've spent the last three weekdays working with Habitat for Humanity. I've really enjoyed it.

We start ass early - 7:30 a.m. - but I get to spend most of my day outside, in the sun, actually DOING something. Like shoveling or raking or cleaning up or, on one memorable day, roofing. Then we're done at 3:30 and the rest of the day is mine. It's awesome. (Oh, East Coast Friends, being outside all day is a GOOD thing here. It's in the 70s. And I'm getting tan.)
(Please don't hate me. I got enough hate mail from those Eagles fans to last me a lifetime.)

I had originally said I wouldn't work with Habitat. Not because I don't admire their cause, but I thought that no one would benefit from a dwelling I'd helped build. I have few talents - imy near perfect aim being one of them - but construction is not one of them. In fact, I don't think I've ever built anything that didn't come out of an Ikea box before. (And one time, when Jaqui and I built an Ikea dresser, we somehow managed to totally screw up the knobs so they were forever crooked. Which, true, takes some talent, but not the sort of talent you want going into a place where you will live.)

But I had a change of heart, thought, "Why not? Do it a couple days and then I can leave. Maybe they'll just assign me painting duties."

My first day was mostly digging two feet deep holes for fence posts. A lot of them. There were a bunch of us on the job and some people had the fancy post digger things and others, like me, had shovels. We were all newbies. We got our instructions, then went to work.

About an hour later, it's time to put the posts in and add the concrete. Our leader, Allain, is commenting on each hole as he directs the work, "Oh, this is not deep enough.... This one is off center..." And then. He gets to mine. "This one," he said, "is perfect."

(Side note: When I first wrote that paragraph, it ended up sounding pornographic so I went back in to adjust. Use your imaginations.)

I was glowing. Yep, that was my hole. Do you know it? It's the "perfect" one. Perhaps you've heard about it on the news.

On my second day, when they were dividing up workers in the a.m., they said, "Who wants to work on a roof?" And next thing I know, I'm with that group. Our group leaders assured us before hand, "I've been here nine months and only two people have fallen off roofs and they haven't died. One broke his pelvis and the other broke his arm. No big deals." (Which someone can say when it's not their pelvis in question.) Still, I next found myself climbing a ladder and scurrying across a pitched roof that is about half shingled. I got up to the peak of the roof and was like, "My God, my God, what have I done? I will never be able to get off of this roof. This is the rest of my life, here on this roof, unless someone rescues me by helicopter."

Then I stood up. Then I started walking around. Then I was like, "I am on the ROOF!"

It was so cool. Then we shingled. For hours. So I had to take measurements and pound nails and go back and forth across the roof and up and down the ladder multiple times. Who was this person, I thought?

But don't worry: I was still true to myself in my mind. I was working with a group of college kids on Spring Break and one of them got all misty eyed as she hit her nails. "Just imagine," she said, "a baby could be born in this house and it could be the baby who grows up to cure cancer! How amazing would that be!" And I'm thinking, "Or, the baby born in this house could be a Ted-Bundy look-alive who worships John Wayne Gacy and admires the techniques of Jeffrey Dahmer and goes on to be the nation's most prolific serial killer." (I do not say this out loud. No need to crush the young.) (Plus, I was afraid my knowledge of serial killers would cause them to freak out and take the hammer away from me.)

Even the mundane tasks I've undertaken have taken on meaning to me. Like one morning, we spent some time just picking up trash in a neighborhood that still looked like it had been struck by a bomb. I found a pin that said, "Today I am 6" and stopped for a moment because, well, these things have a story. Who was six? Did her family get out intact? Was she able to keep any of the toys she'd gotten for that birthday? Was she even a she?

A short time later, I found a weekly newspaper still rolled in its plastic bag. It was from the week Katrina hit, a reminder how, in many things, life here stopped that week.

I go back to Habitat again tomorrow. I don't know what we'll be doing, but I'm excited to find out. Every day is a different mini adventure.

The only thing Habitat lacks, in my opinion, is that contact with the person or family you're helping. Home owners are required to put in something like 350 hours of "sweat equity" on their dwellings, but none have been around the houses I've worked on.

I had that kind of personal contact this weekend when I joined the Times Picayune's Muckrakers as we gutted a home in Gentilly. The homeowner's name was Anne and she told us her father had built the home in 1946. Her brother was coming in from California to rebuild it later this year.

There weren't many savable items left - mostly dishware and a very warped photo of someone in a cap and gown. I was with Alice in one of the rooms when she actually gasped as she pulled something out of the muck. It was some kind of sword. One of her brothers, who had been in the military, had brought it back from some travels with him. She had been calm and cool all day, sweet as can be, and that was the only time I saw her seem rattled.

Later, we found a Pepsi bottle with what appeared to be Arabic writing on it. Her brother had brought that home, too, she said.

Another thing about that work day struck me: We were a mix of journalists, people from the Pic and Jimmie Briggs from NY and me, and normal folk, like Jimmie's friends. None of us had to be there, on a Saturday morning, shoveling out the remains of someone's life.

But we chose to be there and, looking at the people around me, I wasn't suprised by who they were. I knew them all. They are good people.

Then came my surprise.

The newspaper has a social columnist, a very neat and proper woman who writes about the city's society world. (It's quite intense, with debutantes and all that stuff.) This woman showed up at Alice's house a little later than the rest of us. She had on red lipstick and gold earrings and her clothes were far nicer than anyone else's.

But she came in and, quietly, with a dustpan and broom, she collected the broken pieces of dry wall and trash. I never heard her speak - although I'm sure she did. She's the type of person who can afford to have someone clean for her, yet she was here cleaning for someone else.

Some people have said that the storm showed people's true colors, for good and for bad. People weren't who you thought they were, for good or for bad. I think that's true.