A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans. There lay my house, reduced towaist-high ruins, smelly and dirty. Before the trip, I’d had my car fixed. When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill，she noticed my Louisiana license plate. “You from New Orleans?”she asked I said I was, “No charge.”She said, and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet. The next day I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened. As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage (抵押贷款〉on our mined house. We looked at many places, but none was satisfactory. We’d began to accept that we*d have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while, when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kemmedy in California. He’d read some pieces I’d written about our sufferings for State, the online magazine and wanted to give us (""no conditions attached’）a new house across thelake from New Orleans. It sounded too good to be true, but I replied, thanking him for his exceptional generosity, that we had no plan to go back. Then a poet at the University of Florida offered to let his house to me, while he went to England on his one-year paid leave. The rent was rather reasonable. I mentioned the poet’s offer to James Kemdedy, and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months. Throughout this painful experience, the kindness of strangers has done much to bring back my faith in humanity. It’s almost worth losing your worldly possessions to be reminded that people are really nice when given half a chance. 小题1:The garage employee’s attitude toward the author was that of
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