May 10, 2009

Mother's Day at the Sneeds began early and will run into this evening. Mrs. Sneed and I went to our oldest son and daughter-in-law's house last evening for a Mother's Day dinner. It was a really nice evening, topped by a good meal. Aiden and I shot some baskets in the back and then we played a game of Yahtzee, which he won despite minimal cheating. At games end, he proudly proclaimed that, "I won and I only cheated once." The kid has a future in banking. And of course, Miss Riley was as cute as can be. Tonight we are having dinner out with Daughter Sneed and her husband Greg. Along with Noah, of course. This morning Mrs. Sneed and I took a drive down memory lane, culminating in a stop at the cemetery to pay our respects to our mothers, who are interred in the same cemetery. Well, technically Mrs. Sneed's parents are interred. My mom's ashes were spread in a special area of the cemetery. This is the first house Mrs. Sneed lived in when her family moved to Hooterville in the 1950s. It was a working class neighborhood then, now it's in the 'hood. The decades have not been kind. Mrs. Sneed and I went to this junior high, when it was shiny and new. It was built for the throng of middle class families moving to what was Hooterville's east side. Now it is in the center of the city and is in an economically depressed area. It ranks as the poorest performing middle school in the district. The neighborhood residents got old and the neighborhood ran down. These days the residents are largely immigrants from Mexico. The school enrollment is 87% minority children. When we went there it was nearly all white. It failing because it's students are poor, who also happen to be Hispanic, black and Native American. Ethnicity has nothing to do with academic potential, but poverty does. There are hundreds of apartments in immediate proximity to the school. This demographic leads to a 30% turnover in students each year. It is hard for a school to succeed with mostly poor and highly mobile students. The last stop before the cemetery was at my dad's old house. He lived there until he got really sick and had to come and live with us. Dad died in August 2005. The house is in a really tough, really scary neighborhood. It is a classic 1950s Hooterville concrete block structure, completely square, with no frills. The outside is painted white. Dad loved his house and said that he saw nothing wrong with his neighborhood. Even the late night gunfire and police helicopter visits were, "No biggie", his words. The current owner who doubles as my sister, has made some additions to the property. Not improvements necessarily, just changes. She lobbied long and hard for Dad to give her the house in his will, but he wouldn't do it, so she had to buy us out of our share. Why she wanted it so bad, I can't imagine. I said or did something, real or imaginary, to piss my sister off and she doesn't speak to me. Anyway, Happy Mother's Day, one and all. Tomorrow scenes from the cemetery. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky

6 comments:

edward said...

you shattered my illusions of Arizona being free of the scary.

edward said...

those cactus look so friendly. they not.

R.L. Bourges said...

What Eddie said - I never thought of Arizona in that context.

+ 30% turnover in the school. How can any learning happen. I feel sorry for the teachers as well as the students.

(Sounds like it was a nice day at the Sneeds, though.)

Megan said...

Hope your sister changes her mind someday. But maybe you don't? Well, it's sad, either way.

dennis said...

Dennis loves you.

Nan Patience said...

I forget who said it recently or on what show, but someone said that education in some places has become a rhetorical game in which education is hardly the object. It seems like education works just fine when education is the actual object.

Amyway, so you have a sister who doesn't speak to you, huh?