My Redacted Life: Chapter 30

One thing stood out in my work with cities back 1972. I noticed that, at meetings of the city council or board, people showed up. It wasn’t only a special issue that brought them there, although sometimes it did, as we shall see. Often, they came just to watch their city government in action.

Of course, there weren’t as many alternative entertainment choices in those days. Time would dampen the public’s enthusiasm for observing Democracy, unless it jarred with, or supported, strongly held beliefs.

Council meetings could be educational though, so once, while we were waiting for our marriage date to arrive, I took my finance to a city council meeting in the small town of Kensett, Arkansas, known primarily as being the hometown of famed legislator Wilbur D. Mills.

It promised to be a short meeting. I came to have the council approve a grant application for a planning study. I explained to Brenda on the way up that I was familiar with the city, it being the site of the two wildest city council meetings I had ever attended. I explained that the first was when a rowdy group of citizens attended in order to raise hell about the proliferation of stray dogs that had “taken over” the town. Amidst tales of garbage can contents being strewed over a city block and untoward impregnations, the group demanded that council hire an animal control officer.

The second boisterous meeting there, which I also attended, occurred after the mayor had hired a “dog-catcher” and said dog-catcher had begun catching dogs.

He was catching the wrong dogs, it seemed. He was, according to the crowd of speakers, many of whom I recognized from the first meeting, supposed to catch “those dogs” and not “our dogs.” Why, one yelled in anger, “Tags” only followed Johnny to the school bus stop each day to protect him and had been incarcerated for his effort. Would the city be responsible for his, the dog's, therapy?

“Fire the [expletive deleted] dog-catcher,” one lady yelled, with resounding applause from the others.

Brenda thought about my story and said, “Why do people run for public office?” I had no answer, just an admission that I was glad there were those that did.

Seated in the back of the audience later, we were surprised to hear the first speaker, a well-dressed lady in her mid-forties rise, approach the podium, and with an air of great solemnity, ask, of the mayor and council, “What do you plan to do about the Buffalo?”

“The Buffalo?” Brenda whispered, “I thought the Buffalo River was over about Marshall.”

It was. The Little Red River is the one that runs just north of Kensett. We listened.

“He’s moved the beast next to our back yards and the flies are killing us.”

Ahh. The truth emerged like a tyke playing hide-and-seek. From what we later gathered, a man had bought, for reasons known only to himself, a wild buffalo as a pet. He kept the creature in an over-sized yard that backed up to a row of houses. When the residents of those houses had complained about the odor and flies that seemed to accompany the pet, the owner responded by dragging the feeding trough against his back fence so that the offending and noxious impact lay concentrated against the back yards of the complainers. The pet was happy, the owner of the pet was happy, everyone else living nearby … not so much.

An hour and a half later, the council got to my business, having managed somehow to piss off all in attendance, save Brenda and me. The council members fairly snarled as they questioned my proposal. Then one had an idea. “This planning study,” he said, “can it address the keeping of animals in town?”

“Sure it can,” another member said.

“Move for approval,” another member said.

“Second the motion,” another member said.

“All approved ‘Aye’ the ayes have it,” the Mayor said. “Congratulations young man.”

Back in the car, Brenda looked at me and said, “How do they get people to do your job?”

A new element in the
annals of urban planning. 

My Redacted LIfe: Chapter 29 (Cont._4)

The next week passed. We were a betrothed couple so the world looked a little rounder and 1972 seemed like an even more memorable year. The girls, Brenda, Vernell, and her sister, began plans for the wedding. The few times I was around them, I heard lots of giggles and snickers.

They left me out completely.

I didn’t mind. I had work to do. Tom was getting antsy that we finish the Hope plan so the engineering could begin. Business was falling off Downtown there as in most cities. Later, pundits delighted in blaming downtown malls for the death of retail in the central business, and those misadventures certainly didn’t help. But the end had settled on downtown retail much earlier with the proliferation of family automobiles, the death of public transit, and the construction of alluring shopping centers that offered excitement along with spending. Centrifugal force spun retail away from the city core and into the low-density suburbs, to be chased by swarms of shoppers in individual vehicles.

Since ancient humankind first danced in order to make the rains come, we have believed we could cause the unlikely or impossible to happen by human interference. So modern sapiens envisioned the downtown mall as a way to counterattack reality. Reality is an impervious foe, however. Urban planners no more knew this at the time than did the American military or the government that directed it.

I knew nothing about all this in 1972. I danced along merrily with the rest. It would take years of heartbreaking reality before the truth revealed itself. I was still a believer in urban planning’s prowess in imitative magic. Besides, I had me a girl, or she had me. I didn’t know which. That made me untouchable.

On Wednesday, she met me downtown for lunch at Land’s Cafeteria on Markham. Then we walked all the way over to Cave’s Jewelry on Main. There we picked out and bought an engagement ring for her and put some wedding rings on the layaway for the two of us. This thing was getting serious.

It was Daylight Savings Time by now. I took off work a little early so we could drive out and tell her folks. They didn’t throw a fit. In fact, they took it in good humor. I didn’t have my hair greased back and didn’t carry a pack of Lucky Strikes wound into an arm of my T-shirt. Nor did I ask her father if he might hire me as a farm hand after the wedding. She assured her mother that I was, indeed, some years older than she, so her daughter wasn’t “robbing the cradle.” They were pleased, I felt.

Hazel did inquire where and when the wedding might be. “We’ll have it in the Methodist church in town so all the relatives can make it,” Brenda said. “I’m sure Grandma will want to come, and she can’t travel far.”

“That’s good,” Hazel said. “I can’t imagine a girl wanting to get married someplace her grandmother couldn’t get to.”

With that, we were set. Hazel would help get the news out. That wouldn’t be hard for her. The office of Dr. B.E. Holmes, where she worked, was the official news center for most of Lonoke County. Walter Cronkite would have marveled at the speed with which information vital to everyday life in the polis and surrounding area spread.

My name, the last one at least, quickly became a household one, though challenging in pronunciation. Who was this mysterious man who had stolen the heart of the Belle of Lonoke County? Some decided I must secretly be a physician, a member of the only profession good enough for her.

The next Saturday, we drove to Pine Bluff and broke the news to my folks. Their response proved predictable. Any man that Brenda would marry couldn’t be all bad. That even included me.

Thus, we set the stage for a great adventure. Our ship was rigged, the crew was ready, the lines were taught, the anchor ready to be hauled, and the shoals well marked.

Most of them were anyway.

When is my life going
to get simple again?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 29 (Cont._3)

Here I was, in the summer of 1972. I had asked the most beautiful woman I had ever been out with to marry me. She had said yes. What do you think about that? More importantly, what was I to do next? I think maybe I kissed her or something. I can’t remember. My head was about to rotate, a funny feeling shot around in my head like a pinball bouncing off bumpers.

We were way out on the edge of west Little Rock overlooking the sun as it set over the river valley. I put my arm around her and we leaned against my car. She rested her head on my shoulder and we watched the last rays of the sun settle behind Pinnacle Mountain. I remember thinking that my life was about to change.

We rode back the apartment complex without saying much. I parked the Green Angel and we started, hand in hand, toward my apartment. “Don’t look now,” she said, “but someone is watching us from above.” She leaned into me.

I couldn’t help peeking. Vernell was standing on the second-floor balcony, her hands on the railing and a smile on her face. What was that all about?

When we neared my door, we heard a loud “Ahem.” We looked to see my neighbor standing in her doorway, allowing the light to shine through her sheer peignoir and looking like a marble statute. She grinned but said nothing more.

Do women enjoy mental telepathy?  I’ve harbored a suspicion since that night.

We went inside and I poured us two glasses of wine. I sat beside her and we toasted to whatever it was that was happening. We sat close together and didn’t speak for long minutes. Then she sipped her wine and moved away far enough that she could turn toward me. She broke the silence.

“I want to set a date as soon as we can,” she said.

This girl was anxious. She must really be in love. If she was in a hurry, how could I deny her? I considered myself a generous and empathetic fellow, especially for this poor lonely girl. My ego swelled.

“I won’t keep you waiting,” I said with raised eyebrows.

“Good,” she said.

“You’re not afraid I’ll change my mind, are you?” I can’t imagine what possessed me to say something so stupid. Maybe my mind was more befuddled than usual.

“No,” she said. She drank wine and set the glass aside. “I just want to get it over with before school starts so I don’t have to go through a change of my name with a bunch of third-graders.” With that, she reached for her purse and a package of cigarettes.

It wouldn’t be the last time she put me in my place, wherever that was.

Would she ever
come into focus?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 29 (Cont._2)

I woke early Sunday morning and brewed a pot of coffee. It was early June of 1972 and I had enjoyed quite a cruise the last 18 months or so. I’d come a long way from a lonely sailor sentenced to over two years in the East Coast Navy after a nervous year in Vietnam. I had come home to Arkansas with a few dollars in savings, no prospects, and a 1967 Chevy Impala that held my entire belongings. I had intended fully to move on back out to the City By The Bay.

Now, I had a job here and prospects, including a new little sports car I called The Green Angel. And, speaking of angels, I had a steady girlfriend who seemed, when the planets were all aligned, to like me. San Francisco seemed far, far away. There was this safe harbor, though, that I couldn’t seem to reach, no matter which way I tacked.

In short, I wanted to drop anchor, but the shoals were rocky, the distant ports were many, and the lure of Bougainville blossoms on the ears of South Sea maidens still haunted my dreams. Male insecurities generate a lot of indecisiveness in life.

There wasn’t anything I could do about it that morning, so I filled a thermos with coffee, grabbed an empty cup, and wandered down by the little white church that backed upon the Arkansas River. As I eased around the building, the Sunday morning music started. The mysterious guitar player kicked off a version of “I’ll Fly Away.” I stopped and listened.

In a moment, I eased down the trail and found my seat on the “Big Rock” overlooking the river. Several more hymns filled the air, then voices. My mind drifted away with the river and I lost myself in wondering why life was never as simple as I had thought it might be.

I finished the thermos of coffee there, as confused with the last of it as I had been with the first. I rose, nodded to the river, and started back to my apartment. As I walked along the church, I heard the faint but familiar sounds of a sermon being finished. With “every head bowed and every eye closed,” I heard that old exhortation that had been such a part of my youth.

Then the strangest thing happened. The guitar player began his thing. I couldn’t believe it but a familiar tune eased through the walls of that little building and out to where I stood. I knew it immediately, even before the congregation started in with “Oh, Why Not Tonight?”

Crap. I hastened on, thermos and cup in hand and confusion in mind.

Later, I drove to the office and pretended to work. Deciding I needed to straighten out my life, I drove home and spent the afternoon cleaning my apartment. I would clean awhile and look out the window.

No Brenda.

Then I took a leisurely walk to the dumpster.

No Brenda.

As I walked by my neighbor’s apartment, she walked to the screen door, fastening her bra, and looked through at me. She just made a “Harrumph,” sound and turned away.

I finished cleaning and took a nap. Sometime late in the afternoon, I heard the familiar scratch on my window screen. I jumped up.

Brenda.

She stood at my door in fading daylight, her long hair shining brighter than I had ever seen it. She had applied makeup. Unusual … she was a person who was as beautiful without makeup as she was with it, I thought. She wore her favorite yellow shirt, the one that matched her hair so well. She had on loose fitting jeans and tennis shoes with white socks.

“I’m bored,” she said. “Been cleaning all day and straightening up things. Take me for a ride.”

I thought, “You just walk up, after ignoring me all day, and start making demands? Just who the hell do you think you are?”

I said, “Okay.”

We started out Cantrell and I didn’t say a lot. Neither did she. I broke first. “Talk to your folks today?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“They are fine. Went to church. You talk to yours?”

“Yeah.”

“How are they?”

“They asked about you.”

“Oh? Asked what?”

“How you were.”

“And?”

“I told them you were fine.”

“And?”

“That I would tell you they said ‘hello.’”

This line of sparkling conversation occupied us until we reached the entrance to Walton Heights subdivision. I turned and followed the twisting path to Rivercrest Drive. There, I turned left and followed it to where it ended with a magnificent view of the sun beginning to set over the Arkansas River Valley and Pinnacle Mountain. I parked my car and we got out.

The view was particularly enchanting that evening. The darkness enclosed us as if making a safe and special spot. We leaned against the car and watched. She took my hand. That emboldened me.

“Brenda,” I said.

“What?” she said. For a second or two, I feared I had spoiled this precious moment for her by intruding upon the silence.

I thought, “What the hell?”

I said, “I know we haven’t known one another that long, and I know I might not be the best catch in the world, and I know you could do better, but I was just wondering if you might marry me?

It just doesn’t get any more romantic than that, does it?

She turned her face away from the view and looked at me. The setting sun made it glow. I would have jumped over the drop-off into the sunset had she asked me to. Instead, she said, “I don’t even have to think about it.”

“I don’t even have to think about it?” That wasn’t an answer. I looked her in the eyes for a clue.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes, I will.”

“Yes.”

Marry a farmer's daughter?
Why not?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 29

We had enjoyed a trip to St. Louis, Brenda and I, and we had delivered the drawing of the proposed development to the firm there without incident. The development never happened, though. Unfortunately, it proposed a small element of affordable housing and the St. Louis County suburb for which it was proposed didn’t hold affordable housing in high esteem. There were slums in “The City” for that purpose.

But I had done my job. It was nearly noon Friday before we had returned, I had swapped cars, and had debriefed Tom and Jack on my visit with the clients. I say “clients,” despite the fact that our work on this project was another “on the come” deal. I found, as time went by, that doing free work was an extremely easy thing to do in the consulting business, perhaps the greatest single cause of bankruptcy. The danger was that it could make one feel like a master salesperson, but going broke while selling air for free.

Real results, I would decide later, required commitments, in many areas of life. Right now, I was thinking of other things.

We had stopped, Brenda and I, in southern Missouri, at a roadside market. There, we had purchased an entire bushel of peas, probably trucked in from Texas but we didn’t care. Friday evening, after unpacking and enjoying a burgers and fries from Burger Chef, we sat on my patio and shelled peas like an old farm couple.

What? Oh dear. We were drifting out of the 1970s, back past the 1960s, into an age I thought would never exist again, at least for me. I took a sip of red wine and felt the delicious sharp taste caress my tongue. Life was good, after all.

The river was particularly beautiful that evening, the moonlight bouncing off remnants of large cumulus clouds and creating a sensual glimmer. I looked over at Brenda, shelling peas and smiling as if life had designed her for this moment. The sound of peas hitting a bowl mixed with a soft summer breeze, blowing in just a faint smell of honeysuckle from somewhere. From far away, a siren sounded, reminding one that the city was still alive. Magic? You decide.

Just before dark, my neighbor heard us and came around the partition to say hello. I gawked, and Brenda said, “Didn’t you forget something?” My neighbor looked, gasped, darted back around the partition. We didn’t see her again that evening.

The next day, we took some shelled peas to her grandmother, who lived a small distance from her parents. I made another friend for life. They piled up these days, without much effort.

We had enjoyed ourselves lately. I mostly behaved, mostly I say. I suffered from occasional “weak moment flashbacks,” the product of being a child of the 1960s, a veteran of four years of minimal adult supervision, and a plethora of character flaws. She cured these with a sharp rebuke and the stomping of a tiny foot. In this respect, she was like my Sainted Mother, a woman of slight stature and delicate features but bolstered by a strength like tensioned steel.

In short, we became accustomed to one another. I learned that she possessed the inscrutability of an oriental Zen master, and she learned that I was malleable, if neither perfect nor predictable.

I suppose it might have gone on like this for some time had I not taken her for ride just before sundown that Sunday evening.

What was I supposed to do?

Chapter 28: (Cont._3)

The first week in June went along without incident for a couple of days. Everyone was busy and the weather was still just bearable. Work had begun on converting downtown Little Rock into a “mall.” Nobody’s perfect, not even urban planners.

On Tuesday, I received a fine offer for a short, all-expense-paid trip to St. Louis, Missouri. Remember the project that Jack Castin was working on for a company there? He had prepared a nice rendering of the plan. They had it printed and mounted only to find that it was too large to be transported by airline. Oops.

The miscalculation proved to be my good luck, though. Tom called me in and asked how I would like to transport the drawing to Missouri in the back seat of one of the company cars, a Ford, “Crown Vic.”

“Sure,” I said, immediately thinking of being away from Brenda.

Tom must have read my mind, for he said, “That girlfriend of yours still out of school for the summer?”

“Yeah.”

“Take her with you,” if she wants to go,” he said. “You ever been to St. Louis?”

“Just to change planes at the airport.”

“Never seen the Arch?”

 “Nope.”

“There’s a Louis Sullivan Building downtown.”

“The Wainwright Building.”

“I think that’s it, he said. Near Busch Stadium. I seem to remember that he designed some famous tomb or other there too.”

“The Wainwright Tomb,” I said, “In the Bellfountaine Cemetery.” How could I remember that? I couldn’t even had recalled my name at that moment without thinking first.

“You do know your architecture,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Jack will show you where to deliver the drawing. Christie has a check for your expenses.”

“Yes sir.”

He tossed me a set of car keys. “Have fun,” he said.

We did.

The Wainwright Tomb: St. Louis

My Redacted Life Chapter 28 (Cont._2)

Spring turned into summer as Brenda had turned from a date into a steady girlfriend. To repay the trip to her parents, we visited mine. In early June, we drove to Pine Bluff one Saturday and I introduced her around. The family and friends all fell in love with her as did anyone who ever met her. That was no surprise.

The family Matriarch, Aunt Hallie Harden, whom we all called “Auntie” and my mother and other aunt called “Sister,” didn’t seemed too pleased that this nice young lady admitted to being a Methodist. She had heard that they let the kids dance in the fellowship hall. The horror! The horror!

After I pointed out that, at least, she wasn’t a “Roman Catholic,” Auntie relented and joined the fan club. Her seal of approval anchored our ship at my family’s spot in the harbor. We were secure from the storms of life, it seemed.

Back at the office, things were busy. We were excited about the progress toward the dandy subdivision the firm was about to develop. Somehow, we made contact with a developer in the St. Louis area, and Jack Castin designed a magnificent plan for a development they planned. We were making a name for ourselves in our little spot of Arkansas. Things would just get better.

At the opposite end of the hall from our offices in the Hall Building was a Snelling and Snelling employment agency. A crew of nice women, using fake names for some reason, worked there. We were all “elevator conversation” friends and they were familiar with our operations. One day, a young man wandered into their office looking for a job as a drafter and carrying samples of his work.

“There’s a firm we know of that employs such workers,” one said. “Sign here, and we’ll get you an appointment.” He signed the agreement promising to pay part of his wages to the employment firm for several months if hired. “Wait one,” she said.

She called me. It turned out that the original head drafter of our firm had given notice a day or two before, leaving us for the state’s largest engineering firm. She described the prospect. “Send him down,” I said.

Steve Rogers was a man of infinite capabilities. He would later enjoy several successes in the professional world. At this point in his life, he was just what we needed. We looked over the samples of his work and hired him on the spot.

Later, he would confess, “I saw the sign on your office door and started to skip the employment agency, walk down, and make a cold call,” he said. “I wish I had. It would have saved me money.”

Such are the turns that control a person’s life. What was important to us then, and in the future, was that he and Ron McConnell formed one of the best team of technicians ever to grace a firm like ours. Such are the turns that control an organization’s success.

Speaking of turns and twists, I was wondering if life wasn’t getting ready to ask me the rhetorical question, “Will that be cash or credit?” And I didn’t even know if the object of the question was on the market.

She might be willing, if “Barkis” was. Barkis wasn’t sure. And anyone on earth who thought they knew what that woman was thinking was nothing more than a self-deluded fool. Here was I, born a “little on the lite side of the cornbread,” and living in a constant state of befuddlement. The stage was set for something. I had no idea what, but I was so stricken I didn’t care.”

Just pick one, and tell
me what she's thinking.