We’ve been in the rental townhouse in Virginia-Highlands for two months now, and we’ve almost fully unpacked. I’d like to say we have time now to put up Halloween decorations, but we don’t have them anymore. The story of why we don’t have any decorations is the story of what happened to us the last decade, so it’s as easy a way to catch up this blog as any.
The kids and I used to love decorating for Halloween, starting with the year we went to a pumpkin patch the first year the youngest could walk, around 2009. We went outside the city with some of our oldest friends who had just moved to Atlanta and set the whole thing up. We went on a hayride, and the tiny girls picked one orange and one white pumpkin from the field. I carved classic jack-o-lanterns and placed them on the front porch of our loft in Inman Park near Little Five Points. Over the years, we collected more decorations. A first, we just put out ghosts I made of old bedsheets and things the kids brought home from school projects. Around 2011 we gained parts of a teaching skeleton a babysitter found in a dumpster and started hanging the realistic looking bits in the tree near our porch. As our fortunes rose in the following years there were fake tombstones and a few other pieces from Target, including a full plastic skeleton that could fold away neatly the eleven months of the year it wasn’t in use.
My crowning piece of Halloween décor was something I had wanted for years, a pottery jack-o-lantern from Mexico about thirty inches tall sold by Kroger I bought in 2014. The terracotta clay was thick and heavy, with the natural dark orange accented with dark green at the top for the stem. The shape was tall and skinny, pinched a bit in the middle like a malformed gourd, and the face was frightening. I adored this piece of Halloween. It was permanent and something we never could have afforded before. With an electric light puck inside the jack-o-lantern was the perfect combination of scary and dumb. I loved it. I loved that we could own something specific to a holiday that wasn’t strictly functional and was strong enough that I use it for the rest of my life. I loved that we had enough money that I could buy something seasonal and expensive from the grocery store that wasn’t food. I had always admired these imports from Mexico stacked in front of Kroger every year, and in 2014, the year I made the most money I ever would, I had one.
I don’t own the terracotta jack-o-lantern anymore. Last March, I smashed it to pieces.
Like everything else, the gain and loss of our Halloween decorations followed our family fortunes. After building up that steady supply of fun stuff, it all outgrew the loft we owned on Dekalb Avenue, and in 2018 we moved into a rental house – quite a famous one in Little 5, right across from the community center where Austin meets Euclid. There, at the heart of the neighborhood’s Halloween parade, our family went all out for our favorite holiday. We bought a giant inflatable black cat that looked ready to pounce and moved its head from side to side. The husband and our oldest daughter climbed up on the rental house roof and managed to anchor and plug in the cat up there so that it surveyed all who passed. People took pictures, and the neighbors complimented us. We tried to buy that house, but the owner, who was devoted to demolition by neglect for the historic home laughed in our faces. Half a million dollars, the amount we had been approved for by the bank, was not enough. The neighbors mourned our leaving when we finally bought the closest house in our school district we could afford. After over fifteen years living within the same square mile of Inman Park near Little five, the husband and I bought a house in Lake Claire.
The house in Lake Claire was bigger by nearly three times to any house I had lived in before, three stories of fixer-upper madness. I was sad the first Halloween when I realized there were no external plugs for the inflatable black cat, but we had plans to have all the electrical redone, so I stored the cat with the idea that it would come back in a year or two. That first year we threw the random bones and skeleton around the yard, put the jack-o-lantern out near the corner. I took the youngest daughter to the Lake Claire neighborhood pumpkin carving where she had a great time. I bought a few more decorations, as for the first time we had a big yard, but none of them really worked. The ghost that should fly on a string didn’t. The solar-powered light up skulls died in the first rains, and birds nested in the dragon skull. Still, next year decorations would be better. The kids went up and down Page avenue for the first time with the husband, a Lake Claire street blocked off with over-the-top decorations with all the other neighborhood kids. The amount of candy they brought home was so incredible that I found secret piles of it stashed around the house for months later.
The next year was 2020.
Quarantine Halloween was our skeleton poised on the corner around a plastic cauldron full of candy. Contactless trick-or-treating happened up and down surrounding streets. Still fun, as neighbors built candy chutes and pinned bags of treats to clotheslines. No electrical work on the house, so no inflatable cat. Well, things would get better.
Last Halloween – 2021 – my niece and nephew came up from Augusta for the first time, and the four kids and all the adults hit Page Avenue. I knew it was likely the last year for my kids, who were 13 and 15. The older child was late in growing tall, so the party of four did well, especially with the two cute small cousins with them. I was drowning in work and the lawn had just the bones thrown haphazardly and the one skeleton now. The ghost that should light up and fly on a string hung carelessly on a branch like an afterthought, but my jack-o-lantern was at least right against the house in the driveway, so we could see it when I came home every day exhausted.
In the days after last year’s Halloween, I would beg the kids to help me clean up the stuff. They did so near Thanksgiving, setting the decorations near the front door. Because of the way the Lake Claire house worked, I couldn’t put the items away in the attic myself, because opening the dangerous attic ladder was a two-person job. I asked the husband for help, but he was trying not to drown himself, as his solitary law practice shut down at last after eighteen months without a full workload. He went back to bartending at the Fox as he had when we first married, and then to ninety-day job helping with COVID PPP loans six days a week while we struggled to overcome our own financial COVID disaster.
The decorations sat on the porch through winter, collecting dirt and real cobwebs. I wanted to put them away, but every day I came home from work to find something else broken in the giant fixer upper I hated more daily. All the doors stuck when it rained. We had constant plumbing issues. The money we had set aside for fixing drainage and landscape problems was used to float us while the husband’s law practice stumbled, then failed, leaving me to do what I could on the weekends. I was always tired, and the kids had morphed into teenagers who wanted to fight me any time I asked for help.
In late March of 2022, my work gave me the opportunity to travel again for the first time in two years. A conference was being held in Portland, where my middle sister had just moved for a career change. I was able to fly across the country for almost a week, stay with my sister, and get some much-needed time away from the house. I had a great trip, and then on the way home suffered a chain of mishaps too mundane and stupid to document. It all ended with me alone on the porch on a Friday evening far away from a school event for the younger child I had desperately wanted to attend. I had lost my phone at the last minute in a scramble to get out of a dodgy Uber from the airport, and I was alone.
The Halloween decorations, now fully six months away from legitimate use, stared at me from the front porch. I had asked that they please be put away while I was gone, but of course that hadn’t happened. The teens were still too young for the dangerous attic ladder, and the husband couldn't do it by himself.
I grabbed the terracotta jack-o-lantern and heaved it off the porch as hard as I could onto some rocks below. The sound it made as it smashed irreparably made me feel a little better. Then I took what was left – the sadly aged ghost that had never worked, the remaining bits of scavenged teaching skeleton, the Target skeleton and fake tombstones, all of which were partly broken by age and exposure now – and threw them all away. It was easier to throw away the stuff that get it stored properly, and none of it was whole anymore, anyway.
So, it’s Halloween again on Monday, and we don’t have any decorations at the new place. There’s nowhere to put them anyhow, as the townhouse we’re renting is part of two rows that face each other, not the street. The kids are both in High School now and have plans with their friends. My youngest sister can’t afford the drive from Augusta to bring my niece and nephew up to trick or treat this year. Maybe they’ll visit again next year, when the holiday isn’t on a school night. 2023 will be better. It has to be. It’s 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.
Friday, October 28, 2022
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
So, Ripped Denim is Back
I left work Monday on foot, walking towards the eBike I had reserved on my phone. The app that lets you pay for eBikes also shows you all the available ones to rent nearby, and you can put a hold on one for 30 minutes in advance. As I walked down Peachtree from work to my reserved ride I stopped, as I often do, to see what the custom couture shop near the library has in their window. One of the windows was full of artfully cut and torn denim. I had a moment to remember an old MTSU Professor, one of the editors of the Journal of Pop Culture, talking about torn denim in fashion decades ago. "It projects the image of a neglected child" she had said. Of course torn denim is back. People pay a lot of money to project poverty, patched and mixed textures in their clothes, on purpose. I remember thinking even when I was young how dumb it was. I grew up poor, and I have kind of a thing about dressing in clothes that look nice.
As I continued on to my reserved bike, I was sad to find that the first reserved selection had bent wheels and a smashed seat. The next bike was so damaged it couldn't be scanned. The third bike I found on the edge of Woodruff Park was rideable, but the bells had been broken and someone had twisted the left hand break a weird way. I was still able to use the third bike to ride to the grocery, and then home.
I know it was likely one of my unhoused neighbors breaking all the rental eBikes out of frustration. I would be frustrated too, if I were unhoused in Atlanta with all the vacant business tower space just sitting there around me.
One morning during the quarantine phase of pandemic as the husband drove me into work, we watched EMS workers collect the body of a homeless person off the side of Atlanta Medical Center. The unhoused neighbor had died on the sidewalk outside the hospital overnight. This did not make the news. It happens all the time. Now that same hospital is closing because it could not make a profit of any kind, but lost money year after year. Too many people needed help. I don't blame the hospital. I don't blame the person who got angry and went around breaking all the bikes. But we did use that hospital, and I do need the bikes to get home after work, so I wish things were different.
Sometimes I think about the fact that I had a life for about ten years where I mostly wasn't scraping by all the time. There was about a decade where I didn't feel fucking poor, and I thought, hey, I'll never have to be poor again. Then this thing happened that happened to everybody, where the federal government was gutted first, and then a million people died, some of them right out on the street.
Most people didn't see it. Most people in Atlanta still don't know that there were refrigerated trucks beside the stadium for the bodies. I know there are people in the suburbs who still think it was a hoax, because it wasn't in their face.
A friend of mine is using crowfunding for medical expenses now, because even if you are employed with health insurance, most of us don't have enough. I fantasize about finding a way to steal or scam enough to fix all of my loved one's medical bills. I try not to scream when the husband reminds me how much better we have it than the single parents he sees in his work every day, living in rental conditions that in any sane state would be illegal.
We don't live in a sane state. All I can do is get up every morning and go to a job that pays less than I could make anywhere else. I go to this job because I think I am making a difference. If I don't get up and do something every day to make living in this country, this state, and this city less difficult, I think I'll lose my mind. I'll start screaming and shredding my denim pants, because I want to project that we are all the neglected children of a state that lets people die in the street. I worry that by working the job that keeps me from screaming - the job that pays so much less than I could be making elsewhere - that I am damaging and neglecting my own children.
I tell myself that of course, the money isn't what matters, having the time off and holidays this job allows me will fill in the gaps left by the lack of money. I have less than twenty months now with both my kids in High School, and I want to maximize my time with them. We can't afford artfully ripped denim. We can't even afford invisilines to correct their slightly crooked teeth, teeth that on one child were *so close* to being straight until the pandemic hit and she outgrew her invisilines and we've not been able to replace them. But at least we aren't on the street, breaking bikes out of frustration, or dying on the side of a hospital for lack of care. I can make sure my children's clothes don't have holes in them. It's 2022, the world is on fire, and we're all just doing our best.
As I continued on to my reserved bike, I was sad to find that the first reserved selection had bent wheels and a smashed seat. The next bike was so damaged it couldn't be scanned. The third bike I found on the edge of Woodruff Park was rideable, but the bells had been broken and someone had twisted the left hand break a weird way. I was still able to use the third bike to ride to the grocery, and then home.
I know it was likely one of my unhoused neighbors breaking all the rental eBikes out of frustration. I would be frustrated too, if I were unhoused in Atlanta with all the vacant business tower space just sitting there around me.
One morning during the quarantine phase of pandemic as the husband drove me into work, we watched EMS workers collect the body of a homeless person off the side of Atlanta Medical Center. The unhoused neighbor had died on the sidewalk outside the hospital overnight. This did not make the news. It happens all the time. Now that same hospital is closing because it could not make a profit of any kind, but lost money year after year. Too many people needed help. I don't blame the hospital. I don't blame the person who got angry and went around breaking all the bikes. But we did use that hospital, and I do need the bikes to get home after work, so I wish things were different.
Sometimes I think about the fact that I had a life for about ten years where I mostly wasn't scraping by all the time. There was about a decade where I didn't feel fucking poor, and I thought, hey, I'll never have to be poor again. Then this thing happened that happened to everybody, where the federal government was gutted first, and then a million people died, some of them right out on the street.
Most people didn't see it. Most people in Atlanta still don't know that there were refrigerated trucks beside the stadium for the bodies. I know there are people in the suburbs who still think it was a hoax, because it wasn't in their face.
A friend of mine is using crowfunding for medical expenses now, because even if you are employed with health insurance, most of us don't have enough. I fantasize about finding a way to steal or scam enough to fix all of my loved one's medical bills. I try not to scream when the husband reminds me how much better we have it than the single parents he sees in his work every day, living in rental conditions that in any sane state would be illegal.
We don't live in a sane state. All I can do is get up every morning and go to a job that pays less than I could make anywhere else. I go to this job because I think I am making a difference. If I don't get up and do something every day to make living in this country, this state, and this city less difficult, I think I'll lose my mind. I'll start screaming and shredding my denim pants, because I want to project that we are all the neglected children of a state that lets people die in the street. I worry that by working the job that keeps me from screaming - the job that pays so much less than I could be making elsewhere - that I am damaging and neglecting my own children.
I tell myself that of course, the money isn't what matters, having the time off and holidays this job allows me will fill in the gaps left by the lack of money. I have less than twenty months now with both my kids in High School, and I want to maximize my time with them. We can't afford artfully ripped denim. We can't even afford invisilines to correct their slightly crooked teeth, teeth that on one child were *so close* to being straight until the pandemic hit and she outgrew her invisilines and we've not been able to replace them. But at least we aren't on the street, breaking bikes out of frustration, or dying on the side of a hospital for lack of care. I can make sure my children's clothes don't have holes in them. It's 2022, the world is on fire, and we're all just doing our best.
Friday, October 14, 2022
It Was Fall Break
For the majority of the time my kids have been students in Atlanta Public Schools, we've been lucky to have a calendar with full week breaks in early October and mid January. These extra weeks off give teachers and students much needed down time, reduce our summers to a managable ten weeks, and, best of all, used to give us amazing and affordable family vacations. Before COVID, we took the kids to Disney three times over the years, and each time saw other Atlanta families we knew there at the same time. We went to Costa Rica, we went to we visited family, the kids went to week long camps offered by local arts and crafts places or their karate dojo. The October break, in particular, has always been nice because early October is when the heat has finally lifted off Atlanta.
During the COVID years - the school years that started in the fall of 2019 through last Spring - those three years didn't have week long breaks, because of a number of factors, and it made me mad every damn time. Luckily this year we have our old calendar back, and so the kids had this week off.
There's no money to go anywhere this year. We still haven't sold the Lake Claire house. It's under contract for an amount we considered insulting as recently as ninety days ago. Now we'll just be happy to get anything at all, and avoid foreclosure before sale.
I did manage to take the kids out for a nice dinner Monday, right after I took them to get their annual flu shots. Years ago I made the holiday formerly known as Columbus Day our family flu shot day every year, as a kind of object lesson in applied history. The kids always have it off, and even when I don't I can usually skip out on work a little early to make vaccinations happen. Now that we live in Virginia Highlands, I was able to walk with them down to the CVS and then over to the restaurant after.
Other than that one walk out, I was unsuccessful in getting the kids out of the house during their break. I tried, but as teens they legitamately want to lay in bed and play video games with their week off. I am hoping that after the house sells, we can afford to travel again. Winn and I are considering driving the kids up to the UGA Athens campus over the Thanksgiving holiday week. As difficult as it can be to get in to UGA, that's currently the 16-year-old's safety school. We only have about a year before she has to make her decision about where to spend her first few years of early adulthood away from us.
I really want both the kids to go somewhere far away, as I think being outside your home culture is an important part of growing as a person. I don't know if anything outside the state will be possible with our current finacial situation though, and honestly, none of my friends with college ended up making any more than my friends without college in the long run. I am pushing college on the oldest child because I think she has the best shot at scholarships right out of High School, but maybe that's a mistake. It's 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything about the best path thorugh early adulthood, or what might lead to success. We're all just doing our best.
During the COVID years - the school years that started in the fall of 2019 through last Spring - those three years didn't have week long breaks, because of a number of factors, and it made me mad every damn time. Luckily this year we have our old calendar back, and so the kids had this week off.
There's no money to go anywhere this year. We still haven't sold the Lake Claire house. It's under contract for an amount we considered insulting as recently as ninety days ago. Now we'll just be happy to get anything at all, and avoid foreclosure before sale.
I did manage to take the kids out for a nice dinner Monday, right after I took them to get their annual flu shots. Years ago I made the holiday formerly known as Columbus Day our family flu shot day every year, as a kind of object lesson in applied history. The kids always have it off, and even when I don't I can usually skip out on work a little early to make vaccinations happen. Now that we live in Virginia Highlands, I was able to walk with them down to the CVS and then over to the restaurant after.
Other than that one walk out, I was unsuccessful in getting the kids out of the house during their break. I tried, but as teens they legitamately want to lay in bed and play video games with their week off. I am hoping that after the house sells, we can afford to travel again. Winn and I are considering driving the kids up to the UGA Athens campus over the Thanksgiving holiday week. As difficult as it can be to get in to UGA, that's currently the 16-year-old's safety school. We only have about a year before she has to make her decision about where to spend her first few years of early adulthood away from us.
I really want both the kids to go somewhere far away, as I think being outside your home culture is an important part of growing as a person. I don't know if anything outside the state will be possible with our current finacial situation though, and honestly, none of my friends with college ended up making any more than my friends without college in the long run. I am pushing college on the oldest child because I think she has the best shot at scholarships right out of High School, but maybe that's a mistake. It's 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything about the best path thorugh early adulthood, or what might lead to success. We're all just doing our best.
Friday, October 07, 2022
Parties Past and Present
Twenty years ago, I was surrounded by friends and celebrating my birthday at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival.
There's so much more to that memory than I posted at the time. I have a draft story saved somewhere entitled "Nobody Gets Laid at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival". Last November I was at a backyard party where a professional storyteller who was actually from Jonesboro laughed when I told her about the premise. No one gets laid in Jonesboro ever, apparently. I'm not the only one - which is the lesson that the internet has taught me, over and over again. Nothing we do is ever truly unique, we're all in this together.
The backyard party where I met the storyteller was being hosted by a prominent local artist couple I've known for a long time. We're not close friends - I'm not sure how many people at my age have close friends. I know them, they know me, we're all cool with each other. That's kind of how it goes at forty-six. I know a lot of people, but there's no more of that intimacy we had in our twenties, where a bunch of us could sit on a couch and say we felt loved. Even the intimacy we think we have that might be unique isn't. I learned by accident at that artist's party that someone I had dated was now with someone one of the artists had once dated. There's no one-off anything, really.
The backyard artist's party last November was the first party anyone had been to since the quarantine. Since then, the husband and I have been to a few get togethers. There was one just last weekend, hosted by friends I've had since 1997. The husband went early in the day, and stayed until the evening when I came to pick him up.
I didn't go to the board game party all day like the husband because I was busy. The kids needed pick ups and drop offs at their different activities, and a friend from Florida came downtown to visit. The Florida friends are staying with family far north of Atlanta with their kids. We've all seen the sharks swimming down the Tampa area streets and the destruction of neighborhoods on TV. No one knows yet when schools in the hurricane area will resume. The kids can't go to cirtual school because there's no cell service towers or internet. Even if they did have online access, it will be weeks before there is drinkable water and restored roads in many areas.
So since the Florida friends will be around for a while we walked the two blocks down to the Beltline and showed the teens Ponce City Market, the old Sears building which is now a mall. It was the first time I've really seen the return of teen mall culture. For the majority of my daughter's lives, malls were semi-abandoned places we only visited occasionally to go to the movies. Of course, not all malls were like that over the last two decades, just the ones near us downtown and on the east side. But now there's a proper mall again, and my teens can walk to it, and younger daughter was thrilled to show her Florida friends around and run into her school friends. Next week is fall break for my girls, and I suspect all of them will be at the mall at least a few times, since they can walk.
I did go to the very end of the game night party that evening. It was at a house in East Point. I've been going to parties thrown by these friends since 1997, first in Murfreesboro, then in Nashville, and now here, for twenty-five years. As I sat around the bonfire, we all talked about random shit - the kids, and the floods, and the neighborhoods, and caught up. And we all agreed - it's 2022, the world is on fire, nobody knows anything, and we're all just doing our best.
There's so much more to that memory than I posted at the time. I have a draft story saved somewhere entitled "Nobody Gets Laid at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival". Last November I was at a backyard party where a professional storyteller who was actually from Jonesboro laughed when I told her about the premise. No one gets laid in Jonesboro ever, apparently. I'm not the only one - which is the lesson that the internet has taught me, over and over again. Nothing we do is ever truly unique, we're all in this together.
The backyard party where I met the storyteller was being hosted by a prominent local artist couple I've known for a long time. We're not close friends - I'm not sure how many people at my age have close friends. I know them, they know me, we're all cool with each other. That's kind of how it goes at forty-six. I know a lot of people, but there's no more of that intimacy we had in our twenties, where a bunch of us could sit on a couch and say we felt loved. Even the intimacy we think we have that might be unique isn't. I learned by accident at that artist's party that someone I had dated was now with someone one of the artists had once dated. There's no one-off anything, really.
The backyard artist's party last November was the first party anyone had been to since the quarantine. Since then, the husband and I have been to a few get togethers. There was one just last weekend, hosted by friends I've had since 1997. The husband went early in the day, and stayed until the evening when I came to pick him up.
I didn't go to the board game party all day like the husband because I was busy. The kids needed pick ups and drop offs at their different activities, and a friend from Florida came downtown to visit. The Florida friends are staying with family far north of Atlanta with their kids. We've all seen the sharks swimming down the Tampa area streets and the destruction of neighborhoods on TV. No one knows yet when schools in the hurricane area will resume. The kids can't go to cirtual school because there's no cell service towers or internet. Even if they did have online access, it will be weeks before there is drinkable water and restored roads in many areas.
So since the Florida friends will be around for a while we walked the two blocks down to the Beltline and showed the teens Ponce City Market, the old Sears building which is now a mall. It was the first time I've really seen the return of teen mall culture. For the majority of my daughter's lives, malls were semi-abandoned places we only visited occasionally to go to the movies. Of course, not all malls were like that over the last two decades, just the ones near us downtown and on the east side. But now there's a proper mall again, and my teens can walk to it, and younger daughter was thrilled to show her Florida friends around and run into her school friends. Next week is fall break for my girls, and I suspect all of them will be at the mall at least a few times, since they can walk.
I did go to the very end of the game night party that evening. It was at a house in East Point. I've been going to parties thrown by these friends since 1997, first in Murfreesboro, then in Nashville, and now here, for twenty-five years. As I sat around the bonfire, we all talked about random shit - the kids, and the floods, and the neighborhoods, and caught up. And we all agreed - it's 2022, the world is on fire, nobody knows anything, and we're all just doing our best.
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