EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 WORDS

A couple of things I’ve seen recently bother me. One happened yesterday when I clicked a YouTube video featuring a replay of a local TV news show reporting a rape. All was fine except that the word “rape” was blocked. Same-same the “F” word or the other six forbidden utterances. Something is wrong here and I struggle to imagine just what it is.

I’m not a fan of gory, but I do revere history. The old films of war and holocaust now suffer from having explicit scenes and photos of dead bodies blurred. Disclosures appear before ads and videos warning that the following may make someone uncomfortable.

Have we gotten too “woke?”

I fear it may be so. Will the word “Nazi” be blurred in future telecasts because millennials don’t “feel safe” when they hear it? How about "Manson, Bundy, Dahmer, and Gingrich?"

I tell you what makes me feel “not safe.” It’s the wimping and bastardization of human intercourse and the blurring of reality in the name of succor. I've been so "not feeling safe" in my life that I would have emptied a clip on my Sainted Mother had she come screaming out of the jungle at me. I think it served to make the rest of my life more joyous. Reality teaches and strengthens. An impenetrable wall to block fear is nothing more than a woke Plato's Cave. 

The unfortunate result of all this? I’m drifting farther from the left and toward the center. I’ll never reach the cruelty, selfishness, and irrationality of the right, but the extreme left may lose a tacit supporter. And just ask those who participated in the American revolution, women’s suffrage, or the civil rights struggle how important tacit support is.

Facts and Fear

When I was eleven, my father landed me a summer job on a milk truck. Sainted mother roused me at 1:00 a.m., the driver would pick me up, and for ten hours, with a break for breakfast, we would roam the dark streets of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

There were mean dogs and dim hallways, but the most terrifying spot was a block east of Main Street, a Catholic church complex. I would walk down an unlit alley, scoot under a broken fence slat, cross a yard, put two homos, i.e. bottles of homogenized milk (more innocent times), on the back porch, pick up two empties, and run like the devil was after me. It wasn’t the devil I feared. It was the thought of running smack dab into a nun in that dark and fearsome place.

I don’t know from where the fear arose. I had never seen a real nun. Maybe I had heard hyperbolic tales from my Catholic pals. Anyway, I trembled at the prospect until one morning our truck broke down and we didn’t make the church until dawn was breaking. The creeping light comforted me, and I walked bravely through the fence and into the yard. As I turned toward the porch, there stood, a few feet away … a nun reaching for the milk. I can’t describe her except to say that she had the most beautiful and comforting face I had ever seen. She smiled and that smile lightened my “postage stamp world” so much that the humbled sun halted its feeble progress for a second or two. I smiled back, took the empties, and strolled back to the truck, never to fear that spot again.

Facts and reality can cure fear. Perhaps they could cure hate as well, if we would only look.

My Reacted Life: Chapter 33

Some things were simpler for a planning and engineering firm in 1972. Some weren’t. Take an interesting project at a Little Rock landmark. It unfolded like this.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had decided to move its staff operations from the Capitol grounds to site adjacent to the new I-430 bypass in West Little Rock. It was to be part of a large campus to be called the Natural Resources Complex or something like that. Since it would also house state agencies like the Plant Board and Crime Laboratory, the architect for the Game and Fish boys thought some advanced site planning would help. Jack Castin was the perfect choice for the assignment.

There was another reason that site planning from an outside source would come in handy. Jack would find out about that later.

Everyone was in a hurry, a big hurry. Jack needed an accurate topographical map and a professional surveyor would need time to prepare one. Nope. We had to get started. The U.S. Geological maps had general topo lines, but their accuracy was unknown and the scale was unusable.

Ron McConnell and I put our heads together. Through an elaborate scheme that involved putting an accurate and measured line on the small drawing, and having our old friend Bob Wilson photograph and enlarge it to another semi-precise length, we produced a fair representation of a topo map at a workable scale. It would serve until the surveyor had prepared a more accurate version. We prided ourselves. The boss smiled. The architect okayed it. Jack went to work.

Then he learned the news.

Not being from Little Rock, he didn’t know that the plot of land they handed him contained the bodies of inmates who had died, with neither resources nor family, while housed in the state mental hospital. In those days, the government cared for the mentally disabled in public institutions rather than medicating them and turning them out alone to fend for themselves. That’s a topic for another day.

What we faced now was a site irreverently known to generations of Little Rock natives as “Crazy Graveyard.” It lay right in the middle of the property. It served, in addition to incarcerating the indigent, as a favorite “parking” spot for teenagers, young boys hoping that fear of the “undead” might serve as an aphrodisiac, and young girls willing to go along for one ride too many. Adding extra spice to the experience was a long-standing legend that the bodies therein were buried in a vertical position to conserve space. That allowed their ghosts quicker access to the real world.

Old timers say it worked as a love nest, Crazy Graveyard did. Who knows how many successful citizens of today might trace their origins to the site?

Anyway, the situation led to a great deal of consternation. What to do with the location of so many unclaimed and unknown bodies? The boys at Game and Fish didn’t care much one way or another. Truth be known, the architects didn’t either. Jack, being Catholic, wanted a resolution. Questions only produced a great deal of embarrassment and cover-up from state officials. Turns out that there had never been a state employee who had been the least bit involved in disposing of those bodies.

“What bodies?” they explained.

Eventually, some portion of the site remained a memorial. Jack did a masterful job of planning the site, as always. The architects were happy. The boys at Game and Fish were relieved, and the world continued to rotate on its axis.

Oh, and what about the makeshift topo map Ron and I came up with? It proved incredibly accurate as it turned out. Our technique came in handy, although later what took us three days would only take a few strokes of a keyboard.

I don’t know what they do with the bodies of mentally deficient paupers these days. They don’t keep many of them in public institutions, I am told, long enough to expire. They die on the streets and become somebody else’s problem.

Growing Up Southern: March 13, 2018

On June 1, 1947, a tornado tore through our community south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It resulted in the death of 34 people, including 21 children.

Our family had gone to Hot Springs that day and missed the actual event. Returning, we found that the home just north of ours was gone—not demolished, but gone—as was the home to the south of us. The storm destroyed 50 homes and damaged 500 others. A prominent farmer, his wife, and two children died when the funnel lifted their home and turned it upside down in Bayou Imbeau a couple of miles from us.

We would find that six teenagers died when the storm demolished a house less than a city block from ours. The news reports graciously called it “a rural youth center.” Actually, it was a vacant home where teenagers gathered of a Sunday afternoon for a friendly craps game.

Our home, attached to our country grocery, suffered only from a large oak tree blown over on the western end of the structure. That night, National Guard troops stood guard in our neighborhood to prevent looting. I’ve told before how my father gave away the contents of our grocery to the victims, ultimately going bankrupt as a result of his goodness.

Today though, I’m thinking of another subject: embedded terror. Although our family didn’t witness the storm, nor was our home destroyed, terror invaded the area like a dreadful germ left by a malicious wanderer. My best childhood friend would tremble and cry whenever a thunderstorm threatened, as would our family dog, Bob. Both had seen the storm and bore witness to its power. The fear of storms proved contagious to us all.

We feared the reoccurrence of another storm like the children of Europe must have feared another war. It was a silent, insidious terror that never left, lurking below the surface of our awareness. So it was, sometime later, when a warning was issued for a storm headed directly at our grade school.

I was in the third grade, in Miss Roundtree’s class. She was hardly past 21 years of age and the heart-throb of every boy in school. We would have faced a tribe of wild Apaches for her, even charged into a Nazi machine gun nest, had she but given the fateful order.

A tornado though? That was something different. Few students remained at the school at that moment. Only the children, of whom I was one, who waited each afternoon, under the guidance of a teacher, for the arrival of the school bus that transported “the country kids” home.

We had been shuffled into the northeast portion of the school building, our elders assuming that any storm would arrive from the southwest, from Texas. We knew how to “duck and cover” in preparation for physical emergences, and were quite ready and willing to do so.

Then Miss Roundtree announced a new plan. There was no use going to the trouble of diving under our desks unless the storm was actually upon us. We needed a lookout. A dozen sets of eyes bore into the floor, hoping to burn a hole wide enough to allow an escape from the honor.

It seemed, of a sudden, that everyone, save me, disappeared. “You,” our dream-goddess said, pointing a finger at a spot between my eyes, “Come with me.”

Off we went to the most southwestern classroom in the building. I lacked the height to see through the window, so Miss Roundtree pulled up a chair on which I could stand to watch for the terror, should it appear. My instructions were simple. “When you see a funnel cloud coming, jump down, run fast, and warn us.

Then she left. Before her footsteps faded, I heard it thunder.

I felt an electric charge on the back of my tongue, a sensation with which I would become familiar as I passed through life. Awaiting the unmanageable terror, I think I may have experienced, to some small degree, the fear that must accompany any child heading off today to what should be the most joyous and exciting period of their lives, the carefree wonder of school days. I wonder how many instead, should they hear a sharp and unknown sound, will feel that surge of electricity at the back of their tongues.

Unless you have felt it, in the singular and unwarranted way a seven-year old might feel it, you have no idea what an evil organization the National Rifle Association has become.

Terror requires eternal vigilance.