Saturday, through the window

Bandit and I sit and lose ourselves in the window. I watch the neighbor watch the rain; Bandit watches a squirrel. One of us considers meeting the object of our attention.

The rain means there will be peace today. I will empty the bucket filled with drops from a wayward shingle, sending the bounty from my house’s foundation toward the irises that have bloomed for the first time since we moved. The yard is a new green, a shade that indicates health and life and hope that there’s more of both somewhere in the soil. We will plant the garden soon, on a day when there is less rain and perhaps less peace. There will still be hope, hope that multiplies.

It has been a long, middle-class week. Lindsey returned from a work trip only to lock her keys in her car, which proved impenetrable to the hapless AAA man. The incident allowed me to escape a too-long meeting and temporarily stop the workweek around Hour 55. The work doesn’t much concern me; it is an avalanche of dead leaves, unable to hold together long enough to suffocate. I will soon crawl from under the pile and brush off the remnants.

Today I will listen as others tell me about the future, and I will wonder if it is mine. The future surrounds me, in the hammering of the house rising behind mine,  in the earth of my plot, in the narratives that rescue us from dread.

The neighbor has long since gone inside. Bandit turns away, content to wait out a spate of hiccups.

Working overtime

My nerves are shot as I write this. I face a mountain of work with self-pity and the shame that accompanies it. This process is never, ever fulfilling. Everything becomes a task instead of a craft. A life’s work should feel like more than that.

Living to work has never felt right to me. Achieving work-life balance shouldn’t be some goal to strive toward; it should be the starting point.

I read all the time about people who fight for pay they have earned. They’re usually people who make very little, and even then, they don’t protest until their suffering has become unbearable. And yet, so many more simply take what they are given, do what they are told, and try to find victories in small subordinations and eternal rationalizations.

Anyway, I have a lot of work to do, and I should probably get to it. I’ve been here before. It’s not the best.

The Making of a Place

We spent Sunday cleaning the yard and preparing for a spring that has proved delightfully elusive, giving hope that perhaps we’ll have some semblance of four seasons. Amidst the scrubbing, mowing and assembling, we found ourselves believing that this year – the fourth in our home – our dreams of a front-porch paradise and a backyard haven might begin to be realized.

Creating that place has required a lot of disposing and renewing – three dumpsters’ worth of the former, but really more, considering the trucks and trailers that have come bearing the new and have left with the old. We bought a white house with white brick and a white fence and a gray roof in a sea of gray concrete. If we had been snowed in, no one would have found us.

We now live in a blue house with red brick and a red fence (but white in the front) and a red roof in a shrinking sea of concrete. We have a porch made of furniture cobbled together from yard sales and fabric stores and neighbors who we hope won’t ask for their chairs back. We have grass in the backyard and something much worse in the front, but it is progress.

And every so often on Sundays like the last, we inch toward our dreams with suds and seeds. I stoop to collect signs of renewal and reminders of decay. Nails litter the ground from numerous projects, fasteners that didn’t quite make it to their destination. They instead seek willing tire treads in which to nestle and feel loved in a final, destructive act. Glass peppers the fenceline, signs of apparent poverty and the abject neglect that accompanied it. They are shards of a place that gives glimpses of a noble history and markers of a past better discarded than painted over.

We are attempting the folly of creating peace, however fleeting. It is a well-needed exercise.

How not to be alone

The past week has been a weird one at work and in the world. As I write this, there’s a manhunt for a guy — a kid, really — who has killed multiple people, has injured scores more and has set our country on edge. I tend to check in every once in a while to see what’s being said, but most of the time, it’s either wrong or unhelpful. I grew up trusting the press more than our government. Now, I’m in the weird predicament of trusting the government over the press.

Here at home, I’ve been spending much of the workweek in what we have dubbed “the vortex,” a mass of floor driers hauled in after a pipe broke over the weekend. The ensuing cleanup has meant most people in my portion of the office have moved elsewhere, replaced by a drone of swirling air and a musty smell that has me thinking we might soon begin growing our own vegetation.

I’ve had a glimpse this week of what it might be like to work alone. People rarely come by my office now, unless it’s to look for water stains on the carpet. The usual camaraderie among the younger staff has dispersed, leading me to wonder if we might tear down the cubicles and make a giant, common creative space for people to work and rest their brains.

We’re not meant to be alone, either in work or in times of grief. There’s value to time to oneself, but I think it’s meant to be like swimming in the ocean — you can’t stay out there forever, else you’ll get tired and the current will pull you away, until you simply drift.

When I’m alone, I dwell upon people’s faults. When I’m with people, I am reminded of their grace and mine.

NashvilleNext in My Life: Learning from Atlanta

Photo credit: AtlanticStation.com

On a recent trip to Atlanta to visit friends and catch a ballgame, I saw the city a little differently than in previous trips. My office’s work with NashvilleNext, the countywide plan to determine Nashville’s civic planning over the next 25 years, has forced me to notice my built environment a lot more. Now, whenever I see new developments or empty storefronts, I think about returns on investment, density levels and public-private partnerships. Really nerdy stuff, I know.

As we drove through the mega-highways that connect Atlanta and its seemingly endless suburbs, I remarked to my wife that such urban sprawl was a planner’s nightmare. On our way to our friends’ house, we passed construction to extend six-lane highways even farther away from the city. As anyone who has been to Atlanta knows, few people actually live within the city limits. Residents define themselves by their suburbs and surrounding counties, and attached to those locations are subtexts regarding income levels, demographics and overall quality of life. Those realities are not unique to Atlanta, but they are perhaps more pronounced due to the city’s many tentacles.

In Nashville, we like to remark that we never want to be like Atlanta when it comes to traffic and sprawl. But there are also a few positive examples we can take from Atlanta as we consider what kind of city Nashville wants to be.  Inside the Perimeter (as the notorious I-285 is called), we found neighborhoods that incorporated housing for a variety of incomes, as well as restaurants and small retail that encouraged foot traffic. Atlantic Station, a mixed-use Midtown development on the site of the old Atlantic Steel mill, has gained attention for its focus on reuse, energy efficiency and density. (It also attracts a jealous side-eye from Nashville toward its IKEA.)

As is often mentioned at NashvilleNext events, our population is going to increase by more than a million people over the next 25 years. Surrounding counties like Rutherford and Williamson will grow at a faster rate than Davidson, but the jobs will continue to be in Nashville. We’re going to have more commuters, meaning we’re going to have to come up with solutions that use our existing infrastructure – our highways – and encourage sensible transit options. That’s where we can avoid a lot of the gridlock and asphalt that Atlanta has created.

But we’re also going to need to create spaces that allow people to live, work and play where they are, without having to spend a disproportionate percentage of their income on transportation and housing. That’s where we can look at Atlanta’s examples like Virginia-Highland and Atlantic Station to see what we can incorporate both within our urban core and in our suburbs.

NashvilleNext is encouraging such discussions in a very accessible and open way. People don’t have to be city planners to get involved; they just have to care about their communities. We can learn a lot from cities like Atlanta as we plan for the future, but it’s going to take everyone’s involvement to ensure we create a plan that is uniquely Nashville.