My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen

The year 1972 sort of eased in. I didn’t make a commotion, fearing I might wake up from a dream standing behind a bunker, rifle in hand, and staring into the jungle.

We were working on a number of planning projects. I spent most of my time working on a major project for the city of Hope in southwest Arkansas. Part of the project would be righteous endeavor, providing rehabilitation assistance to homeowners in a low-income section of the city.

Alas, the other aspect of the project would involve a misguided attempt to follow the advice of internationally known architect Victor Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum. He was an Austrian-born architect best known as a pioneer in the design of shopping malls in the United States. Yes, shopping malls. Once he had facilitated the downfall of downtowns as dominant retail centers, he had a plan for their salvation.

He proposed simply turning Downtown into another shopping mall. He should have stuck to designing buildings.

At any rate, I was becoming intimately acquainted with this charming town not far from the Texas and Louisiana borders. I doubted if anything or anyone of significance would emerge from within its borders, but it was a nice place inhabited by nice people. It was also the first city in which I worked that placed a female on its planning commission, alongside an African-American male who had preceded her by nearly a year.

It was a pattern that repeated itself countless times over the years: first a person of color, next a person of the female gender. Change comes slowly sometimes. Planning proved no exception.

I was enjoying my current apartment, though it was old and hardly sparkled. The landlord was a man called “Smitty,” who managed my building and the newer one next door. He was friendly, attentive, and was always pleasant, even if you interrupted him during a meal with some minor complaint.

Work was both fun and fulfilling. The new partner—the engineer—and I didn’t, as they say down South, “gee and haw” too well together, but that really didn’t affect my career. I avoided him and he quickly expressed the feeling that I wasn’t of significant consequence to warrant his attention. He didn’t mind expressing his opinion of planners, and I didn’t mind expressing my opinion of people who, as he had, joined the National Guard. At that time in our country’s history (it would change drastically and tragically much later), it was a move back then designed to avoid actual military service.

That’s all I’ll say about that topic.

Let’s see … oh, lest I forget. As I went home each day, there was a young lady with luxurious long hair and eye-popping beauty, in a city some 20 miles away who had just finished teaching an unruly band of third-graders in her hometown. She had friends in the apartment building next door and visited there often. I knew nothing about it. That apartment was as step up, socially, from mine, so I stuck with my friends in the opposite direction on Riverside Drive. Class is class, but benefits are benefits, after all.

As with many young teachers working for minimal wages, this young lady was still wearing her college wardrobe while teaching.

Given the then-prevalent style of mini-skirts for well-formed young college ladies, and remembering my lingering infatuation with a third-grade teacher named Miss Roundtree, I can only imagine the fantasies created. Ah, but that had nothing to do with me.

Or did it?

Waiting in ambush?