My Redacted Life: Chapter 38

Life rocked on. Brenda began teaching her second year of school, carpooling with a colleague. I was working on projects and continuing to study. Once a month, Tom and I would motor from Little Rock to Blytheville, Arkansas to attend the planning commission. Author John Grisham had been born there in 1955. By then 17 years of age and living in Mississippi, he was no doubt trying to decide whether to starve as a writer or grow rich from studying the law.

I had settled on urban planning, and was learning a lot about it. For example, cities in Arkansas weren’t required to plan at all. Those who chose to, however, all followed the same process as defined by state statutes. Arkansas existed as a so-called “Dillon’s Rule” state, a descriptor named after an old judge somewhere, named, aptly enough, Dillon. He opined that cities were creatures of the state and had no inherent powers, only those granted by the state. That was news to me, and it complicated things.

The secret was in the plan. If cities chose to make plans, they were to protect the health, safety, welfare and morals of the community. The plans set policy rather than law. In order to carry them out, the cities could enact zoning and subdivision regulations which did constitute municipal law.

Most people didn’t, and many still don’t, understand the difference. In reality, many cities simply adopted plans, then went about business as if those plans didn’t exist. Planning was important primarily (to many cities) because it made them eligible for certain grants.

It closely resembled the way our new household was forming. As the husband, and, by the power granted by no less than the Apostle Paul himself, I was head of the household. As such, I set both policy and law. The wife, in this case my new bride Brenda, was to adore me quietly and diligently while setting about to help me carry out my policies and enact my rules. Smooth is as smooth does, so to speak. I think that may be in the Scriptures somewhere.

Here’s how it really worked. I could set all the plans and policies I chose. No problem. Then it departed from standard doctrine. The rules we lived by had nothing to do with my plans or policies. A set of rules, rules that Herself enacted and enforced, governed our day-to-day activities.

It worked more peacefully that way. In similarity to the benefits of urban planning, compliance qualified me for benefits not available to the recalcitrant. As with any fledgling form of government, it took a number of years for the doctrine fully to establish itself as governing methodology, but it would finally settle into a standard process of “plan and ignore.”

That’s urban planning in a nutshell. Marriage is, after all, a metaphor for many aspects of modern life. That’s why it is fitting and proper that it be available to all.

Oh wow! This marriage thing
 isn't so bad, after all. Is it?
Women can rule. Neat.