The Screaming Hour

Tonight I was sleuthing through some old computer files looking for something, and I found this. It is dated February 2007, and though the computer credits me with being its author, I have no memory of writing it. I was having some, um, mental health treatments around about that time, which created a wide swath in my frontal lobe's memory banks, so that probably explains why its discovery today comes as such a complete surprise. If anybody is interested in the original saccharine and insipid literary gem to which this refers, you can find it here.

And now, here offered without further comment:

With No Apologies Whatsoever to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Old Fart

By Tracy Thompson

  

Between the dark and the daylight

As the night is beginning to lower

Comes a pause in the day’s occupations

That is known as the Screaming Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me

A thunderous sibling stampeding,

A slam that would shatter a doorframe,

My six-year-old howling, “I’M BLEEDING!”

From my study I see in the lamplight

Two divas descending the stair.

“I DID NOT!” comes my 10-year-old’s roaring;

“YOU DID, TOO!” yells Miss Curly Hair.

A whisper, and then a silence

And I know from the whimper-marked hush

One’s raiding the Band-Aid supply

While her big sister hisses, “You wuss!”

A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the door!

They’ve seen me! They descend full of grievance,

Tales of woe, wrongs endured, marks of gore.

  

Little Sophie hits “delete” on my keyboard

While she rats out her big sister’s sin;
If I tell them to leave, they ignore me;

Emma screams, “I HATE BEING TEN!”

Oh, what I’d give for an icepick

I’d stick it right into my brain

Maybe a home-made lobotomy

Would keep me from going insane

From this 5 p.m. scourge of fighting,

Low blood sugar, wails, homework hell.

Then again, the racket these kids make

Would penetrate a well-padded cell.

Do you think, o mother who reads this,

That because my kids cause me these woes

That you’re a superior parent?

That your children will never be foes?

Maybe so. All that I’m sure of

Is that if H.W. Longfellow were here,

I’d say, “You think kids are so darling?

Take mine, then. I need a beer.”

A Teachable Moment

Went to the Newseum today in downtown DC with my 16-year-old daughter, where we saw a short film on the media and the civil rights movement. At the end of it I said to her, "Just about every single person in that movie who made history, good or bad, from the President on down to the cops and the reporters and the students staging those sit-ins, were Southerners. Now do you see why I still think the South is so important?"

And she said, "Yes."

History is Interested in Us

We are products of our history whether we know it or not.

That's become my mantra after spending years researching the South, where I grew up. The latest evidence of this is a study published today in the New York Times,  which paints a stark geographical portrait of where in this country it is the hardest for a child born in poverty to better his economic condition. 

Guess where it's the hardest? Yup: the Deep South, which is to say a band of counties starting in southeast Arkansas and west Tennessee and curving down and then up again through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South and North Carolina and extreme southeast Virginia. The worst city? Atlanta. 

The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex, but it is not particularly linked to present-day racial factors: researchers noted that the climb out of poverty was just as hard for white children as for children of any other ethnic group. Geographic and demographic factors do play a role, though:

In Atlanta, the most common lament seems to be precisely that concentrated poverty, extensive traffic and a weak public-transit system make it difficult to get to the job opportunities. "When poor communities are segregated," said Cindia Cameron, an organizer for 9 to 5, a women’s rights group, “everything about life is harder.”

And that's where history comes in. Even though its neighborhoods remain, on average, more racially integrated than most American cities, Atlanta still bears the broad imprint of decades of residential segregation: poor minorities live south of I-20, affluent whites north. The fact that Atlanta is crippled today by a lack of rapid rail is directly traceable to the decision in the 1970s by residents of Cobb and Gwinnett counties to opt out of MARTA, because so many affluent white folks in those counties feared more mobility would mean an influx of poor black people into their neighborhoods. (It would have, too, and in the long run everybody would have benefitted.) And finally, the symbiotic link between public officials and private developers--by no means an exclusively Southern phenomenon, but one that flourished in the South's conservative anti-union, pro-business climate--has mean decades of suburban sprawl: more houses, more roads, more traffic, very little regional planning. 

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in history, but history is interested in us. 

Life After Air Conditioning

As I type, I am sitting in my air conditioned office and it is a torrid 90 degrees outside. These days it's hard to imagine life without AC, and those times when storms have knocked out the power have made it abundantly clear how much of a necessity it's become. And yet I grew up--in the Deep South, no less--without air conditioning, and managed to survive without even feeling particularly deprived. How did we get from there to here? By making incremental changes in residential architecture and urban design, none of which have made for a healthier planet. Here's one case where the rural South of 50 years ago could show the rest of the world how to live in a post-industrial future. How did they do it?They used:

• Trees. Not those puny little things developers set up on the front lawn after they have denuded the landscape to build another housing tract, but actual trees--the kind that may be older than the inhabitants of the houses they shade. Your basic oak or maple or tulip poplar or whatever is a complex ecosystem that takes in greenhouse gases and turns it into oxygen, while sheltering human beings from heat and preventing soil erosion, providing a home for birds, insects and other wildlife, not to mention the occasional treehouse. Trees are amazing. And yet: the managers at my gym recently cut down a 50-year-old tree because one of the members complained it was dripping sap on his car. There are times when I despair, and start to consider the possibility that human beings deserve extinction.
• Hassock fans. They were round, built like something you'd rest your feet on, and they moved air in all directions around the room at a level where you could actually feel it. Ceiling fans rarely work that well, especially when they are placed 15 feet overhead in a cathedral-style ceilinged living room, where they serve mere decoration. It goes without saying that we did not have skylights, since the whole point was to keep the summer sun out of the house, for pete's sake. (I saw a house the other day with a front porch where somebody had put skylights in the porch roof. Talk about being unclear on the concept.)
• Iced tea.
• Cross ventilation. The "dog trot" style of architecture, where there's a central hallway that moves air from front to back, worked with nature to move the air around. We have replaced this with house layouts with more angles than a pinball machine, one HVAC unit per floor and (often) a humongous generator out back for when the grid goes down. Which it will.
• Sleeping porches. Even in a sultry climate, the night air is usually cool, and there is something mesmerizing about dozing off looking at the stars and judging the passing of the hours by their movement if you wake up in the middle of the night. The cicadas and tree frogs will sing you to sleep, if the hum of the hassock fan doesn't do it first. It beats the frigid woosh of central air conditioning by a mile. 
• Porches, period. The demise of the front porch is one of the major tragedies of late 20th century residential architecture. Front porches invite people out of their house toward the street, where they can watch the neighbors and the neighbors can watch them, where they can converse with each other or gossip about each other as they see fit, where they can simply sit and contemplate the human comedy. They are cool places to sit and catch a breeze when the house is too hot to stand. They are good places to sit while shelling peas or stringing beans, chores that frequently involve long, meandering conversations of and great story-telling. Backyard decks say "we are all hanging out back here to get away from all you riffraff." Poches say, "Come on in and sit a spell." They create community. 

          All this we know, or at least used to know. When will home-builders get a clue? When, oh Lord?

Thank God for....New Mexico?

The South is still the epicenter of child poverty in the United States, but the old "thank God for Mississippi" saying we Southerners all know is no longer operative when it comes to overall child well-being, according to the annual Kids Count report issued by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. For the first time in the 24 years that the Casey Foundation has issued the report--which is avidly read by journalists, social scientists and policy makers around the country--New Mexico has replaced Mississippi as 50th in the ranks.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there still seems to be an inverse relationship between geographic latitude and child poverty rates--i.e., that the further South you go the more child poverty you will find. After Mississippi, Louisiana came in at 46, followed by South Carolina at 45, Alabama at 44, Georgia at 43, Arkansas at 40, Tennessee at 39, North Carolina at 35--and then Virginia, way up at 11. Texas (which is only partly a Southern state these days), Nevada and California don't come out looking so well, either, but for the most part, sadly, the South has got the child poverty thing covered.

The state with the lowest child poverty? It's them dern Yankees up in New Hampshire.