Leaks

Leaks

Sometimes when I water my plants I put in too much and the liquid percolates through the pot and drains out into the saucer that I put underneath. Sometimes the saucer has a crack in it and the water seeps through onto the plastic tray I keep underneath the cracked saucer. I suppose that I could repot the plant and give it one of those new plastic pots with a built in saucer, all-in-one. But I never seem to get around to it. Letting the water seep through the cracked saucer onto the tray is a lot easier than fixing the problem. So I live with it.

I went to the YMCA in downtown Roanoke earlier this evening to play some volleyball. Actually I was going to play “Wallyball,” exactly like volleyball except played with a volleyball sized racquet ball on a racquet ball court. Unfortunately, my friends didn’t show up tonight, and I was left looking for some activity to do in the crowded complex. Basketball is always my first option. So I went and checked out a ball, giving the clerk my car keys as collateral. Apparently, they have a problem with people stealing the new basketballs, so they hold them hostage at the front desk. Carefully clutching my ball, I headed to the court.

On one side of the court, a friendly pick up game was going on, but I didn’t want to join in since I’m coming off of some knee issues, and I’m really just an old fart now. All I really wanted to do was just shoot. My first shot was a deep three pointer from behind the arc, and I sent it trough the nets with a pure swish. Gradually, the basket I was shooting toward became filled with mostly teenaged kids just shooting. They, however, didn’t all have basketballs. Obviously, they didn’t have the necessary collateral to free one, so they would try to mooch my ball if I missed a shot. I did this regularly and they responded with a theft every time.

Shoot around etiquette demands that when a player makes a shot, the ball must be returned to the shooter for another try. Everyone who spends any time on a court knows this rule, except for this 11 year old white kid. If he happened to be under the basket when I made a shot, he’d simply kick the ball out of the way instead of tossing it back to me. A couple of black kids did this too. Within a few minutes of beginning my shooting on a rather empty court, two black kids came over and decided to simply take over the court and play a game of one on one. I refused to be bullied off the court so I just continued shooting right through their game. Other teens then came and clogged the court. Sometimes when I missed other kids would get my basketball and take shots. I always kept an eye on my ball because I was afraid that I’d never get my keys back if I didn’t return that ball.

Then after I had just made a shot, one black kid simply took my ball and went to another basket to shoot with his friends. I couldn’t believe it. He knew exactly what he was doing and his body language suggested to me that he didn’t really care what I thought about the matter. So I stood there at mid-court and watched he and his buddies shoot with my ball. I stared and stared with no apparent effect. In their eyes, I was invisible. I didn’t exist. I was no factor. Using that to my advantage, I grabbed my ball when it bounced off long from the rim and I walked back over to my court. Behind me, I heard them yelling, “Hey man, bring that ball back!” But I just kept walking right out the door to the desk where I exchanged the ball for my keys. I wasn’t really mad nor was I surprised that I could be so invisible because to some extent, I’ve been invisible in my home town of Roanoke Virginia my whole life.

I hopped in to my generic Dodge mini van and began heading home. As I was about to pull out onto the highway to head home, I decided to forgo my usual route down the expressway through the center of town; instead opting for an older and less familiar route through the heart of the old town. I turned down one of those single number streets, Third Street I think, and I snaked my way to Orange Avenue. All along this route were beaten houses, almost invisible like me. The houses were defeated by neglect, poverty and apathy. Shutters dangled from some in the dim streetlight glow. The pale light cast a zombie mask over the homes. Once proud yard fences lay twisted and broken, unmended. Trash scurried across the road before me seemingly escaping with the wind to a better place. Row after row of these broken dreams, these after-thoughts. My ride continued past closed and boarded stores with small packs of cars with red tail-lights signaling clandestine meetings. I’d pass by neighborhood convenience stores with barred windows. People with hooded sweatshirts were staggering out with brown paper bags clutched firmly in their hands. There were no grocery stores in this forgotten world. Row after row, road after road. I slowly cruised invisible through a town I did not recognize. My hometown, but not any town I knew.

How could things be this way? Where did people lose their focus? Why did it seem that these people were more invisible than me? Despite my questions, I was not surprised by these horror scenes. My wife had taught school in this part of town, and she recounted to me every day the horrible struggle her children had at home. Most lived with a grandmother. Their mothers were either crack heads or in jail. They most likely had never known their father or if they did, then he was most likely in jail. It’s no wonder that my home city has a high school drop of rate of about 50%. One out of every two kids never makes it out of school. The whole family system is fractured and what remains is an unnatural, disjointed social system.

Back in 1985, my wife and I visited her sister in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She and her husband bought a house in one of the most invisible neighborhoods in that beaten city. Bridgeport had a reputation as an industrial town that had rusted away. Just down the block from their house, past the iron-barred convenience store was a once majestic two story brick schoolhouse. At one time, the school’s twin entry columns and sturdy brick must have elicited pride from the neighborhood residents. But when we drove by, the columns and brick were adorned with graffiti. The windows were all boarded up. A high chain-link barbed-wire fence surrounded the playground which was covered with piles of broken glass. When I told my sister-in-law about the abandoned school building a block from her house, she looked momentarily confused. “That,” she explained, “is our public elementary school.”

A few years later, before my own kids entered my life, we were living in a small, rural county in Central Virginia. One evening, a fire broke out in a shabby trailer park in North Stanardsvlle. This area is where most of the county’s black residents were allowed to live. As long as they stayed poor and no threat to the white community, they were pretty much ignored and invisible. In fact, the county went out of its way to NOT put in a water/sewer line to that area and were eventually denied matching grant money for the water project to the white community unless they gave water to the black community. Eventually the county gave in and pushed the water line through. That fire displaced a family of kids that we taught, and my wife and I were moved to help in some way. Knowing that they needed furniture and knowing that we had an extra couch, I loaded up my Isuzu Trooper and drove over to that invisible place.

I entered the trailer park on a rutted, water potted road that jostled my Trooper for all she was worth. After I waded through that rough passage, I found myself in the center of a mobile home camp. The trailers were parked on bare dusty dirt lots. No one was around on this hot, sweltering summer day. The temperature was flirting with the century mark, even in the shade. Right in the center of the compound was the one permanent structure on the whole campus. It was a small one roomed sort of white shack. There was no door to this shack, just an opening. A skinny old coon dog lay dead-like on his side in the shade of the roof beside the building

With my truck laden with furniture, I needed to know where to drop it all off, so seeing no one around, I peeked my head into the shack. The stench and flies were overbearing but not surprising. There in the middle of the one dirt floored room was a double bed, and on that bed, lying on top of the sheets, was about the skinniest and oldest looking lady I’d ever seen. She was breathing and looking at me with hollow eyes as she lay there sweating in her dirty white nightgown.

Her look froze me and suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to get out of there as fast as I could. I stammered, “Excuse me mam…I have some furniture for the family that lost their trailer to the fire.”

She seemed to lick her wrinkled lips and raise a shaky, bent finger in the air, “They ain’t here. Just dump it all out over there (pointing out the doorway).” Then her eyes glazed over, and she fell asleep.

I did as that lady told me. I dumped the furniture out on the dirt yard in the camp and piled into my Trooper never to return there again. I suppose I could have gone back and assisted the family in rebuilding their life or even gathered more supplies, but I had already made an effort and that one effort was more than I usually did. Doing nothing more sure was a lot easier.

I guess I’m like a lot of other people. I never seem to get around to it. Letting the life of my hometown seep through the cracked saucer onto the tray is a lot easier than helping to find a solution. So I usually ignore it all and drive home by the expressway.