BALMS

My professional career centered on urban planning. By some accounts, I was fairly successful at it. That, as H.L. Mencken once observed, is for future biographers to decide.

Along the way, I’ve experienced many insights and more than a few epiphanies. The most dramatic of the latter occurred one afternoon in the Baring Cross neighborhood of North Little Rock, Arkansas.

I was touring the area, on assignment from the city, and profiting from the insights of attorney/developers Jim Jackson and Lisa Ferrell, folks I’d like to know better. The pair had invested in this troubled neighborhood, once a solid settlement of railroad families who raised children with love, now a meeting place for drug dealers who settled accounts with firearms.

Jim introduced me to one of their tenants and excused himself to attend a problem. A woman in, maybe, her late thirties stood by her gate and agreed to talk. Let me add that, at the time, I felt quite sure of myself. I had achieved honors in my profession, even assumed leadership roles. The squishy enthusiasm of professional gurus had led me into a world of vacuous terms like “sense of space” and “community engagement.” In other words, I served a profession that claimed to be able to spread fairy dust over a multitude of social problems.
“How would you describe the feelings of your neighbors about the community?” I said, following the urge to seek a soothing balm.

Her answer changed my life.

“Mr.,” she said, “I work two jobs to support me and my two boys. I come home from the first as they get home from school. I lock them in and threaten hell and damnation if they leave the house ‘til I get back. During breaks at my second job, I go somewhere and pray that they don’t escape and run into a drive by. I don’t know my neighbors and they don’t know me.”

That’s when I realized that my job was not to plan urban playgrounds for rich people. That’s when I quit rationalizing that the balm for people that were hurting was to show them pictures of where people lived who weren’t in pain, observable pain that is.

As I say, that meeting changed my life.

Morning Thoughts

 October 17, 2026

My thoughts of a Saturday morn.

She existed, but we didn’t know why. The other classmates knew her by Betty but none of us had ever passed as much as the time of day with her. She rode the school bus with an assortment of rural kids. Most remained anonymous. We paid them no attention, having other things to amuse us.

How she ended up in advanced English with our eleventh-grade class remained a mystery known only to those higher on the phylogenetic scale than we. Maybe she had shown promise somewhere. Maybe they felt sorry for her. We didn’t care.

But there she sat each day, a rather plain young girl, stocky but not overweight, wearing dresses probably inherited from an older sister. Her round, featureless face stared ahead. She said little. We paid, as I have said, no attention to her one way or another.

Until that day.

That was the day Mrs. Morgan, our teacher, imposed the harsh penalty that required each of us to read something we had written.

Oh, it proved a sad affair. It featured much itchy drivel, pompous buffoonery, and self-conscious mutterings with no shred of promise.

Until it came to Betty.

She stood, took a deep breath, and spoke for the first time we remembered. And when she spoke, something magic emerged and circled our hearts. It was a poem. It rhymed and everything. Best I remember, it told of a young girl with no hope in life watching from a porch each day as people passed. Words flowed in a misty rhythm that settled upon us like the thought of a smile from long ago. She finished to silence, nodded, and sat. I thought I saw one of the rich girls in class dab an eye. A football star said, “Damn.” Mrs. Morgan sat speechless.

Perhaps she copied that poem from a dusty book in a home with no indoor plumbing. Perhaps an older sister helped her on a kitchen table, writing by a coal oil lantern. Maybe she found a quiet place somewhere and let her heart flow among the poverty and hopelessness, and just for a brief moment she was a princess.

I like to think it was the latter.

DAILY THOUGHTS

  AS THINGS STAND

It's going on two years since I can remember a general rain crossing our state.

The aquifer supplying our drinking water is diminishing.
We are pressuring cities to provide data center cooling water instead of drinking water.
Corporations profiting from the drought are making record profits.
I-40 in our state will be impassable in five years.
Public transportation is considered obsolete and suitable only for proles.
Gasoline is right at four dollars a gallon where I live.
Regional hospitals disappear one by one.
Working families are one illness away from bankruptcy.
My tax dollars?
In our state, they are going to teach children that I, and others who don't believe as their parents teach us, will burn in an everlasting fire when we die.
If we could see the stars at night they might twinkle in laughter.