For 90 days or so, I had religiously attended a daily routine of exercise at the Downtown YMCA in Little Rock. It was 1975 and the first time I had followed a healthy pattern of living since Navy Boot Camp. A wonderful fitness expert and trainer named Ersel Tillery was guiding me and I was making progress. You betcha.

At my 90-day checkup, Ersel and I were thrilled. My readings were fast approaching those of a 50-year old man, down from the early 70s when I had started. I had lost fifteen pounds or so, and you could see the vestiges of my chin again. Along the way, I had noticed my pants getting loose around the waist. I had even bought a pair a size smaller.

I was walk/jogging around the little 30-lap track for nearly a half-mile a day now. I was “born-again.” I had started projects around our old Victorian Home. I was on my way.

Then, I hit a bump on the highway to perfect health.

Getting ready for work one day, I chose an old pair of pants, the loose ones. I liked to wear them to work because I sensed that it made the other guys jealous.

Guess what? The pants weren’t loose at all. In fact, they were snug as could be. What happened? I re-traced my steps. I hadn’t been on a wild spree. I hadn’t missed a day exercising. I had even started walking on Sundays. There was no reason for bloating. Jeeez!

After donning some warmups, I trudged into the kitchen where my Trophy Wife (yeah, it’s easier just to marry one right off) was enjoying a bowl of cereal. I made me one and sat. I didn’t feel like talking.

“How are your pants fitting?” She smiled and spooned some cereal.

What the …? Now here was a nice philosophical problem. A Kantian Moral Imperative would demand that I tell the truth. A sense of “Pascal's Wager” would suggest that I take the route offering the least chance of future disaster. I discarded both and used my old standby that I call “The Lie of French Impressionism.” That is to tell two truths and let the listener mix them as the listener wishes. If the result is misleading, the fault lies with the listener.

“I’ll try them on in a bit,” I said. “You can’t expect overnight results.” I squirmed.

She nodded in that quixotic way she has of proclaiming a non-verbal “Bullshit.”

“I just wondered,” she said, “since I took them up two inches.”

Have I ever mentioned that she is a first-class seamstress? She smiled in that quixotic way she has of proclaiming, “Ha. Gotcha, you old fool.”

Would you like to hear about how I practically skipped into work that morning? At the noon exercise class, Ersel even found the episode funny. Brenda? After all these years, she still delights in telling the story. Did I ever mentioned that she has a bit of mean streak about her at times? I love her anyway.

Did I ever tell you how much
I like to mess with his mind?

My Redacted Life ... health

I’m fat, out of shape, and suffering from extremely high blood pressure at age 30. What could I do? I asked around and found out that the Downtown YMCA, at Sixth and Broadway in Little Rock had a fitness center frequented by many of the men who worked in the area. They had recently opened the center to African-American men, but several years would pass before women members appeared. I checked it out.

One of the finest people who ever lived ran the club. Actually, there was a “Health Club” and a “Businessman’s Club.” I don’t quite remember which was which, but one was more expensive than the other. Anyway, ErselTillery ran both and provided an excellent program. He would give you a checkup and prescribe an exercise program based on your vital signs.

That’s where the trouble started.

While taking my blood pressure, Ersel couldn’t suppress an “Oh no.” I’ve always felt that if he hadn’t been a Baptist minister, he might have uttered a profanity.

Here’s what happened.

My BP was so high and my body fat so great that he had no exercise program to start me on.

He studied on it awhile. Ersel wasn’t one to give up on a man just because he was a slothful blob of fat. So he designed a program just for me so I wouldn’t keel over dead my first day of a new life. Here is what he came up with.

There was this little wooden track on the third floor. It resembled a 45 rpm phonograph record and it took 30 laps to make a mile. The lowest form of Ersel’s exercise program was for a really out-of-shape man to jog around the track nine times, walk around nine times, jog around, etc, for a little over half-a-mile, after attending a “stretch and strength” class he taught at noon and just after work. He was afraid that beginner’s program might kill me.

So … he devised a plan for my first couple of weeks. I could waddle around the little track once, walk around it once, for a total of nine revolutions. In the class, I had to stop halfway through each exercise. You can imagine how the others in the class stared at me. Oh well.

I was committed, though. And Ersel was patient. I knew some folks who came to the gym. I wore loose clothing so they wouldn’t see the full extent of my corpulence. I don’t think I fooled anyone though. I would usually go the class at lunchtime. If I missed, and wasn’t on the road, I could come after work. We lived south of the YMCA, on Broadway, so the gym was on my way to and fro. I didn't miss a day.

Two weeks passed and I was still alive. Ersel was pleased, so he doubled my regimen. The signs dropped a little, not much, but they were headed in the right direction. And … I imagined that I felt a little better. This transition, no matter how slight, pleased my wife who dreamed of my amassing a fortune before departing this earthly sojourn. We each have our dreams, I suppose.

Tomorrow: Real progress.

The wonderful man
who saved my life.

My Redacted Life ... health

Been thinking about going to the gym. Also thinking about not going. It’s Friday and I’m tired. Also, gyms are funny places that make me think. The most out-of-shape folks are on the machines with the most moving parts. The most fit-looking are those walking around the track. The most muscular are the weight-lifters. The angriest-looking are on treadmills, and the ones who most look like they are having fun are the kids playing basketball. I think about lessons of life one can learn from the gym. It’s a microcosm of life.

Mostly I think about how a gym saved my life once. It happened this way.

In December 1968, I returned from overseas and reported to a U.S. Naval ship stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. Two days after checking on board, I had to stand the midwatch and forgot to bring cigarettes. I had been up to, depending on how the security watches in Da Nang fell, maybe three packs of Marlboros a day. A day earlier, at the ship’s store, I had purchased a carton of cigs for $2.10, or 21 cents a pack. I had opened one pack, but, as I say, I had left it in my bunk.

Well, there ain’t much going on below decks on a navy ship at three o’clock in the morn after midrats, so I was stuck for four hours without a smoke. When someone relieved me, I went straight to bed for I didn’t know if the “smoking lamp” was on above decks.

Next morning, I got to thinking. I’d gone something like 12 hours without a butt. I’d just hold out until noon. I’ve never smoked a cigarette since. Two months later, I gave the unused carton to a shipmate. I laugh at the ads about using chemicals to quit smoking. Hell, it ain’t hard. You just quit, that’s all. Pharmaceuticals are for sissies.

You do gain weight though. At least I did. In the old Navy, I don’t know about the new—they seem a little gentrified to me—you could eat four meals a day if you stayed up long enough. Then they had a “gedunk” stand that opened for a break in the morning. And, of course. they sold beer in the clubs on the beach. Let's just say that I partook of opportunities.

I didn’t transfer out of the Navy two years later as much as I waddled out. They almost didn’t let me go due to high blood pressure. At least that’s what they said. I thought they were bluffing and told them so. Anyway, I landed in Little Rock, Arkansas in the company of a splendiferous young woman who didn’t seem to mind my affection for carbohydrates. I don’t know what she saw in me but it surely wasn’t manly heartthrob type stuff.

Things limped along. Then we bought an old Victorian house. My corpulence began to acknowledge its inherent weaknesses and I decided to do something about my weight. I was 30 years old and about to die.

Then there appeared the Downtown YMCA at Sixth and Broadway. My life changed forever.

Stay tuned.

Fat, dumb, and married
to a beautiful woman is
no way to go through life. 

Oh dear ..

Another relative in the hospital. Check back later.

Honor and Hope

What a splendiferous day yesterday. Went to lunch with two high-school friends and ran into several other folks I knew at Franke’s cafeteria in downtown Little Rock. We talked and talked over lunch, sometimes all three at once. I tried to listen, because they are both a lot smarter than I. That’s one of the best ways to learn, even better than staring into a cell phone.

Anyway, took a “road trip” later with another friend. It was actually a “bidness trip” to a town in the Arkansas Delta with millions of dollars in needs and no resources with which to address the needs. Yes, there are a number of those communities in our state. It would take the cost of one new aircraft carrier to fix them and those in our neighboring states. Yeah, I know. It ain’t gonna happen, even if we raised taxes on CEOs making a salary of $250 Million each year and kids inheriting over half a trillion. The “right people” don’t make money curing misery.

After visiting with a very knowledgeable city council and attempting to answer some sincere and intelligent questions, another old friend walked in. It was their City Attorney, one of the “Valley” men from Helena-West Helena, Arkansas.

My cup was running over.

A visitor in the crowd was a young woman with a great interest in her community. It’s sometimes heartbreaking to see young people wanting to stay in, or return to, a hometown that has been shunned by both recent history and good fortune. The young one asked if it would be legally permissible to erect a monument to the veterans from the community.

I thought, “As long as you don’t list any that were shot down while flying an aircraft in the service of their country and spent years being tortured in a prisoner-of-war camp.” But, back to the meeting.

There is an old economic term, probably obsolete due to the “Retail Apocalypse,” known as “location quotient.” It calculates whether a defined region is employing enough workers in each economic sector as put up against a national economy. It was used by urban planners and others to quantify the status, uniqueness, or shortcomings of an area compared to national averages.

I always wonder, when I leave one of these communities, how many Einsteins, Mozarts, Darwins, Newtons, Armstrongs, Hurstons, Curies, Obamas, Salks, Carnegies, Winfreys, Angelous, and the like we leave languishing in the Arkansas Delta, and the poverty pockets of other states, while we heap tons of attention and coverage to the Kardashians and Manhattan White Trash of our nation. It is quite a sobering thought.

For the veterans’ memorial, I told the young lady, when she asked if they should build it, “I’d vote for it.” What I didn’t tell her was that within walking distance of where we were, there was the grave of a brave man who fell standing with Hal Moore in the Ia Drang Valley. Should there be a local memorial to men like him?

I thought, “Build it? Yes, yes you should. Yes. Honor those who wore The Uniform, lest they think their people doesn’t love them or appreciate their service.” Any point of pride in a community is a brick in the foundation of success.

Love and honor your people?. Hell yes. Maybe, just maybe, the son or daughter of one will reach the status of a Martin Luther King, Jr.

The blessings of civility ...

So-called social media gets to be a little more than I can stomach from time to time. I still go back to it, though. I’ve found too many lost friends and comrades therein. I’ve re-established ties with relatives I haven’t heard from in years and made friends with some I barely knew. Sadly, I’ve found that some contacts, on both sides of the political spectrum, whom I thought were kind and gentle like the best of Christians, have what I call an “abscess on their soul.” Fortunately, they are somewhat outweighed by what I call my “Brothers and Sisters of the Beatitudes.”

What’s happened to us? There is a lot of hate boiling on the Internet these days. It can’t be good for us in the long run. Can’t we accomplish more and better things as friends, rather than enemies? Sometimes, I think of a city for which I worked years ago as a consulting city planner. It was in the process of shifting from one political party to another. I had a chance to watch the transition.

It was a fairly benign process. I don’t recall that it affected the condition of the city at all. Government at the most basic “grass-roots” level must avoid the pitfalls of prejudice and the passions of political partisanship that can plague us if it is to survive. I, being wiser then, played my cards carefully. Members of both parties felt I was one of them. I didn’t make any attempt to dissuade them. We all concentrated in making the city and its neighborhoods better. I still maintain friends there and I think the city is a better place to live because we dodged controversy.

Maybe it was easier to do that back in that day. It proved to be a lucky time for me. It comprised an eight-year period of peace and prosperity which we may never see again. It also coincided with my peak earning years. As a result, I became financially secure and a slightly well-regarded fish in a very small, but wonderful, pond. I attribute some, if not much, of my success to keeping my political views to myself.

“Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now…”

- Bob Dyan: My Back Pages.

Peace ...all it takes is
a good pal, and
a change of perspective

Learning about life ...

Some of my life’s best learnings came through adversity, or what seemed to me at the time adversity. Bear with me while I elucidate. Elucidation is a minor talent I possess that, itself, grew from adversity.

Early in my career as an urban planner, I ran afoul of one of the most mean-spirited people ever to emigrate to our state. His name is Paul Greenberg and, at the time, he was the editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial, my hometown newspaper. Because of an innocuous issue, he developed a hatred for our firm, which was doing some work for the city. To adapt a phrase that J. Edgar Hoover used for Bobby Kennedy, nobody hates like Paul Greenberg. Just ask Bill Clinton.

As a result of a year-long series of sometimes personal attacks in his editorials, attacks that tickled my aunts to death and mortified Sainted Mother, I developed a talent when writing. “What talent?” one might ask. It’s not a talent as much as a cautionary instinct, which is to think before I write. I imagine that Paul Greenberg, all full of venom, is watching every word I write. Let’s just say that it helps me proceed with care aforethought.

Adversities related to sports took awhile longer to teach me. But after a series of humiliating experiences, experiences that still contribute to my 3:00 a.m. insomnia attacks, I decided that I would never excel at anything requiring manual dexterity, speed, strength, visual acuity, good reflexes, or basic coordination. It took time, but I even found a girl to date who didn’t regard those traits highly. She was seeing a basketball coach at the time, and I think that the experience of watching a few games while sitting on a hard bench, may have convinced hear that a boring sloth whose main dream was to learn to play the banjo wasn’t the worst deal around.

That brings us to my military service, an issue that I never expected I would have to face. I had suffered asthma as a child and it was well known around Pine Bluff High and Maxine’s Tap Room in Fayetteville, that asthma was the best “no-service” guarantee around. There was this clinic in West Memphis that still held my records, and when LBJ and General William “The Unsuspecting” Westmoreland came for my body, all I had to do was present those records. I was in a nice place, surrounded by friends, and set for the future. “Get your fodder somewhere else, boys.”

Imagine my surprise when I learned that the clinic had since suffered a fire that destroyed many of the records and was run by the son of the original doctor. Imagine my further discomfiture on learning that said son believed that military service was next to spiritual salvation and that any male with a body large enough to receive a bullet who desired to avoid such service deserved to be imprisoned.

No sweat, I’ll join the Navy, avoid combat, see the world, and spend ample amounts of time in the company of beautiful South Pacific ladies wearing Bougainville ear-blossoms and mouthing my name like a Trump moans “money.”

“So long you draftee suckers.”

Well we all know how that turned out. But you know what? I learned a lot in the Navy, some of it even legal. The greatest thing I ever learned was that it is very important that one be happy wherever one is. There is no guarantee that things won’t change, as Baptist preachers like to say, “in the twinkling of an eye.”

It sure did for me, and, when they saw me in uniform, you should have seen all my “friends” scatter like cockroaches in the light. Know what? I’ve been better off without them. It’s just a matter of learning from adversity.

Are you coming or not?
Yeah, I went.

Retracing history ...

I’m heading over to the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History in a bit to board a bus taking a group of us in a day-long tour. We’ll trace the route of Major General Frederick Steele’s ill-fated campaign during the Camden Expedition, a part of the Red River Campaign. Federal troops left the site of the Museum on this date in 1864 and came back in May, let’s just say: less than successful.

We'll trace the old Military Road past Elkin’s Ferry and Poison Springs, the latter the sight of debacle that resulted in an entire wagon train of goods being captured and members of the First Kansas Colored Infantry being savaged by Confederate troops.

We’ll lunch at the site of Steele’s headquarters in Camden and proceed back toward Little Rock as did a deflated Union Army. After stopping at Mark’s Mill, site of another Union disaster, we’ll arrive at Jenkin’s Ferry where the Union Army finally stood its ground, and the Second Kansas Colored Infantry exacted some revenge for the treatment of their brothers at Poison Springs. A reconstructed scene of the battle formed the introduction to the film Lincoln of a few years back.

I’ve read that my great-grandfather’s Confederate unit took part in the Battle of Jenkins Ferry. If so, he was only about 50 miles away from where my other maternal great-grandfather was stationed with the First Indiana Cavalry. One’s daughter would marry the other’s son after the war and the family would be a bit confused forever thereafter.

If standing on the spot where history occurred doesn’t make your nerve-ending jingle a bit, I pity you. Here’s Great Grandpa Coats of the 23^rd Arkansas Infantry. He farmed and served as a part-time preacher after the war. His obituary noted that “… he never took part in a neighborhood brawl.” There’s something to be said for that.

A simple act of grace ...

You know, it seems sometimes like we’re running out of things for which to hate people. No, it’s true. A headline grabbed me this morning. This “pundit” named Laura Ingrahm was all over some candidate for the way she pronounced her name. Geez, I would think that if there ever was a personal freedom, it resided in the way we pronounce our own name.

Maybe Laura Ingrahm doesn’t think so. Or maybe she just picked up on another way to spread the kind of distrust, divineness, and, well … hatred that her particular career, and employer, demands.

With a name like mine, I’m a little sensitive about the topic. Southerners, in my experience, like to make a scene about how to say it. Jerks in the United States Navy had a field day with it. Sainted Mother bristled about it, but had a nice retort, for a while anyway, for tradespeople who made a scene about how to pronounce it. “It’s funny,” she would say, “but I have a three-year-son who can pronounce it without any trouble at all.” She used it until my little brother was about 15.

For reasons known only to himself, my father simplified (in his estimation) the spelling on our birth certificates. I think it had to with the fact that he was never particularly proud of his heritage, having gone through World War One as a teenager and having been subject to a number of sobriquets, the most benign of which was “dirty Hun.” Then, a man named Hitler finished off any lingering affinity with “the Fatherland.” Daddy even posted a sticker on the front window of our little grocery store, “Americanism, our only ‘ism.’”

That wasn’t like him, but it appeared during a period in which one of the greatest hate-mongers (a title now being severely challenged) America has produced was dominating the news cycle. Yes, that would have been Joseph McCarthy. People feared him, and his pit bull Roy Cohn, to the extent that they would often express a “sympathetic hatred” that they didn’t even feel. One can see it today if one looks hard enough.

But back to my name. Luckily, I once had a close attorney friend, a Harvard grad in fact, who started his own firm. Suffering from boredom during the startup period, he tempted me with several offers of free legal work. Failing at divorce, bankruptcy, a suit over a neighbor’s barking dog, or a class-action suit over the mental damages caused by the reading of Ayn Rand, he finally settled on getting my name spelled right, by court order, and for free.

From a simple act of kindness, I’m now able to, without fear of unkind criticism, express, with each signing, the full fact of Teutonic royalty in a name that once drew the sort of vitriol that fuels people like Laura Ingrahm.

So, there you go. Using the pronunciation (or spelling) of a person’s name as an act of love, rather than one of hate, seems a good move to me. In fact, wouldn’t this world be a better place for a day if we all decided that we won’t express any act of hatred? After all, it only points out to the world that we have an abscess on our soul.

Yes ... the "von" indicates royalty,
So take that, you fear-mongering
sack of ... . No, wait, I'm
supposed to be good today.
Belay my last. Insert instead,
"My precious friend."

A full heart ...

I never go out of my way to offend. Well, sometimes I veer that way, but, I hope, without malice. Today, though, my soul is too full. Please just give me some leeway for the outpourings of my heart at this moment.

First, let me say that I have had, and continue to have, close and dear friends on the other side of the political spectrum from me. I believe that they have sound beliefs and honest convictions. For example, concerns about the unbridled growth of government are valid, I believe. Also, I have found, during my professional career, that if one’s job is to write regulations, one tends to write regulations, whether they are needed or not. On the other hand, most agree with me that the climate is changing and that we need to address the issue.

So, we have many reasonable things to discuss rationally over a friendly beer or cup of coffee.

That stops, though, at some point. If one belongs to a political party that dishonors the military service of brave shipmates of mine like John Kerry or John McCain, then we have a problem, and I feel that I must acknowledge that, as I acknowledge the mendacity of my liberal colleagues who dishonor the brave police officers of our country.

I don’t support the morality of what John Kerry and John McCain were doing in Vietnam. Yet, while they were doing it, I was in the same military, doing exactly what my country told me to, at the same time, and close to the same place. I don’t support the morality of what my country had me doing, but, like those two heroes of mine, I did it because my country asked it of me. I didn’t think up the Vietnam War. Neither did John Kerry or John McCain. The Vietnam War was thought up by men who valued real estate above honor—men like Robert E. Lee. It was prosecuted by people like myself who believed service to their country shouldn’t be questioned.

So the two sailors did their duty. One survived the experience of war and went home. One had his plane shot down.  Both then achieved their moments of greatness. John Kerry spoke out against sending more of America’s finest young men and women to die in an unjust war. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” he asked.

John McCain spent five and a half years being brutally treated in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam. At one point therein, he was offered the opportunity to go home, due to the fact that that he was the son of an admiral who served honorably in “the good war.” The publicity would have greatly enhanced the international status of his captors.

“No,” said John McCain, “Not unless you release the other prisoners as well.”

Vietnam veterans have become used to, over the years, a lack of gratitude from their country for the service to it during that miserable “police action.”

None were ready, however, for the sight of a political party saying that John Kerry and John McCain were deserving of shame for their service, Kerry because he spoke “truth to power,” and McCain because he was “shot down.”

I hang my head in shame over this. We all should.

I’m not asking my friends on the other side of the political divide to abandon the valid beliefs of their party. I’m asking them to root out the evildoers who have taken it over. Replace the odious serpents that have hijacked the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. As the greatest of them said, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

It’s only a small step from the wrong side to the right side of history. Let us all believe again in honor above party, and let’s all go home together.

Humility ... fault or blessing?

Came in from a meeting last evening and was confronted by a sort of loudmouthed woman on TV who was maybe the 100^th person announcing for President of the United States. She had a voice that would peel wallpaper and seemed to be saying that her only fault was too much humility.

Ah well, I understand that. Humility has been heaped on me like sugar on a pudding lately. I even got a good dose of it at the meeting I attended. Some fellows want to build a sports facility for a city where I work. We discussed it at length. Looks like a good plan and they seem to be honest, conscientious men. The city will profit from it. Still, it brought back some painful memories.

See, if you’ve ever played sports, you’ve probably been involved in the picking of sides.

If you’ve ever been involved in the picking of sides, where one team gets to pick a player and then the other does, you may remember it.

If you are athletically-challenged, you may remember the process with some degree of pain.

If you have ever been left standing, the only one not chosen, you may remember the process with a great deal of humility.

If you’ve ever been asked to be the spectator instead of a player, you may grow up to detest sports.

Ah well. I drown those pains with thoughts of a renewed friendship of late with a high school running-buddy.

Oops. There goes another heap of humility. Not only was he smarter and more academically gifted than I, he was a star athlete. Not only was he as star athlete, he bore a resemblance to Paul Newman. Yeah, the Paul Newman. The one who gave Southern girls a case of “the vapors.” A close relative still gets a tear in her eye if I mention his name, which I won’t here. It would embarrass him and erode any sense of humility he might harbor.

We’ve been swapping tidbits of the stories of our lives, and it’s quite an enjoyable pastime. Of course, we’re not in high school anymore, so our remanences are more diversified than they might have been back then, chatter among boys in high school being mostly confined to one topic. That topic wasn’t the writings of Kant on moral imperatives, if you can imagine. Oddly enough, we never mention the high school topic at all anymore. But we do mention the writings of Joseph Campbell from time to time. Isn’t it funny how one’s perspective changes with the passing of years?

Thank goodness for time and humility. One ripens us and the other keeps us earthbound. Together, they allow us to treasure things like old friends, decent wine, sweet memories, and the wisdom that grows with old age.

I never made the football team and I never dated the cheerleaders. Later in life, though, I learned to play the banjo. There’s a leveling of life that keeps us humble, rough-hewn though it may be.

I did marry a
beautiful girl, though.

Lilacs in a garbage dump ...

A comment I heard from a post featuring Stephen Fry hung around my neck all day yesterday. He commented that, despite the rightful abhorrence of slavery, and certainly not for a millisecond condoning any aspect of it, there arose from it the [African-American] spirituals that have warmed our hearts and lifted our spirits for centuries.

It made me think of other atrocities and the tiniest rays of light that grew, despite massive efforts at repression, from those atrocities.

From the Jewish Holocaust, came some of the most heroic art as well as some of the most inspiring words ever penned by humans such as Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl.

From the Great Depression and Dustbowl tragedies in America, we received the words of John Steinbeck and the music of Woody Guthrie.

From the insanity of 9-11, we have the legends of heroic public employees who gave their lives to try and save other Americans whom they didn’t even know.

From the multiple-mendacities and criminal acts of the Vietnam War debacle, we treasure the words of Tim O’Brien and the heroism of a POW named John McCain. (Yes, John McCain, the memory of whose heroic sacrifice towers above the antics of his most recent critic like Mount Everest over a dung hill.

From World War One, we have some great poetic lines, such as those of Rupert Brooke,

“If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.”

And, of course, World War Two, for Americans, produced the greatest coming-home party ever witnessed, led by such songs as It’s been a long, long time, featuring what it probably the best guitar work (Les Paul) ever recorded on a popular song in America. (IMHO)

And, the monster Joseph McCarthy did, after all, produce the American hero Joseph Welch who laid him low and maybe saved America as we know it.

For me, it caused me to think about once when I toured a municipal garbage dump with a mayor. As we walked around the stench and filth of the facility, we came upon a small patch of blooming lilacs, proudly waving over the discarded trash of the city.

 Do we condone atrocities because some snippets of beauty may have grown from them? Certainly not. Our world would have a much better place had they never occurred. It may only signal to us that, in our darkest moments, some gleams of sanity and beauty may lie “a’borning.”

And, boy, do we Americans need those tiny bits of sanity and beauty now.

Yeah, it took a female and a 

sailor to provide an icon 

to victory in war.

My Theology Hour

An expert on theology I’m not, but I give it the honor of thought and reflection. I love the Galilean and like to keep up with him. Also, I read the Good Book through and through every few years. It does me no harm and I believe that one can’t truly begin to understand western literature without it. Last week, I mentioned, following the death of my only brother, my long-time problem with the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

See, I always felt that my parents favored my brother over me. Maybe it was true, maybe not. In my more rational moments, I imagined that my perception had some truth due only to the fact that he needed extra love and understanding. I’ve had more than one parent tell me that happens.

At any rate, my reconciliation with the parable came about when I considered it in a chronological context. There is a tendency for folks who’ve never read the whole Bible or studied its origins (seems to me that most fundamentalists fall into that category), to imagine that the books in the New Testament were written in the order presented in the store-bought version of the document.

Not true, say the experts. Many believe that the book of James is the oldest in the New Testament. They say it was written about, maybe AD 47-50. It’s one of my favorites. I treasure many lines, such as the ones about looking at your face in the mirror and then forgetting what you looked like. But … my real favorite is Verse 26: “Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.” Can’t tell you why, it just is.

Anyway, there was an active Christian community by the time the Gospels were written starting in AD 50-50. And if one believes, as I do, that that individual humans, with personal agendas, wrote those Gospels, there could have been some hidden motivations. Some of those early Christians were a fairly rowdy lot, I mean, getting drunk on the communion wine? When they weren’t doing this, or worse, I can imagine that they bitched about everything and anything, much like some (certainly not all) of their contemporary brothers and sisters. Which brings us to the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Imagine with me, if you will, that some of those early Christians may have drifted from the fold for a spell. Even the ultra-conservative Amish send their youth away temporarily to taste and, it is hoped, reject the foul and bitter fruits of the ungodly. As for those early Christians who did so, what happened when the wandering ones returned? Can’t you hear the rest of the congregation? “So we are just supposed to let them back in and feast upon the fatted calf, the calf, by the way, that we tended and nursed while they partied heartily? What about those of us who have stuck with one another through thick and thin and now see you letting the apostate return as if nothing happened? Is that what one gets for faithful and unbroken service? Well I never … .”

See the problem? What might work to sooth them better than, “Shut up?”

That’s right, a little teaching story from the (literary) lips of the Galilean himself. It won’t take away from the great words he uttered on the Mount and it might shut up the whiners. We’ll just slip it in and not say a word.

That’s the story of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in my opinion, for what the opinion of a “heathern” is worth.

Next, we’ll consider the parable that seems to suggest that rich men can pay their workers whatever the heck they choose and we should keep our mouths shut about it.

Embrace your wandering brother.
Better safe than sorry.

Thinking about good and evil ...

Yes I know it’s odd, but I like to get up early of a Saturday morning and multi-task on the computer with three hours of Hopalong Cassidy films in the background. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. I like Hopalong Cassidy films and I like mindless tinkering with the Internet early when there is no one else about. It all fits well together.

The movies are formulaic and predictable. They provide a certain appeal, though. Back when they were made, even B-movies deserved high-quality attention. The photography is well-composed and stunning, if repetitive. The dialogue is trite and sparse, if maudlin. Even a person advanced in age can understand the words, a welcome relief from the mumbled incoherence of today’s band of “actors.” The filming formula follows the practice initiated by D.W. Griffith in Intolerance. As the films enter the final denouement, the scenes get shorter and more dynamic. This contrasts well with the aggravating practice of modern directors who aren’t above a forty-minute car chase spoiling the final solution.

In short, old Hopalong benefited from a professionalism that eludes the angst-ridden “bumbalongs” that produce today’s offerings. Best of all, goodness, morality, and admirable motives always rule the day as the hero carries out his business. As an added bonus, one can sometimes catch a glimpse of then-unknown actors. I’ve noticed Jason Robards, Robert Mitchum, George Reeves, and others doing bit, or sometimes major, parts. Hope springs eternal.

There is, sadly, a lack of African-American characters in these films. The works emanated from the 1940s and 1950s, after all. Native Americans, Hispanics, and Chinese appear frequently, and Hoppy, on his horse Topper, always serves as their protector. The films also contain a parade of strong female character, some as mean as snakes. Hoppy converts those he can and sends the others away for safekeeping. Ethical confusion never spoils the ending of a Hopalong Cassidy film.

It all takes me back to a time before “situational morality” became an acceptable social motivator. Those old films remind one of Ansel Adams photographs or Dickens novels. In the photographs, Adams creates a range from pure white to pure black with the tones between providing our eyes a feast. And, like a work by Dickens, a “Hoppy” film includes characters from purely good to purely evil. Much of the crowd operates somewhere in between, but the good always wins.

Hopalong would never have mocked a disabled person. Nor could he have told a lie for personal gain, only during a ruse to trap an egocentric evildoer bent on deluding the honest but reason-challenged town folks. He solved problems by straight talk and righteous reasoning. His job was to join the community through love, not divide it through hatred. What a concept that is.

Yeah, yeah. The films are fluff, and watching them, even as background, seems to be a strange gig for a person of such taste and sophistication. But early mornings are for eccentricities, and, if you ask me, America could benefit these days from more Hopalongs and fewer “Liealongs.”

Here he comes.

I ponder care for others ...

My Little Buddy left on a jet plane yesterday for a much-deserved weekend of fun and relaxation in Houston with her cousin Phyllis Cole. Little Pal has been through a lot in the last few years, including the sale and subsequent demolition of her family home, built by her father’s hands on nights and weekends, after long days in cotton fields, when she was still just a twinkle in his eye. No two people ever doted on a child as Julius and Hazel Cole doted on their daughter. And she returned it stroke by stroke.

Then, a few days ago, she watched her last parent leave this life.

Regret? I suppose she’s had a few, but if there ever was a child who watched over and cared for her parents more loyally or faithfully, I’d like to know about it. It prompts me, this morning, to offer a few thoughts on final care. It is a particularly exhausting and trying experience to dedicate one’s life to a caring experience that offers no chance for cure.

To borrow a thought from Thomas Gray, the paths of final care “lead but to the grave.”

We never thought we would be placing the dear person I called “The Lady Hazel” in a nursing home. After all, her daughter was, by education and training, a Registered Nurse Practitioner. A person in her keep would have to be awfully sick before nursing home care would be required, wouldn’t they?

We underestimated things, including the process of caring for one who, because of the ravages of advanced dementia, had lost both the will and ability to move. Try assisting someone, who may appear frail, in meeting all the essential functions of life on a daily basis. After seven years, we made the painful decision to seek professional help. We opted for nursing home care.

Allow me to say a few words about it.

We had experience with two facilities in Central Arkansas. In both cases, we found the highest level of attention and concern. We found no fault with either. Perhaps we appreciated it all the more because we knew, first-hand, the trials of caring for, what the Galilean might have included as “the least of those among us.” Perhaps those who seek every opportunity to find fault with, and sue over, the slightest perceived neglect, have never experienced the necessity of removing a comatose patient from a bed for daily care.

Many of Hazel’s nursing home companions required such intimate care. Some didn’t. Some appeared to have been able to live at home with family if the family had been willing. One can only guess as to whether the unwilling were among the first to find fault with the care received. Me? I hypothesize a correlation.

It reminds me somehow of an experience I had as a young planner. For a project we had, the firm sent me to interview a young doctor of theology who was serving his ministry by managing an assisted care facility owned by his church. The talk turned to the topic of family visitation.

“Would you like to know?” he said, “who are the most pleased with, and who are the most heartbroken over visits from their family?”

I assumed it had to do with frequency of visits.

“No,” he said. “If a child says he or she can only come, say every two weeks, but makes that visit on schedule without fail, a parent is satisfied. But some promise weekly visits and miss half the appointed times. I’ve seen an elderly person sit with a packed suitcase waiting in the lobby for a weekend visit home, only to be forgotten.” That’s what brings heartaches, including to those who have to watch it.”

We’ll never know if Hazel even knew when her daughter visited. If she did, she knew one thing. She could count on it.

The Galilean knows that I am a “cultural Christian” and not a literal one. But I do believe in saints who walk this earth.

I’m married to one.

Yeah. I've been lucky.

Overcoming Guilt

I am, as most people know, about one wheel short of a semi-trailer rig. Take, for example, the concept of guilt. Oddly, I don’t feel guilty about having told some lesser being off, using swear words in at least four languages. No, in fact, I brag about such antics with Philosophy Club members who meet, from time to time, at E.J’s on the corner of 6^th and Center streets in my beloved city of Little Rock. They tend to guffaw at my antics and that makes me smile.

On the other hand, I feel guilty when I pick a turnip green, shredding its life in my fingers. I might add that such guilt only lasts until said plant, along with a crowd of its brothers and sisters, has been thoroughly washed, seasoned, boiled until it is tender and tasty, and served with other victims of planticide: juicy corn kernels made into a thick wholesome bread and accompanied by buttermilk.  Guilt only extends so far in my world, or so I'd like to believe.

Why bring this up? The latest guilt-laden escapade of mine involves a small wooden table. We, my wife and I, obtained it like most of the hundred thousand or so objects we own. People con us into taking them, she buys them at flea markets, people leave them to us, she picks them up from piles of discarded trash, she swaps her pal Nick Nicholson something for them, we inherit them, or people leave them at our doorstep, ring the doorbell, and run away.

Anyway, I have, after hours of sanding and stripping, reduced this table to near its natural state. This effort revealed that the top comprises a number of woods of different shades, textures, colors, and grain. Was this arrangement deliberate? We would have to travel back a hundred years, find an artisan, and beg for the truth. To hell with that.

What I want to do is paint it and use it as a “splash of color” in a lonely corner of a bathroom in our Lonoke house. The color I’ve chosen is Pantone Color Institute’s color of the year, “Living Coral. That places me among the elite cadre of tasteful aficionados who cherish the dernier cri. Look:

So, why the guilt? Am I killing the soul of this antique table by converting it to a “splash of color?” After all, when it was first utilized, there was no such thing as color in poor rural homes, only drab furniture on the floor, and newspapers pasted on the walls and ceilings.

Am I demeaning history?

It gets worse. Taking Herself to Lowes to seek out the Color of the Year, I found the closest thing I could and suggested it.

“No.”

“What?”

“Here.” She pointed.

Now, raw courage came into play. At the risk of divorce at best and a session with “Mr. Louisville” at worst, I managed, in as strong a voice as I could manage, on the floor of Lowes, “My precious. I love you like Jesus loves a sinner. And if a hand grenade bounced down the aisle, I would jump atop it to save you.”

“But?”

“But, Navy Blue is not ‘a splash of color.’”

It still stands in limbo. Anonymous suggestions would be welcomed.

My Redacted Life: Pets of all sorts

We had been married maybe six months and were enjoying the home we purchased on the GI Bill. My beautiful, long-haired redhead—no longer long-haired and no longer a redhead, but still breathtakingly beautiful—decided we needed a dog. Six months of marriage had been enough to teach me that total and complete acquiescence greatly trumped any attempt at Pauline male dominance.

So she found a dog, and thus began a, so-far, 46 year-old family protocol. Feeling Biblical that day, we named him Jeremiah. He was a mutt, black with orange circles above his eyes, perhaps evolutionarily designed to convince predators that he was awake, when actually he was sleeping, which was most of the time.

Having grown to adulthood, he discovered the joy of eating, or attempting to eat, anything left within reach. He particularly enjoyed my treasured edition of Victorian poetry, but he shunned no potential meals. This brought him into contact with Marcel the Mystery Plant.

Marcel was a gift from a neo-hippy friend named Wes. With a gnome-like appearance and a taste for all things from the 1960s, he was a favorite with young kids who hung out at the Art Center. Thus, we understood it when he brought us a small container of soil and a mystery seed, explaining that some of the kids who gathered at his place were untrustworthy, whatever that meant.

We planted the seed and cared for the resulting plant. Of course, being good Methodists, we had no idea what kind of plant it was, but we nourished the slender young thing, awaiting our friend’s return for it. Going through a Gaulian phase, we named it Marcel.

It had grown to approximately a foot in height, with nice, long, serrated leaves when Jeremiah noticed it. It sat in a quiet corner of the kitchen where watering was simple and, since we feared there was something vaguely sinister about it, out of sight from most visitors.

Well anyway, Jeremiah quietly watched Marcel grow, giving us no indication of impending “planticide.”

Then one Sabbath morning, Marcel was gone, nipped down to soil level. Jeremiah lay beside it with the spots over his eyes doing a sort of “ping-pong” dance over the most innocent-looking canine face one could imagine. Every once in awhile, he would make this dog-moan, like Lassie had just walked by wearing a bikini.

It got worse. Brenda was cooking breakfast when her mother called to inquire about any intentions we had of attending church services that day. It took some time for her to employ her best prevarication skills and get us excused. When she returned to the kitchen, the remnants of an entire package of raw bacon lay scattered about the kitchen floor.

An emergency?

She thought so, and demanded that I find a vet who answered calls on Sunday. For once in our marriage, I refused a direct order, saying, “You call one and explain what just happened."

We compromised. I sat in a chair and watched Jeremiah for any sign of seizures or fits. He had none. Rather, he just belched bacon grease for several hours, hummed tunes like “Come on Over to the Other Side,” and from time to time looked up at me and said, “Far out man.” His eye spots danced in rhythm with the music and he would shake his head from side to side, especially when he did, “Don’t Bogart That Joint, My Friend.”

We lost a pound of bacon that day. Jeremiah lost his innocence. Marcel lost his life. Our friend Wes lost his safe house, and the 1960s lost some of the allure that had drifted with us along a smoke-filled path through time.

Jeremiah stayed with us, apparently un-phased by the experience, for 16 years. I don’t like to talk about the day he passed over the Rainbow Bridge, so we’ll leave him with the memory of moaning, “My Sweet Lady Jane.”

Yeah, I know. She's never
held me like that.

Why we are who we are

It’s interesting. There are approximately four billion DNA base pairs, or letters, that make up the human genome, an organism's complete set of DNA. Think about that for a moment.

While you are thinking, consider that a typical internal combustion engine car has about 10,000 moving parts.

Oh, you science majors may say that is a false comparison. That doesn’t make it less interesting. Science haters may say that it is false news. They learned so on Facebook. That doesn’t make things less scary.

Anyway, think about how many moving parts must operate in both unison and harmony for an automobile to be a Honda Accord instead of a Jeep Cherokee. Of course, an automobile is not the direct product of evolutionary forces acting unaided upon, as it now seems accepted, the genetic structure of an existing body. That’s why we can put it in working order with 10,000 moving parts.

That’s also why it took three billion DNA pairs and four billion years to produce a modern member of Homo sapiens. Now that’s a lot of connections working at once, the product of what Charles Darwin called “descent with modification.” Some connections serve uses that are no longer needed. Some confuse us. I read somewhere once that there is a genetic mechanism in our makeup that served to keep us alert when we shared the Savannah with creatures that ate humans for breakfast, lunch, and supper. No, it didn’t serve to warn us of danger. It warned us of a perceived lack of danger, for a feeling of safety may be the most dangerous condition of all in a violent world.

In other words, “You think things are fine? Think again.”

Could that archaic mechanism be what makes it counter-productive to tell a person suffering from chronic depression to, “Cheer up. Everything is going to be all right?”

Why do I bring this all up? It evolves (no pun intended) from a sermon I heard yesterday, full of the love and grace that eludes most TV evangelists. It included a story of a young man who was almost suicidal because his 3 billion DNA pairs had produced a sexual orientation that differed from his parents, siblings, and the majority of his peers. Why the difference? I don’t know. Multiply 3 billion DNA pairs times four billion years and look therein for the answer.

Do I understand it correctly from my friends who are fundamentalist evangelicals that we are somehow spiritually ordained to hate a person who has a slight difference in his genomic makeup from mine?

Am I supposed to assume that this slight difference is not the result of DNA but the result of a conscious decision by a fourteen-year old that puberty, psychic anxiety, fear of the future, a lack of popularity among peers, and a world seemingly gone insane does not produce enough psychic terror in one’s life? That, in order to round things out, he or she might just choose to adopt a lifestyle that would make them an object of un-reasoned hatred in members of society, including the adults who are supposed to be in charge?

I once knew an individual who thought so. “It’s a choice,” this person avowed, “a result of our ‘old sin nature’ generated by the Devil himself.”

Our what? Only someone as nefarious and full of venom as Franklin Graham could believe that.

As a side note, this individual assured me that a college professor had taught his class, at a central Arkansas university (not my Alma Mater thankfully), that a homosexual could be identified by a certain bump at a location in a certain place on their forehead.

I can’t find one on mine, although I do think Orlando Bloom is awfully sexy.

Anyway, this post-factual age could get me down if I didn’t occasionally run across thoughtful, caring, loving sermons like the one I saw yesterday. Contact me for a source.

There is hope. Study and believe.

Riches, divorce, and Girl Scout cookies ...

Just finished “Theology Hour” for this Sunday morn. I know. I know. “Heatherns” have no right to study what the Galilean said. But he assured me it was okay. In fact, he even asked me a couple of questions. We, the two of us, have our “coffee-talkee” early on Sunday mornings. So we had a nice visit today, although he was an hour late. Don’t ask me what he thinks of Daylight Savings Time. Anyway, we talked.

First, he wanted to know what kind of Bible people had that was signed by a man who has had a couple of unjustified (his words) divorces and who worships riches above all things?

“Wasn’t I pretty clear about that?”

“Seemed so to me,” I said, “but remember that I tend toward secular humanism.”

“I don’t judge you for that,” he said, “even told the Pope so.” In fact, that brings up another point.”

I waited.

“Girl Scout cookies,” he said. That made me look his way. “I like Girl Scout cookies,” he said. “Especially the Thin Mints. ‘Johnnie the B-Man’ likes the Shortbreads. Says they remind him of the taste of raw honey. The rest of our bunch likes any of them, as long as they don’t have to pay for them.” He made a humorous squinting face and said, in a mocking falsetto voice nodding his head from left to right, “If you can make water into wine, surely you can make mud pies into Girl Scout cookies.”

“Girl Scout cookies?”

“Didn’t I read where some jerk hates a woman in a different political party who was a Girl Scout, so he wants to boycott their cookies?”

“I think so. Is there anything you’d like to pass along to him and his people?”

“Yeah,” he said. “If you get the chance, tell them that they’d better not make me come back down there again.”

He was getting into a mood, so we finished our coffee and he parted. I picked up the Scriptures again, the volume that doesn’t redact the parts about riches, divorce, judging others, the Sermon on the Mount, and the 25^th Chapter of Matthew, i.e. the “autographable version.”

Next week, I think I’ll take up the Parable of the Prodigal Son. That one has always bothered me, for I’ve felt at times that my parents always favored my brother over me. If you have any ideas, I’d welcome them.

As we would say in the Sixties, “Peas and harmony grits.”

Saying goodbye ....

Finally said goodbye to the brother today. Time to move on. I let go of a lot of stuff, junk mostly. What I kept were some memories of the best times we ever had together.

It was back in 1970. When I left Vietnam, I wound up on a Navy ship in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the meanest cities to strangers in the U.S. at that time. Meantime, he had enlisted in the United State Marines for reasons known only to himself. After boot camp and schooling, he ended up at Camp Lejeune in southern North Carolina for some sort of advanced training. It was close enough to where my ship docked that we got together weekends when we could.

The people and police in Charleston hated blacks, servicemen, and people who had come there since 1680 in pretty much equal proportions. Scoring two out of three, I needed all the friendly faces I could find. So, brother and I spent some weekends there, often in the company of James Huddleston from Thayer, Missouri and/or Sidney Bussey from Douglas, Georgia. My brother had no civilian clothes, so we all wore uniforms, which meant that it was best for us to stay out of sight as best we could. We three sailors had seen what the local peacekeepers could do to one of our breed after seeing a few of them carried aboard the ship after exceeding some local rule or other.

It wasn’t a pretty sight, so we avoided the good people of Charleston as best we could.

It was enough for us simply to find an affordable motel room and spend time just watching TV, drinking beer, and lying around without being yelled at during a weekend, quite suitable for lonely men far from home. You had to be there. It lasted for several months before an incurable allergic reaction to combat-boot leather ended his career with an honorable discharge, a promotion to Lance Corporal, and orders to Westpac, i.e. Vietnam, laying on the Personnel Officer’s desk.

Once, just the two of us had a little extra money and landed in a pretty nice motel with a friendly bar next door. Too friendly I guess. I woke up the next morning with no memory of walking back. With that great smile of his, he explained it. I had made it fine until we reached the bottom of the stairs leading to our second-floor room. Thereupon, I needed help up, like a sinner being led to salvation.

He wasn’t a big man, my brother. But with muscles toned by the Marine Corps, he was making steady but noisy progress until we were halfway up the stairs. When the manager of the motel came out to check on the commotion, he asked if help was needed.

According to a now long-time family legend, the response was fast and firm. “He ain’t heavy mister. He’s my brother.” I have no proof that it happened that way, but, as they said in the John Wayne movie, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It's one of the stories he would tell until he died.

So I leave you with this. It’s a song about a wandering performer, but it made me think of my brother and, given his love for all things Jimmy Buffett, I choose it with which to say goodbye.

Some stories are worth telling.
Some may not be.

A Blessing After a Tough Day

I received a late-evening blessing yesterday after a tough month. Ironically, I also received some of the best thoughts on urban planning I’ve heard in ages, all from a self-made millionaire.

It happened this way.

After experiencing the lingering death of two family members, and two funerals within a week, I was deflated and exhausted, ready for a “Maker’s and Three Cubes,” and some meaningless TV. Then I received a call from a close relative in my hometown where the second funeral had occurred only hours before.

I groaned, but answered. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but maybe he was needing a friendly voice. So, we talked. For a brief background, let’s just say that this individual rose from being homeless (no, not on the street but borrowing a spot on the floor of a friend’s college dormitory room) to working on his second, or third (I’m not sure) million, in two decades.

He made his first the hard way. He worked for it. An old man taught him to repair HVAC systems and he eventually started his own company. After years of hot August days in attics around town, he gained a reputation as being good at his craft, honest, and one who treats everyone he worked for, “the same.” That last descriptor is a positive one in my hometown.

See, my hometown is a bi-racial city. That means it deals with challenges that all-white communities don’t recognize, believing instead that their superior righteousness accounts for all their success. My hometown must deal with mistrust and prejudices that began shortly after companies in Europe started sending settlers to take over the New Land in the 1600s. It also must deal with the lingering effects of a people who, back in the day, no matter how righteous they were, and how hard they worked, were denied access to The Avenue of Success.

Now to this individual’s second million. He began investing, a few years back, in houses that had once served middle class white families. (If you are unfamiliar with that term, look it up in an economic history of the U.S.). These were sound houses that could be purchased at a discount in my hometown and rented for a positive, but not onerous, cash flow.

It has worked well for him and we drifted into a discussion about it. He explained the cash flow system and how he felt he was preserving a valuable housing stock in the city from ultimate deterioration.

“My concern,” I said, “would be getting reliable renters.” Friends know that my home town doesn’t share the same good reputation as “white-flight” or “sundown” cities. We mostly read about its problems.

Showing some impatience, he replied, “Let me tell you something. There is a strong population in this city of black families who work just like we do and want the same things we do: a good job, a decent place to live—to rent if they have to until they can afford to own—and are as reliable tenants as you can find. I have no problems. My renters want to work and to do well.”

“So why,” I said, “do we not hear accounts of this strong black middle class in the city? We just hear about the problems.”

“Beats me,” he said. “Ask your friends in the news business.”

I changed the subject. “Are there any new homes being built in the city?”

“A few,” he said. “There would be more if the city would clean up some junky spots and make land available in stable areas.” ("Junky spots." Urban planners don't use that term. Too bad.)

“And? Does it?”

“No, they want to plant trees on Main Street to solve our problems. And some college kids came down and solved things. Someone told them that if they would build a giant Ferris Wheel by the lake, folks would flock here to see it.”

Yes, I thought, there is a lingering belief among some in our state that urban planning is so simple college kids can do it. I changed the subject again. “And what effect will this proposed casino have on your middle-class population?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not a good one.”

“So you are saying things would work out better if the city concentrated on improving the basics of life?”

“The people I rent to deserve a path to continue improving their lives,” he said.

Probably, I thought. If they have that, the future of the city will take care of itself.

I thought about all those fancy-assed urban design consultants that Arkansas cities bring in from New York. Then I thought about what this man was telling me. (Disclosure: He’s my nephew and I’m proud of him).

Maybe, just maybe, I can learn more from him about urban planning that I could from some arrogant jerk from “Back East.”

Further, maybe, just maybe, we fall into the trap, in my profession, of listening to the wrong people.

It's simple really.
Why make it hard?