My Redacted Life: New friends, new challenges ...

Now that I had moved from one beat away from a heart attack to jogging up to three miles a day, I was feeling pretty cocky. Oh yes, it cost the price of some new clothes, but that was a joy. I decided to wait on purchasing new suits in case I should become a “backsliding sinner” and get fat again. Meantime I practiced this little “strutting jog” like I was something special.

A great humbling event awaited me. It began one day when a moving van moved alongside the vacant house just to the south of us. I paid little attention at the time. I had heard a rumor that a couple of attorneys were moving in. I couldn’t imagine what impact that would have on housing values in the area, but it didn’t bode well. I went about my business.

Then the sun rose on a wonderful spring morning and I decided to do the jogging part of my daily routine outdoors. Accordingly, I ambled north on Spring Street and wound my way to the Arkansas River and back. When I turned onto Broadway and came to our house, I couldn’t help noticing a lone figure standing in a massive bathrobe in the yard next door. He held the morning newspaper in his hand and waved at me with the other. I walked over and introduced myself. I started to say something, but he interrupted.

“Do you jog?”

I thought of some snide answer such as, “No, I was running away from home but changed my mind.”

I said, “Yes.” I started to summarize my near-death experience with calories and high blood-pressure, when he interrupted again. Would I like company some day when jogging?

“I said sure. When?”

“I’ll meet you out here tomorrow, the same time you left this morning.” With that he spun around and went back into his house.

I thought no more about it until that evening. Over the supper table, I asked Brenda if she had met our new neighbors. “No, have you?”

“One,” I said. “We’re going jogging together in the morning.”

“Oh,” she said. “Is he a jogger?”

I thought of some snide answer such as, “No, but he saw me doing it and couldn’t wait to try it himself.” I thought better of it. Snide remarks did not exist in her lexicon of appropriate responses. “I guess he does, but he doesn’t look too athletic to me. I hope he can keep up.”

At a few minutes past the appropriate time the next morning, I arrived at the appropriate corner. He stood waiting, hopping from foot to foot as if they were each on fire. “You’re late,” he said.

I thought of a snide answer, but I lost it while examining his appearance. He was a few inches shorter than I, and he maybe weighed half as much. His slender body rested atop two spindly legs that looked more like giant toothpicks than human appendages. He wore a baseball hat from some bank or other. He announced the route, spun around, and hopped off. I say “hopped” because each step sent him high into the air and he was halfway down the block before my brain cells communicated, “jog.” I ran to catch up and immediately begged for mercy. He said nothing but slowed to a pace that I could manage. He looked over at me as if I were a miserable species left over from the Cambrian Explosion. I smiled and shrugged. I could have sworn I heard him grunt.

Thus began a journey that was to include thousands of miles and untold adventures.

Lo, how the mighty are fallen.

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.

My Redacted life: A break

Sometimes the present invades the past. Sometimes the two merge. I must take the day to mourn the passing of a friend, a good friend. It’s what unmanned me so yesterday.

Don Zimmerman was more than a friend to me. He could be a mentor, story-teller, historian, confidant, and fine boss. Some people pass through your life. He altered mine, for the better, though some would say he didn’t have far to go.

He directed the Arkansas Municipal League for more than 40 years. I guess I first saw him around 1971, and each year thereafter. About 20 years ago, he became my boss. He wasn’t a full-time boss but hired me as a planning consultant for the Municipal League. I would be available to visit cities and help with planning and zoning issues. We also sat through many legislative committee hearings together. And for those 20 years, I’ve written a monthly column on planning issues for the League magazine: City and Town.

It ranks as the most precious part of my long career.

I’ve been free to do additional work for cities wanting to go beyond the one day provided by the League. That made me very successful. I own a huge debt to Don Zimmerman for the friendship and assistance provided over the years.

Don died yesterday, from complications caused by a stroke. He was only a year older than I. Arkansas will never be the same. Arkansas cities have suffered an irretrievable loss. Our cities will suffer the impact of his passing for years.

Don’s achievements transcend my meager abilities of description. One stands out, though. I’m brash enough to think it was among his very favorites, for a number of reasons.

When Ronald Reagan abruptly cut states and cities off from what was known as “General Revenue Sharing” with no plan or policy to soften the blow, our cities faced bankruptcy. They were choosing which police officers and firefighters to cut from the payroll first. Some faced shutting down entirely.

Don, in his typical “let’s fix the problem” frame of mind, helped assemble a bi-partisan (yes, “bi-partisan”—I know it sounds strange these days) coalition that convinced our state legislature to enact a law allowing what was known as the “local option sales tax.”

Many consider the sales tax as regressive, but that isn’t the issue. The issue was that the law saved Arkansas cities and Don Zimmerman left this earth laying justifiable claim to the results.

He left this earth with countless more claims to glory, ones that I’m sure his friends will recount. One obscure accomplishment that won’t make the news is his lifting an obscure urban planning consultant from the depths of obscurity into a position of some minor respect.

For those friends and supporters who believe in a heaven for good people, be assured that Don is there, and already preparing plans to annex the underworld, incorporate it as a city, and straighten it out.

Thanks for everything,
old friend You did well.

.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Five (Cont._4)

After a couple of months on a new job in a new city my social life began to improve. I actually had a date, fixed up by Tom Hodges. It didn’t amount to much. It was a woman with whom I had attended college. She was divorced and had four children. We had a nice time but nothing came of it except for a lingering wonderment on my part on how a couple could make four children before deciding they couldn’t live together.

I guess I had a lot to learn about the new world to which I had returned.

A more lasting event occurred one evening while I was practicing guitar of a Friday evening. I had purchased an old Gibson sunburst from a sailor aboard the Hunley and had become intimate friends with it. As I tried my hand at fingerpicking a tune, I heard lumbering footsteps ascending the stairway. When they turned toward my apartment, I laid the guitar aside and went to the door.

I opened it and there stood a close friend from my college days, a man named George M. Owen. He clutched a six-pack of cold beer in his arms, so I knew he had come with no evil intent in mind. I welcomed him in with enthusiasm and he handed me the beer, a late housewarming gift. I bade him sit, removed two beers, handed him one, and took the rest to the refrigerator.

My oh my, did we have a lot to catch up on. Nearly five years had passed since I saw him last. We both looked that much older and possessed a great deal of information about the lost years. He was working for a local architect and had taken up the banjo. He told me of a group he had joined called The Rackensack Society. It was a bunch of folk music enthusiasts and entertainers that included amateurs, semi-professionals, and even some prominent names like legendary political cartoonist George Fisher.

The group met the first Monday of the month at the Arkansas Art Center and would welcome me with open arms. Me? Aside from family, no one had welcomed me with open arms in years. Was he sure? Yes. Actually, they did, and I stayed close to the group for years, until a work assignment took me away on meeting nights.

That evening, we finished the beer and began swapping tunes on the Gibson. I broke out a bottle of Gallo Sauterne I had been saving, and, in the words of our old and dear friend, songwriter Gary Toler from Texas:

The time it ran so slow,

Cause we had so much to say.

Singing slow and drinking sweet white wine,

We passed the time away.

Friend George had filled in an empty spot in his life. I was no longer alone in the big city. And time, we both felt assured then, would always be a soft loving breeze across our cheeks.

Back then: Gary Toler and I.

Growing Up Southern: February 4, 2018

We had a small stock pond on our place when I was growing up. It wasn’t as big as a city block. They dug it to get fill dirt for a Jr. high school. There wasn’t much to it—the pond that is—but square foot for square foot, it furnished about as much enjoyment as any site you could find anywhere.

There were fish in it. Fish galore: bream, sunfish, catfish, and, later, bass. We never fished it out, but oh lord did we try. There were snakes and turtles, as well. We only swam in it once, and that was when no one was watching, My mother told the story about how, when I could barely walk, I had seen some people swimming in a pool, and, I reckon I was impressed because, alerted by our family dog “Bob,” she caught me next morning “just a high-steppin’ toward the pond.”

My Sainted grandmother would laugh and talk about how she had taken me there a little later and showed me how to bait a hook and toss it out. She created a monster, I guess, for she said all I wanted to do thereafter was to go and “pish” some more. I don’t know if kids have that much fun with their grandmothers these days.

There are so many lessons one can learn from a small, postage-stamp, place like that. For one, the cork from a bottle of Garrett Snuff makes an ideal “bobber.” Bouncing it up and down is supposed to attract fish. And something that Della Nathaniel taught me, you must spit on your bait if you want to catch the really good ones. Of course, she dipped snuff, so her spit was much more potent and effective than mine.

She sought, once, to even the playing field by offering me a dip. I tied, but decided I’d rather not catch fish than live through that ordeal again. Bless her heart, she moved to Oakland California later and found equality of sorts, I’m sure. I’ll bet she missed that old pond, though, from time to time.

Sometimes, when I was older, and the Hester boys lived close by the pond, we’d start out on Friday after school and fish until Saturday afternoon. Then the mothers who lived nearby would come over with the “fixin’s” and fry our catch for the whole neighborhood.

I still recall the day my dad and I went out one Sunday morning and cut a nice gum tree that we dragged into the pond for a fish refuge. I think the hooks I lost therein outnumbered the fish I caught from it, but since Sunday was his only day off, it most wonderful that we spent the time doing it.

Today, the average teenager has a cell phone that probably cost more than my father paid for that little spot where the pond was. I’ll match memories with any of them, though.

Ever notice how things
get less fun as they
get more elaborate?