hannah and caroline and me
(part twenty-five)


has it really been almost three years?

son of a gun. i guess it has. funny. looking back on that post from april of 2006, i mourned that there was no flag football at east lake park like there was when i was a kid. i wasn't sure when that had come to an end, but i was certain that i would never see it again. today, we went back to see the ducks. this time, caroline making her first visit to the small lake that i spent many a summer morning along it's banks trying to fish with my brother and mom's dad. i didn't catch many fish. i hated fishing. but i fished and touched worms and nicked myself with fishing hooks anyway. there were life-lessons to be found amongst the blood and the squirmy fish bait. i didn't know it then. hell, i am not sure what the lessons were even now. but i was there. and there was always flag football. this morning, when we pulled up into the parking lot, what did we see? at least four different flag football teams stretching it out and getting ready to share the east lake football field. how about that? what's old was new again. either that, or i just came on the wrong day in 2006.

huffman, roebuck, east lake...what a disaster those areas are now as compared to when i was a kid. everything seems so run down and out of date. east lake park, itself, is a shell of it's former self. the community building around the pool that is now the shepherd center looks like a bomb shelter from the outside. the pool beside it has not been cleaned out in years. the track around the park is in three years worse shape than the last time we visited. still no open concession stand. there is still people-traffic in and around the park, but, for the first day of 2009 that felt like spring, it felt deserted. after we finished at the park, we took a right to find sarah's first alabama house. tucked right next to east lake united methodist, i imagined our car as ricky baker from boyz N the hood rolling in slow motion down a dead end alley. i felt uncomfortable and unwanted by every pair of eyes that i made eye contact with. i'll tell myself that i was just being paranoid. i am smart enough to know better, though.

as we headed back towards huffman, we detoured past my grandparent's old house next to don hawkins park. damn, i could have sworn that house was bigger. the yard definitely had to be bigger. oh, the adventures i had in that backyard. swinging on and off of the poles that held up the laundry lines. hiding so that the enemy could not find me behind the shed. it was a world unto it's own. and today i saw that it was about 100 square yards. oh well.

we got into huffman and back on the parkway. once we passed wal-mart, i tried to notice how many retail buildings were left vacant or had transformed themselves into something skeevy or exploitative. i would put the conservative figure at 30 percent. it was probably higher, though.

starbucks closed yesterday. another one down, joseph. another one down. not that it was an institution from my youth, but it was a company sticking their neck out into a community that is becoming a parody of itself. maybe they should have known better. maybe their vetting process was flawed. whatever the case, i hear mcdonald's cafe is excellent.

we headed on towards cici's down center point parkway. funeral with hip-hop hearse outside of the worship center. does a hearse really need rims? someone passed from this world and i bet a bunch of people are sad about it. all i can focus on is the rims on the hearse. closed business here. decaying homequarter's warehouse there. terrific looking sign drawing attention to the 85 percent empty strip mall that used to contain the old wal-mart. great looking sign, though. empty guthries. leveled bama six movie theatre.

we ate at cici's. too bad walker's wasn't open for business yet. headed back towards the library. drove past a really nice new park on polly reed road. i hear it was funded by housing and urban development. i don't mind my tax dollars going for something like that. i wonder why my tax dollars can't be poured back into my community.

why is everything closing? why is everything so old?

is this really a ghetto? is it going to be? what is a ghetto, really?

brian mccann just hit a home run for the usa...

"portion of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure."

that sounds about right. east lake is there now. you don't choose to move into a ghetto. nobody chooses to move into east lake these days.

huffman, at least the outer edges, isn't there yet, but it could be in five years. nah. between five and ten.

center point, at least the outer edges close to pinson and chalkville, has ten to fifteen years left unless something changes.

and unless something changes, we won't be bothering to make trips down memory lane through my and sarah's old neighborhoods because someone will have burned them to the ground.

usa just left the bases loaded in the seventh...

why is my church dying? because people are getting out while the getting is good. "we tried." "we did everything we could." "we knocked on doors." "they just wouldn't come."

they just wouldn't come.

it's all their fault.

when i was a kid, the ducks at east lake park didn't recognize plastic bags that contained bread. if you wanted to incorporate feeding the ducks into your east lake park experience, you went to the ducks. three years ago, the ducks didn't recognize the bags either.

today, at least one of them did. at least one of those ducks recognized the bag and told his friends. ducks were knocking down the baby, baby girl to get to that bread. nipping at our pants, hissing at us like it might be their last meal for days, even the ducks are pissed.

they can see the writing on the wall. probably see it better than we can.

no one chooses to move to the ghetto.