My Friend Katrina Evacuates Her Name

My friend Katrina has reluctantly decided to abandon her name, she told me the other day. "For a long time I held out hope that my name was salvageable," she said. "After all, no name has ever been completely destroyed by a storm before. I thought I could wait it out, but eventually it just got to be too much." Since the storm struck, my friend Katrina has been pounded by relentless media references to her name and a torrent of disapproval from strangers. "Everything I've put into my name has simply been washed away," Katrina stated. "There's nothing left to come back to." Katrina isn't looking forward to the post-Katrina era. "I never liked any of the nicknames for my name: Kat, Kit, Kitty," she reported. "I guess I'm going to have to pick one of them. Eventually I'll rebuild somewhere, but Katrina as I knew her is gone forever."