280. Ghetto

I don't mean ghetto like how rappers mean ghetto. I mean more like how ghetto used to mean a somewhat sealed off portion of a city filled, in European cities, with Jews, and then later in America, with Italians or other immigrant groups.

I drove down McKnight Road today and thought about the kid I used to pick up, for $40 a week, and take to the summer camp where I worked, which wasn't a summer camp as much as a glorified babysitting job in the air conditioned school where I'd worked the year before. I remember how Anthony was so shocked I lived in the CITY, in the GHETTO. He meant it like the rappers do. Crime everywhere, drug dealers and pimps on every corner, shoot outs between cops and gang members.

Omigosh it's such a terrible place. Anthony hated living so close to the ghetto, out there just west of 170, and was happy that the lawsuit his mother had pursued when the teacher at his county school did something unspeakable to him (!!! That's how it was said to me when I asked him what he meant by "settlement") had paid off and they were moving out to the far reaches of West County. Where he wouldn't wind up, you know, caught in the crossfire.

Now, his obvious personal problems aside, it wasn't the first or the last time I'd heard the sentiment.

I don't live in the ghetto. I live on a tree-lined street a half block from a Victorian walking park. I know all my neighbors and not a single one of them sells drugs. Not a one. A few of them own guns, but they shoot deer with them. People hold down jobs that do not involve pimps. Really.

I know it hasn't always been this way--I know because I've been there, called the police about that. And I know that I do live closer to the scene of crime than the boy I drove to camp that summer (although I will point out that some crimes happen anywhere).

But in some ways, I wonder about the ghetto-ization of my children. They are city kids who do city things. They attend a charter school and go to a city parish. Yeah, I take them out to the country and they know an oak from a maple from a catalpa tree, but I wonder about the area of the world I skip over on my way to the trees and bugs and pit toilets. The suburbs.

I grew up in the suburbs, the same suburb all over the country. It is the same wherever you go. Yeah, it was New York Ave and South 1st Street and Orangewood Trail and Fairwick Drive and Sonora Place and Pruitt Street and North Beechwood and Spring Meadow but it was all the same dang place. By the end of it I was more than happy to shed it. The longer I live in the city the less it looks like an option. Even my parents live in the city now.

But will my kids? Or will they shun the ghetto and the 'old ways' of their parents and move out to some tacky exurb? Will they feel they were kept from something because I raised them in the city instead of the two-car-garage no sidewalk lifestyle of my own childhood?

There must be a reason beyond ignorance and fear to want to raise your child out there in the suburbs. Maybe it's yards or driveways. I don't know. I just know that as a child, I would have been shocked by the way my kids are being raised. If I knew them as peers I would be intrigued and probably a bit jealous of what they had that I didn't have. Fiona and Daisy haven't expressed similar ideas yet about friends out in the suburbs. I don't think they see the difference so strikingly yet. People live in different places. Simple as that. I don't know why county kids don't see it the same way. Maybe it's an inside-looking-out vs an outside-looking-in mentality.

Anthony would be, let me count, 27 years old now. Old enough to have a family of his own. I wonder where he lives.

279. Growing Up

"Are you going to the competition this weekend?" asks Iris. Of course Fiona is, and Iris realizes this as she says it. "Oh, yeah. I'm going and I'm going to kick Veronica's butt."

"I thought you and Veronica were different ages?" I point out.

"They combined the competitions so that there'd be enough people," she explains. Fiona, Iris, and I, I'm sure, are all thinking about Veronica for a moment, because then she continues: "You know, it's one thing to be really good at something, but if you aren't a nice person, it isn't enough."

278. Summer Evening

The sun past the park treeline, I sit facing north watching a plump gray squirrel creep along the electric wire highway above my alley. A mosquito bites me but does not leave a welt. Humming A/C units turn off and on. The air is still but more pleasant than it's been in 2 weeks. I hear the phone ring inside, Jake's voice talking with Daisy and Fiona.

Clouds this year have given dimensions to the sky that shock and please me. The sky is so big now, bigger than I remember it every being since I moved from Texas. Jake says I'm wrong but this year is different.

A squirrel gnaws, somewhat desperately, at my baby pin oak branch. I need to decide between the pin and the scarlet. With the magnolia, two redbuds, a dogwood, and the straight hybridized red/silver maple, I can't keep both oaks. Like Penny says: I can't grow every tree. I think the scarlet will win. It's already taller than my house and the pin is crooked trying to get enough light.

My foot is resting on a large patio pot containing a basil plant and a jellybean tomato. Tiny red grape-sized fruits, the woman at the market told me. Right now they are green but I have hope.

Our old dog's bowl is still on the porch. Jake, I think, suggested it as a burglary deterrent. I don't think it would fool me.

The euonymus is leaving this fall. I will replace it, perhaps with a Japanese maple. The euonymus attracts too many flies to its flowers.

Steve and Jerry's wisteria is blooming, but they moved to Amsterdam, I'm sure they don't care. I miss them. To bastardize Frost, good hostas make good neighbors.

277. Pool

Bree is so happy with the new pool. Yes, Bree, the neighbor, not one of the kids in my house. Zelda told me that she came home after the first afternoon when she and Noah came to swim and was very happy.

Our old pool was a galvanized metal horse trough. It was reminiscent of my childhood but it was a tetanus shot waiting to happen. Each summer involved more and more fiberglass patching and painting. I was done. We rolled it into the alley last fall for bulk pick up and bought this one in the springtime. Total cost was astonishingly low, especially considering that there's a freaking filter built in. The water is clean and I don't have to constantly change it out. It's smarter. Maybe not nostalgic, but smarter.

In my experience, that's not always true about new things, but this time it is.

276. What day is it?

I just published 275/365 and realized it had been several weeks since I last wrote here. To top that off, I was temporarily unaware of what the date actually was. Yup, it is summer. Totally completely summer.

And I have been writing over here for over a year, but the 365 format isn't working for me anymore. My thyroid is in check, for one, and so I don't find myself as hypergraphic and out of whack as I once did. I don't write every day anymore. Because I don't have to.

So I'm going to continue here, but I'm going to drop the 365. My other add-on blog, Ease in Fullness, is simply counted. I probably don't even need to do that, but something about these extra little blogs makes me want to number them.

How long? I don't know. I kind of like the pseudonyms, the kid conversations, the big old pat on the back for having the luck to live here. So we'll see.

275/365 Last Child in the Woods

I'm reading the book, Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv (I think Richard? I'm actually too lazy to walk into the next room to get the book). It came out a few years back. Its premise is that due to a number of reasons (fear of litigation, the Bogey Man, over-scheduled childhoods, the idea that nature should be left pristine for viewing purposes only, and so forth), children are no longer in touch with nature.

I read these statements and I nod my head. But then I look at my block and I think that even though we are in the city, even though the park across the street is one of those "look, don't touch, unless you're playing on approved fields or equipment" kind of parks, we are doing our very best to allow for this nature connection.

We camp, for starters. The older girls are in girl scouts, and as their leader, I'm making sure they learn about their environment (and not in the distant "save the rainforest" way, but in "this is an edible weed; this is a white oak; these are possum tracks" way). My yard is, due to laziness, mostly in a wild state. No pristine swaths of grass back there. The McAllisters have left toy dump trucks and shovels on the tree lawn for digging. Our kids build, and destroy, and build again, fairy houses--perhaps not the same as building their own treehouse, but they still learn something through this.

A couple of dads hunt. A couple others fish, and take their kids. Fiona will get her hunting course done this summer. We garden. I'm about 5 years away from chickens--that number fluctuates but it's not here yet. But our kids know where food comes from.

Daisy plays with these little centipedes that live in my open compost pile. Both girls know you can eat daylilies, but not Easter lilies. They know poison ivy and they have built dams on creeks and canoed down rivers.

But sitting at Irish dance the other night waiting for Fiona's class to finish, the topic amongst about 8 parents turned to vacations and camping. Many of the people there had camped as kids. I was the only one that still camped. Or had been to a state park even for a day trip.

And I realized this book wasn't for me, the woman with the book of knots sitting on top of the computer desk. And as Lisa put it in the comments over on my other blog, my kids aren't the last children in the woods but perhaps the last children in the world.

We live a good life here. I guess sometimes I forget how good.

Anybody want to live across the street from me?

274/365 Power struggle

Eliza calls just as Daisy and Fiona are getting in the backyard pool. "Do you want to come over?" Fiona asks her. No, she doesn't want to swim. Swam all day Sunday or something like that. Since they're on speaker phone and Daisy craves playmates, begging begins.

"Don't," I tell her. "If she doesn't want to come over, that's fine. Don't whine and beg."

They get off the phone. "I don't understand," Fiona says, my lovely non-game-playing child. Straightforward.

"She probably isn't too interested in swimming," I begin, "and maybe wants to see if she can pull you away from swimming to play on her terms." Maybe not. Maybe I read too much of my own experience into things.

Fiona shrugs. "I like the pool."

Three minutes later, I'm heading out with the phone. Fiona is taking the cover off the pool. The phone rings. Eliza has decided swimming sounds ok.