Not so Fondly

    

      Houstonians wear the one hundred percent humidity that shrouds the city as if it were a second set of fine clothing. They’re proud and tough. “If you can live with this humidity you can live anywhere.” I heard it said no less than a thousand times while growing up. The muddy Buffalo Bayou runs through town and the city is blessed with tall pines that graciously obscure the miles and miles of flat and boring terrain that flow to Galveston and the brown waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

     I remember two water fountains that sat side by side in the back of the Lewis & Coker grocery store. “Don’t drink out of that one. Use the other.” By the late Sixties the signs with the words “colored” and “white” had been removed but the screw holes and the yellowed outlines remained. Some parents still instructed their little ones to use the “white” fountain. I grew up going to that grocery store every day. Opal, Mary and Cora were the checkers and Jimmy was the smiling bag boy who pushed our cart to the car and unloaded the groceries into the back of our Pontiac. 

     We called Jimmy “the bag boy” but, in reality, he was a grown man with the mental capacity of a 10 year old. When I was in junior high he drank a bottle of drain cleaner in an effort to end a life that we all thought was uncomplicated but must have been plagued by demons and depression. It was my first glaring realization that people are rarely what they appear to be and life is not as simple as nostalgia paints the picture. 

     Problems were whispered and hushed. Dads went to work and moms stayed home and barefoot children had the run of the neighborhood from morning ‘til dark.  They raced from one green lawn to the next and from tree to tree on makeshift baseball fields. Every yard in our neighborhood had a small ditch at the end of the driveway and, when it wasn’t filled with muddy water running off our below sea level yards, it made a perfect resting place. Our skinny little backs bent in unison with the slope of the yard. Our lazy moments were laced with gossip because the kids in the neighborhood always know the truth. Behind the little ranch style houses were families with secrets they never talked about.

     I always thought it was the muggy air that made people do crazy things but now I know that families and their problems are universal. Mr. Lydell lived one block over from us.  On his forty sixth birthday he got up from the dining room table, calmly walked into the hall bath and shot his brains to smithereens.  His family was eating meat loaf and mashed potatoes and the candles on the chocolate sheet cake were ready to be lit. I don’t ever recall anyone saying he had been unhappy.

"The times they are a changin'." Bob Dylan was right and thank God for that. When my own kids look back on their childhood what will they remember? We're better equipped to recognize and deal with depression but suicide remains a scourge. Segregation and the separate water fountains have given way to other social injustices but the outcry of collective voices seems much louder in 2011.