My Redacted Life: Chapter 17 (Cont._3)

At one of the first national meetings of urban planners, the chief topic concerned the cleanup of horse manure in cities. Different problems pile up over the years, I suppose. By the time I entered the profession, one of the top issues was the provision of affordable housing that was decent, safe, and sanitary for all citizens, a tall order.

We had solved that problem in the South, we thought, with a simple structure called, “the shotgun house,” maybe, maybe not, so named because it consisted of three rooms in a row, through which a round could pass without hitting a wall. In my early youth, cotton fields were dotted with them. My own parents had lived in a series of them during the first years of their marriage.

In the large cities, we had tried to solve the problem with high-rises into which we moved families who had moved straight from the cotton fields. The new tenants weren’t quite sure what those rooms with the white fixtures at the end of the hallway were for, but they feared entering them. Since there were no outhouses available, the halls themselves served the purpose.

This experiment didn’t survive.

In the urban ghettos, we had finally arrived at the stage of sanitary planning. Before that, if the outhouse was within reaching and leaching distance of the water supply, who cared?

Addressing such problem required taxes,

regulations, and helping the poor, all solutions held in particular disgust by many Americans. Planners and humanists struggled. Others shrugged. The poor would be with us always. Why bother?

 It happened, then, that at a public hearing in my hometown as I was learning my craft, a young woman, what you would call a “neo-hippie,” stood and made a bizarre statement.

“I don’t believe,” she said, “that anyone should make a profit from providing a basic human need.”

I think everyone in the room laughed. I know I did. With each passing year, though, I would find it less and less funny. I didn’t know it then, but a humanist philosophy stirred and grew within me as a result of what I was seeing, hearing, and learning. As the poet Walt Whitman said,

"There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder

       or pity or love or dread, that object he became

And that object became party of him for a day or a certain part

       of the day ....or for many years or stretching cycles of

       years.

Oh, and it was about that time that, as I was leaving for work, I met the Redhead returning from taking a sack of trash to the dumpster. She was, from all appearances, wearing only a t-shirt that displayed a Mickey Mouse,” logo, shorts fashioned from a pair of old jeans, and flip-flops.I had never seen anything more elegant in my life. She even stopped when we met and, with a swoop, made the long red hair reveal a face of such photogenic grandeur that it took my breath away.

“Morning,” she said. I nodded. Her eyes twinkled, she smiled, then said in a mocking tone, “I guess you have to work all summer, right? Ain't life a bitch?”

Before I could answer, she sashayed on by me. It was a full minute before I could move. It was another before I could think.

Then it dawned on me that she might be a little on the feisty side.