Don't get me started: Good souls ...

After a rain-soaked weekend, one can almost hear, of a Monday morning, the collective groan of folks going to work. It reminds me of the words of Henry David Thoreau when he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Over the years, we tortured poor Thoreau until his words were quoted as, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.”

Actually, I’m not sure that I “agree 100 percent with his police work,” in either case, to borrow a quote from Sheriff Marge Gunderson of Brainerd, N.D.

I’m afraid there is a tendency for us to assume that having great “songs” inside us must demand that one have a great position in life. I’m afraid there are souls from the highest skyscrapers in Manhattan that not only lead lives of quiet desperation, but could only spew songs of imbecilic ineptitude. Just read today’s newspaper.

Conversely, I have the singular honor of having known, once, a beautiful soul named Almeda Riddle who had so many wonderful songs in her heart that one could hardly count them. Born in Cleburne County, Arkansas, she received a welcome in such far-off places as the hallowed halls of Harvard University. This was back in the days of folk music, a time I miss a lot.

She could be “misunderestimated,” as all wondrous souls are. Once, after appearing at a Folk Music concert in Little Rock, a “journalist,” having expected, I suppose, to see Joan Baez, or Joni Mitchell, gave Almeda’s reedy voice a scathing review. There was a great scurrying next morning by her hosts to hide the trashy review from her. As far as I know, she never saw it.

At party back then, fueled by a tragic volume of alcohol, I was induced to play “The Wildwood Flower” for her and even to sing along with her heart-piercing voice. She took it in stride like a true saint. She’d heard worse, I imagine.

But as for me, I would not trade that moment with “Granny Riddle," for days with the “beautiful people” who are writhing in the fetid swamps of America today, dominating the headlines from cold hearts and empty souls.

To have known her is a song in itself.

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.

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.