All those years I taught English, my students kept journals–some unforgettable.
Usually before Thanksgiving, their assignment was to write about how they expected to spend the holiday. It was around 1980. One fourteen year old young man told me that after he got off the bus that Wednesday afternoon, he would feed the dogs and bring in wood. Then he was going to heat up beans for supper, and he was going to stay awake most of the night because his daddy would be drinking and playing cards and he wanted to be sure they did not start shooting or trying to have a dog fight. He sure did hope that his aunt was going to save him a piece of lemon pie from her Thanksgiving dinner because that was his favorite. He and his daddy would just hang around the rest of the time until school on Monday.
Another unforgettable insight into how ninth graders lived came after Southern Vance opened in 1991. It was a Friday afternoon in winter. I was returning from Wake Forest after picking up my nieces and nephew who were spending the weekend with their cousins. I had forgotten something at school and drove in around 5:30 as it was getting dark. One of my students was sitting out front, and when I came back out of school, she was still there. I asked her if she had missed her bus, and she said her mother was supposed to pick her up but had gotten a chance to go off, so she sent her boyfriend to give her a ride. The young girl told me she would not go with him because he was trying to “mess” with her. I told her I would give her a ride if she thought she would be safe at home, and he would not be around. So she got in our van where my nieces and nephew were waiting for a ride home.
My nephew was asking if we were going to have chili con carne and baked corn bread and brownies with ice cream for supper and wanted to be reassured that he was going to get pancakes with blueberries and pecans for breakfast. He wanted to know what movies I had rented and what video games he could play. The girls talked about going shopping and spending the next night with their granny and sewing. They all wanted to be sure we were going to have a fire in the fireplace, and they wanted assurances that the furnace upstairs was going to be on because our house was too cold for them.
We pulled up to my student’s house to let her out. You could not imagine a more dismal, cold, bleak, damp and uninviting dwelling. The leaning house was completely dark, the yard was muddy, and you could truly say that it was the pits. I let her out and told her to call me in fifteen minutes, or I was going to call the police check on her. She told me that they did not have a phone, but as soon as she lit the heater, and ate some Oodles of Noodles she was going to go up the street to call her granny and get her to call me. Her mother’s boyfriend’s car was not around, so she felt safe.
The parents of these two students have a lot in common with the City Council that we just put up with for the past two years and now, regrettably, have mostly voted into office for the next two years. Maybe they were doing the best they could. Maybe they can’t see what is right before their eyes. Maybe they really don’t know a better way. Maybe they know better, but just can’t get it together. Maybe they have tunnel vision and only see it one way. Maybe they have their priorities mixed up. Maybe they look after themselves first. Maybe they just cannot get concerned about things unless it suits them. Maybe they just can’t think straight. Maybe they are just doing what they are familiar with. Maybe they think someone else will do their job for them. Maybe they don’t look very far down the road. Maybe it does not seem to be important to keep an eye out for trouble. Maybe it does not seem to be a problem until it blows up in their face. Maybe they are relying on others to step in and run things for them. Maybe they just do what is easiest for them. Maybe they are just making excuses or not paying attention. Maybe they are good at ignoring things.
None of these “maybes” are acceptable and are, in fact, worthless when you are in the position of having an awesome responsibility for others, whether as a parent or an elected official of Henderson. This election cycle is a big disappointment for those of us who wish to see Henderson do better, think better, know better, work better, provide better, and succeed better than the city has for the last two years. Many of us wanted to see the walls come tumbling down. In this election cycle, even though only one wall was crumbled, it is regrettable that more of the walls were left standing. But we can still chip away. We can still use our voices for the next two years to insist that our city government build the correct walls and tear down the both the figurative and literally unstable walls in our city.
Don’t lose hope. There is a movement afoot, and you can be part of it. There is a way to insure a better future than the stagnation this election seems to predict. There is “Plenty Good Room” for you in keeping Henderson a good place to live.
Stay tuned.