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.