Girls Ranch: A Need and a Vision

I went Tuesday (9/23) to an appreciation luncheon at the Tallapoosa County Alabama Sheriffs Girls Ranch — Girls Ranch for short — and came away from the ranch, as I usually do, inspired  by the energy and enthusiasm of the staff for making the lives of girls who have been dealt bad hands in life.

The luncheon was an opportunity for the ranch to thank those who have contributed to the ranch with money, materials or hands on efforts and to give an accounting of its stewardship.

THE METHODIST MEN of First United Methodist Church in Dadeville, who sponsored the luncheon, fall in the category of those who have provided hands on help. Although we moved to National Village a year ago, there is only one traffic light between our house and Dadeville, and we have continued to belong to the Methodist Church, and I continue to participate in the men’s group’s projects. The men, as well as Christian Women in Action, the women’s group, have contributed a good deal of time and labor to assisting in ranch director Jimmy Harmon’s push to revitalize and expand the facility.

Jimmy has been at the ranch for only a few months, but he and the people working with him, have tackled a mountain of challenges and have gained far more ground than anyone expected. The ranch’s trademark white board fences have been repainted and the weeds along the fence line cut. Pastures have been mowed, deferred maintenance on some of the homes has been tackled, gardens planted and the grounds spruced up.

I kid Jimmy that if he were a football coach that he’d have the team breaking down the door to get back onto the field after his halftime talk. It was that way Tuesday. He ran down a list of people who have benefitted the ranch in one way or another and what has been accomplished. The achievements are impressive, especially considering that the bank account totaled only four digits when he assumed the job.

Jimmy operates with a lot of faith. When new roofs were needed on some of the homes, a gift appeared. Ditto money for a desperately needed tractor. So when he went down that ambitious list of future projects, I did not doubt that they will be accomplished. Nor that our men’s group will play a significant part in seeing them done.

THE FOCUS, OF COURSE is the girls who live at the ranch. They have been dealt bad hands in life. They have parents who died, or who went to jail, who abandoned them, or who otherwise could not take care of them.

Right now there are a dozen girls living at the ranch. There are girls out there who need a home such as the ranch can provide, and the ranch hopes to provide more housing before the year it out. The ranch is making a home for some girls attending college, too. It has been the practice for boys and girls to be considered grown when they graduate from high school, and they have gone from a very structured environment to complete independence. The ranch will help girls who continue their educations to learn the life skills they will need when they do begin living on their own.

Jimmy has a dream, too, and making a place for pre-adolescent boys whose sisters come to the ranch. He has observed, he said, that siblings who are separated early have difficulty developing the kind of bonds that sisters and brothers who live together do. When he accomplishes his plan, the boys will move to a an all-boys ranch when they reached a certain age.

ANOTHER, NECESSARY, PLAN is to make the ranch more self-sufficient, The ranch gets from the state (the girls are wards of the state) only $60 per girl per month for food. Can you imagine feeding any teenager for a month for $60. In the plans are gardens and fruit trees and vines, and animals. The girls ranch, Jimmy said, needs to be a ranch.

Giving money is a fine thing. Many organizations could not function without generous donors.

But there is something infinitely satisfying about investing your own energy in bettering the lives of people who cannot help themselves. I expect that if you call Jimmy, he will have something that you can do to make the girls’ lives better.

Bill Brown can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Tomatoes and Other Good Things

We were in the gate area at Atlanta airport a few weeks ago, waiting for our flight to begin boarding when my phone rang.

It was my friend Laeman Butcher. “I’ve been trying to track you down for a few days,” he said. “Are you busy this afternoon?”

“Well, we’re about to get on an airplane to San Francisco,” I said.

I’VE GOT SOME TOMATOES I’ve been carrying around for you,” he said. “I’ll have some when you get back.”

I gave fleeting consideration to going home. We’d had only a few really good tomatoes so far this year.

Laeman didn’t have time for gardening during his working career, and he has made up for lost time with enthusiasm, and his garden responds to his loving touch.

He was as good as his word, and after we got home he presented me with a box of ripe, red, juicy tomatoes, only hours off the vine.

“I know what I’m going to have for lunch,” I told him.

Another friend’s civic club sells Vidalia onions as a fundraiser each spring, and I already had my bag.  We already had bread, mayonnaise, and American cheese slides. All of the ingredients for one of the true treats of a southern summer lunch were on hand.

THERE IS SOME RITUAL to building the perfect tomato and onion sandwich. Mayonnaise is slathered on a piece of bread. Then comes a slice of American cheese (it helps keep the bread from getting too soggy), a healthy slide of tomato, topped with a little salt and pepper, a good slice of onion, topped with another slice of cheese and a piece of bread, also with mayonnaise.

That, along with an icy glass of tea, sweet tea, of course, is food for the gods.

After that, and perhaps another half sandwich, dessert is a nap on the couch with the breeze from the ceiling fan just tickling your cheek.

Some folks, I know, are willing the summer to hurry along, dreaming of the beginning of football season.

Me, I’m already mourning the coming end of tomato season.

Bill Brown can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Cacophony Will Pass

One day ours will be a quiet little street with green lawns, neat flower beds and young trees reaching skyward.

But not for a while yet. I write this from a rocking chair on the front porch on a Monday morning, and Double Eagle Lane is a bee hive of activity, has been since just after 7. Fortunately, I am an early riser and enjoy the morning quiet with a cup of coffee before the buzz begins.

A TRUCK RUMBLES by with a load of lumber, rattling the windows. Across the street, workers are swarming over what will be the homes of new neighbors. They are putting the finishing touches on a house across the street. Next to it, a framing crew is getting ready to erect walls and next to it, what was a vacant lot only a few weeks ago now is a house with shingles and siding.

When we left town a couple of weeks ago, another house diagonally across the street had just been framed up. Today workers are installing trim and are hauling shingles up to the roof.

One lot over from us, a slab has been poured, and the framers will begin there soon.

That leaves empty lots across the street and next door to us. A friend and former neighbor has the one across the street; she hopes to have a house finished by the end of the year. There are vacant lots farther up the street, but when work on them begins, it will be much less visible.

AT THE MOMENT, it is like I am sitting on the front row of a ballet with the music by Strindberg or Bartok. There are no woodwinds nor strings. A forklift unloading lumber from a truck provides a bass note, while its backup beeper counts time. The percussion comes from nail guns and hammers, and screaming saws hit the high notes. The small gasoline engine that lifts shingles to the roof hits a note just a shade up the scale from the forklift.

Workers calling to each other are the chorus.

We moved to National Village a little less than a year ago from Lake Martin. I greeted the mornings there in silence, watching the sun light the top of the ridge across the slough. On Sunday evenings, after the weekenders had departed and the boats disappeared, we sat on the deck, watching the stars appear and listening to nature’s background music.

I DO NOT COMPLAIN about the noise or the dust—at least not much. The lots around us were vacant when we built, and we knew that you can’t build houses without noise and dust and mud, and we look forward to seeing new faces. Meanwhile, we are living in the middle of a documentary on home construction, and we have given names to some of the continuing characters, the Lone Ranger and Tonto being just two of them.

Mornings here are lovely, too, and the cacophony eventually will disappear.

Meanwhile, I am just an observer of the spectacle.

Bill Brown, a retired newspaper editor, lives on Double Eagle Lane in National Village.

Slowing Down for Spring

Hurry is, I think, the enemy of spring — or at least of the appreciation of the season’s subtleties.

When the gray, dreary days such as we endured in the winter past yield to blue skies and puffy white clouds, and the azaleas and magnolias and a myriad of other seasonal flowers burst forth, our step lightens. But for many of us, the warming earth simply adds to the list of chores. Although there is pleasure in releasing pent up energy—we must weed the flower beds, prepare the earth for new beds, plant the garden, flush away the pollen  that has painted a mustard color on our cars and concrete, windows and porches—the demands of the rest of the world do not diminish.

WE MARVEL AT the earth’s renewal, but our attention to it is as brief as the dogwood’s blooming and the landscape fades into the background.

We are, as a former diplomat acquaintance put it, time burdened.

And it is our loss.

In the coolness of the morning, a mockingbird runs through its song, reprises it with variations and then repeats the whole thing. The performance merits applause. (Although we had many birds around our home on Lake Martin, there was an absence of mockingbirds, so its song is a particular treat.)

On many of the walking paths in National Village, wildflowers grow. Some are large and showy, others so small and delicate that the walker must stop and look deliberately at his surroundings. Many of them bloom only briefly, but they are no less beautiful than the domesticated flowers around our homes.

THE OPEN FIELDS, such as the large meadow near the Marriott, are awash with color. In the golden morning light they wave in the gentle breeze as if inviting one to walk among them. In the slanting light, the flowers on the thistles are a complex set of geometric structures.

As Housman noted in his paean to the cherry tree, we are allotted only a certain number of springs. It is a pity to waste one.

Doing Dumb Things Faster

A couple of ill-advised e-mails I’ve encountered lately resulted in unnecessarily hurt feelings. Written words unintentionally causing hurt feelings aren’t anything new, of course, but the internet does allow us to be dumb faster.

I write from experience. And I am reminded that you sometimes learn important lessons in ways you didn’t expect from people you didn’t expect to learn them from.

ONE OF MY most important lessons in dealing with people came from a copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times. Copy editors were the faceless, often grouchy, souls whose job it is to read stories before they are published, trying to guard against errors of language, fact or taste. For this, they got little credit, and, when some error sneaked through, more than a fair share of blame.

Chick Ober was one of those people. Early in my career as a reporter, Chick had taken me under his wing, perhaps because I was eager to improve, and he taught me more about respect for the language than perhaps anyone.

When I got promoted to running the newspaper’s bureau in Bradenton, Florida, I didn’t go to the main office very often, and I usually didn’t see Chick when I went to St. Pete for the monthly staff meeting.

As bureau chief, I was in charge of gathering news for the edition of the newspaper that served what we called the South Suncoast. I’d assign stories (including some to myself) and pictures. We sent our stories and pictures to the main office by bus and by Teletype. Along with the stories, we sent a budget — basically a list of stories for the next day’s with recommendations on their relative importance. Most of our communication with the main office was in memos that went with the bus package.

I had a lot of freedom and responsibility. I also had a lot of pride in what we did.

Sometimes when I picked up my morning paper, I was unhappy with the way a story was played or edited. I did not keep my thoughts to myself. When I got to the office, I would write a memo the copy desk saying what I thought had been done poorly.

ONE AFTERNOON, I passed through the newsroom and Chick asked me if I had time for a cup of coffee. If Chick wanted to talk, I knew I needed to listen.

Over our coffee, he delivered a short, gentle, but terribly important lesson.

“Bill,” he said, “most of the people on the copy desk now have come since you’ve been down in Bradenton. They don’t know sweet old Bill. They just know Bill Brown from the memos they read, and they think SOB means something else.”

In earlier days, whenever he had given me a word usage lesson, he always closed with, “you might want to look it up.”

This time he said, “You might want to read some of those memos.”

When I got back to the bureau office, I opened the file slowly read some of the old memos, trying to read them as if I’d need seen them.

SOB indeed, I thought. I tried to take the lesson to heart, not sending a memo criticizing anything until it had cooled down for a while and I had re-read it as if I were the recipient.  I learned that some things are best ignored and others could wait until I could have a personal conversation with the person.

I HAVE READ that Mark Twain was as good at writing outraged letters as he was at novels but that he let the letters age overnight and rarely sent them. I’ve read at least one that he did send, and it was a lulu.

With e-mails, it is temptingly easy to dash off a message without taking time to let it sit a while and re-reading it. It is even easier to click on reply and zap out a reply.

The internet is a wonderful thing; it certainly gives a note a quicker ride than the Greyhound bus did.

But it also allows us to do dumb things faster, too.

Mortality Comes Calling

We all are reminded of our own mortality from time to time — an illness or accident that could have been fatal, the death of a friend. When we are young, though the stark reminders that our time on this planet is limited, are quickly erased by the optimism of youth.

The passing of the years, though, brings the reminders more frequently.

A couple of events in recent weeks have touched me directly.

FIRST WAS THE DEATH of a friend and former colleague. He was half a dozen years younger than I, and when we first worked together he was in his early 30s. Our paths separated, and then we worked together again at another newspaper. Our careers, and our energy, were still on an upward trajectory, when he left for another opportunity.

We talked on the telephone every few months and saw each other only occasionally in the years that followed. But the friendship was one of those that that was not eroded by time and distance, and we always picked up with where we had left off. We did not dwell on aches and pains, and the barrier of distance leaves us picturing the other person as he was in days we were together.

In the past couple of months, we’d talked more often. He’d smoked for far too many years, and this winter had been particularly hard on him, sending him to the hospital multiple times with pneumonia. He was weakened, but each time we talked, he was confident that he was going to get better — and I believed he would get better, too. I would come visit, I promised, when he was feeling a little stronger. 

PNEUMONIA STRUCK again, though, and I did not realize until the last few weeks that he would not come home from the hospital.

I was taking comfort in the knowledge that he embraced life fully when word came that another friend, a contemporary, who had cheerfully fought cancer to a standstill for many years now was seeing the contest edge in the other direction. He is a realist, and, having toted up the cost of expensive drugs that at most could add only a few months to his life, he has decided to take as much enjoyment as he can in the time that remains.

All of this leaves me saddened, of course, and more conscious that the horizon looms ever closer.

But if youth is optimistic, age is stoic, and the Latin expression Dum vivimus vivamus  — is a "While we live, let us live" — becomes more relevant.

The poet A. E. Housman, I think, was both the optimist and the stoic when he wrote that  “… since to look at things in bloom fifty springs are little room, about the woodlands I will go to see the cherry hung with snow.”

There are no cherry trees here, perhaps, but pears and dogwoods will do nicely.

Repenting the Arrogance of Youth

I had occasion to spend some time in the waiting room of a clinic in Florida recently and was reminded of the arrogance of youth — my youth.

Just getting older had already changed my perspective, as aging does for most of us. Thankfully, I wasn’t a patient, so I was free to watch the others around me without being absorbed by my own woes. As might be expected in an area that is a magnet for retirees, most of the patients were older, and they were the people I had too little appreciation for in my long ago youth. Some shuffled along, barely raising their feet off the floor, some were stooped, others rode in wheel chairs. Some were morbidly obese, others emaciated. There were more stories there than in the waiting area of an airport.

I was transported back to my first time in Florida, fresh out of college and beginning my career. I didn’t know anything about St. Petersburg until I was hired sight unseen over the telephone by the St. Petersburg Times. My rudimentary research before grabbing my diploma and heading out did not prepare me for what I was to find. There were old people everywhere. Data for the 1960 census, released not long after I began work, confirmed what I observed: the median age for the census tract comprising downtown was 65 years.

Webb’s City in downtown was a sort of Walmart before there was Walmart. The median age there probably was closer to 75.

I HAD BEEN AROUND old people all of my life, but they were part of a broader population. They were great aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. Even those older folks who lived alone were not isolated from those of other ages. Here, they were most often on their own. They had spent their working years in Detroit or Buffalo or Rochester, and they had come to Florida to claim their share of sunshine and warm breezes, often leaving kith and kin. Some of them lived in enclaves where children were not welcome.

Most of us on the reporting staff were young, and we didn’t think the so-called senior citizens were anything like our grandmothers or aunts. They shuffled down the sidewalk and lined up for the early bird specials at the restaurants. They wore pith helmets, plaid Bermuda shorts and black shoes and knee socks and waited for a weed to have the audacity to pop up from their plush grass. They crowded zoning board meetings to rail against spot zoning and filled the city council chambers to oppose tax increases. They talked to anyone who would listen — and to some who wouldn’t — about their children or grandchildren or their ailments.

We were not going to be like them. Somehow we believed that we would waltz into the sunset, slim and erect and energetic forever.

How arrogant we were.

Time has a way of eroding youthful arrogance, and we learn that there’s an awful lot we have little or no control over. No matter how lithe and erect we were, how many miles we hiked or how many rivers we paddled, time and gravity tug at us, and our genes betray us. Hands that could tie a fishing fly are gnarled with arthritis, and eyes that could see to thread a needle have difficulty making out the type on a page. Minds that could direct a complex business operation have trouble keeping a simple task in mind long enough to complete it.

TIME ALONE HAS broadened my understanding. Just observing those patients at the clinic pushed the process along. 

Carrying on into old age calls for a certain amount of bravery. Hopes and dreams can still burn bright in bodies that are enduring the storms that time brings. The will to live defies the gravity that bows the back or the cataract that dims the sight.

I am still youthful enough or arrogant enough to believe that aging does not have to embrace rigidity and bitterness and mean-spiritedness.

Perhaps living in a community of geriatrics is good for some, but I suspect homogeneity is not as conducive to maintaining a lively mind and an appreciation for diversity. Many of our neighbors fall roughly within our age range, but there are younger people in the neighborhood, as well.

We’re fortunate, too, that we live in a college community. Auburn University is a virtual picnic of cultural and entertainment possibilities, and the passion and energy of youth are a welcome antidote to fossilization.