First, my best wishes and deepest sympathies to the people of Louisiana and Mississippi who have been hit so hard by Katrina.

I have been to New Orleans about six times in the past five years, and it's eerie to see pictures of flooding on some streets that I know well. But of course it's a lot more than just eerie if your home was on that street. Can you imagine knowing that your home is destroyed, and you have nowhere to go except the Superdome, where's there's currently no A/C inside? The highs in New Orleans are expected to be in the mid-90's all week.

Apropos of nothing, I have been doing some thinking about foster homes recently. It was precipitated by a friend who just told me about a full, four-year college scholarship that he gave to a promising young woman in Michigan who grew up in the foster care system. My friend didn't do it with corporate money; he sponsored it with his own resources, in honor of his grandma, who also grew up in Michigan's foster care system.

This triggered thoughts of a woman I've met a few times--she's a friend of a good friend--who works for the Department of Children and Family Services in LA. Last I talked to her, she was on some sort of "crisis response team" that deals with the worst of the worst of humanity. You know on TV or the movies when some horrific thing is done to child and a social worker shows up right after the police? That social worker role is what that this woman does in real life. Often it's a foster child who is tortured or burned or beaten senseless, and this woman's job is to swoop up the kid (if an ambulance hasn't already done it) and/or the siblings and take them to the next foster home, and/or put the children in protective custody.

But I think the vast majority of foster homes provide stable if not loving environments, and the kids typically are better off in foster care than their original home situation.

Which of course brings me to the foster home I lived in, but not as a foster child. Sometime around 1976, Peter and Marcy opened a foster home, primarily for emotionally disturbed juvenile delinquents, in Santa Rosa, CA. It was called "Hearthlight" and was a logical follow-on to Peter's work at a troubled youth counseling center in Stockton called "Rising Sun." And given the huge hearts of my parents, it was only natural that they would want to make a career out of their passion, which was helping troubled youth.

Jed and I lived under the same roof as these kids, and in some cases, their bedrooms were adjacent to ours. Some of the kids were merely odd and disturbed (which some friends say explains a lot about me!) while others were potentially dangerous.

I remember a police car in our driveway being a common occurrence, and several of the kids had been in and out of juvenile detention centers. One of the kids, George, claimed to be from the Andromeda Galaxy, with a spaceship buried in our backyard. Another, who may have been named Ivan, was rumored (I remember just taking it as fact) to have committed a hat trick of armed robberies (a gas station, a convenience store, and a doughnut shop, perhaps?) all before he was 14, the approximate age at which he landed at our house. Maybe Jed will add to or improve upon my recollections here.

Once, Marcy and I were inside a barn with horses...one of the foster kids was outside in the corral and threw some rope in through a little hole in the side of the barn. "Hold this rope tight" he shouted to me, "I want to see how long it is." I did, but Marcy took it from me. Marcy then wrapped the rope around her wrist as she continued to brush another horse. Next thing, BAM! Marcy flies through the air and bashes her head against the barn wall...the kid had tied the other end of rope to a horse and told it to giddy up.

Anyway, looking back on it, I think Jed and I were not actually negatively affected by the foster home in any significant way, but almost three decades removed, I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of having emotionally disturbed juvenile delinquents around your own young children. On the one hand, it was a very eye-opening, horizon-broadening experience, but on the other, it was a pretty damn weird and potentially even dangerous environment.

I know the 70's were different, crime was different (armed robbery in suburbia typically meant knives, not guns, I think) and Peter and Marcy were just trying to make the world a better place while simultaneously providing for their boys...so I shouldn't complain too much, especially when neither Peter nor Marcy is around to defend themselves! I have no bitterness about the foster home situation, just curiosity about why, beyond the reasons mentioned above.

In fact, Peter and Marcy deserve all the credit for recognizing the value of education, ending their foster home business, and sacrificing a great deal by moving us to a place with a reputation for outstanding schools (Palo Alto) in 1978.

These entries are supposed to have a point, and I am looking for one right now. Here, I just found it: If I had a problem with living in a foster home, or even just curiosity about why, I should have brought it up a long time ago with Peter. Perhaps he had a much better and more nuanced explanation--one that now I'll never know--for choosing to open a foster home. The point being that baggage, even of the potential variety, and curiosity, is better to deal with when the players involved are alive.