Jesus Saved Me From Cigarettes: and other curiosities from Noblesville's streets and waterways

Pimp My Rental
Leaving the Community Bank drive-thru on Saturday the 13th of June, I was interested to see a large crew of people scraping, painting, and landscaping 220 N. 10th St. According to an article in The Times two days later, the people were volunteers for Keep Noblesville Beautiful (KNB), and members of the Hamilton County Probation Department as well as those working off community service mandated by County Courts. They had gathered to improve homes in need of upkeep.

According to a source inside KBN, they did the work on behalf of a tenant at 220 N. 10 who asked for help fixing up the property. What KNB didn’t know that Saturday, and what wasn’t mentioned in The Times story was that the property they were improving is owned by Steve Holt, a County Commissioner, local attorney, and real estate investor who owns many investment properties throughout the county.

“Kids, get the hell outta the way!”
Local resident and DJ for 97.1 Hank FM, Ernie Mills, took this photograph on a recent weekend at Potter’s Bridge. Kids were floating on inner tubes in the river while others strolled the walking trails or fished from the river bank when fishermen in boats with oversized motors came roaring through with no apparent care.

One can only hope that the hidden boulders and floating logs of White River thin out that portion of the herd.

“Jesus Saved Me From Cigarettes”
That’s what the man’s sign said. He was sitting on a park bench on Logan Street in the shadow of the Courthouse last Friday, noontime, holding up his sign. I was so intrigued I parked the car and asked him his story.

His name was Larry Adams. Sitting in the sweltering heat Larry told me that in 1980, after he was saved, he asked Jesus for help kicking his smoking habit. In a prayer, he asked Jesus to give him a headache every time he lit up a cigarette. His prayer was answered. Headaches came each time he weakened and tried to take a puff.

In a later prayer, Larry asked Jesus to give him a headache whenever he drank beer. Larry no longer drinks or smokes cigarettes. He told me he just wanted to come to the courthouse square to share his experience with others.

Can’t See The Forest For The Trees
New ordinances being imposed on downtown Noblesville are guaranteed to make it less attractive to merchants and shoppers alike.

Merchants have been told they cannot put out sandwich board signs without a permit. The permit application requires a $100 fee and if granted, merchants must purchase $1 million in liability insurance. This is puzzling when you consider the most dangerous trip hazard currently on the sidewalks downtown are not sandwich boards, but the scores of flag poles.

In my ample time sitting out at Nobles Coffee & Tea, The Marketplace, and Matteo’s, I’ve not seen anyone endangered by sandwich board signs, but I’ve seen plenty of baby stroller wheels locked up by the flag polls and plenty of pedestrians with flags wrapped around their faces on a windy day. Is there $1 million in liability coverage for each flag?

And restaurants were recently notified that outdoor seating must leave a 40” open space between the seating and the star brick path

This is built upon the mystifying belief that the star brick strip is not a safe walking surface, so what’s left must provide a “treadable” space for pedestrians and wheelchairs. Which again is puzzling, because the variation in star brick surface appears to be less than the dimpled panels the City recently installed in sidewalk ramps – for the sake of safety.

I measured the “treadable” space along outdoor seating at one of Noblesville’s most popular downtown restaurants. As people sat and scooted out their chairs, the “treadable” space quickly shrunk to 16”. While I spoke with the patrons we set the tape measure for 40” and tried to imagine how the restaurant could comply. It could only be done by reducing their already meager seating by two thirds.

I asked a City Planning Department representative what they would do when seating shrunk the “treadable” space narrower than 40”. I was told it’s a violation that if repeated enough, would result in the establishment’s “encroachment permit,” being revoked. In other words, no more outdoor seating for that business.

But consider this. The distance between a city bench on the south side of Conner Street and the star bricks provides an ample 40” “treadable” space. Yet the moment you sit down, your feet reduce the “treadable” space to 30’-35’. But there’s no accounting for that in the new ordinance. I asked the same Planning Department official about the City’s violations and was told there were no provisions to address violations caused by the City. So if a restaurant violates the ordinance, they will be sited and stand to lose their right to outdoor seating. Do this on City seating and it’s okay.

On the east side of 8th Street, the City’s benches, flowerpots and trash cans leave only 15” of “treadable” space. Perhaps merchants should sue the City to force them to comply at the same rate they expect of merchants.

All this bureaucratic silliness doesn’t just encourage merchants to leave downtown, it also scares off shoppers. Why? Because the city has also banned bicycles from downtown sidewalks.

Having raised children in Old Town among other families raising children in Old Town, I assure you that if this ordinance is enforced, children on bicycles are essentially banned from downtown because parents know the streets are too dangerous.

All this effort to address minor fringe issues is puzzling, because there’s no plan for addressing downtown’s #1 safety issue: motorists who chase pedestrians and bicycles out of crosswalks.

How could such a supposedly conservative group of leaders produce so much illogical, nit-picking, bureaucratic, red tape aimed at ham-stringing small business people?

Vibrant city centers I have visited in America and abroad are organic, imperfect, funky places. Those that are heavily regulated tend to be sterile governmental and banking centers that die everyday at 5:00 when the bankers and bureaucrats go home. Noblesville’s leaders are apparently satisfied with the latter.

[Perhaps this all could have been avoided by simply banning the sales of antique military paraphernalia downtown.]

Debating The False Bill Cosby

I recently received an emailed prescription for turning America around. It clams to have been authored by frequently insightful and always outspoken comedian Bill Cosby. But further research reveals that Cosby did not write it. Other emails attribute it to late comedian George Carlin, who also did not write it.

The list fascinates me because it represents a bundle of mob-mentality notions. It masquerades as good ‘ol American common sense, but manages to ignore much of what America has stood for over generations. It also reminds us of the many ways the Internet has replaced the corner tavern, the beauty parlor, and the barber shop as the spreader of gossip and often narrow-minded, middle-America angst. The lynch mobs and misguided coups of the future will not assemble on the streets, but on the Internet, fed by intellectual perversion like this.

Here are the Fake Cosby’s bullet points for a better America, followed by The Contrarian’s rebuttal.

#1
The False Cosby: “’Press 1 for English,’ is immediately banned. English is the official language; speak it or wait at the border until you can.”

The Contrarian: So we're going to demand more of modern immigrants than was expected of our own ancestors? Many of our adult immigrant ancestors spoke their native tongue coupled with broken English until their deaths. Often only their children learned English and in many ethnic neighborhoods (in the good 'ol days) streets signs and businesses often used the local ethnic language. How quickly we forget.

#2 & #3
The False Cosby: 2-“We will immediately go into a two year isolationist posture to straighten out the country's attitude. NO imports, no exports. We will use the Wal-Mart policy, 'If we ain't got it, you don't need it.'” 3-“When imports are allowed, there will be a 100% import tax on it.”

The Contrarian: The world economy has been destroyed time and again by isolationism. And the behind-the-scenes Wal-Mart corporate policy is one that aggressively and systematically lures American manufacturers to China. Impose the False Cosby approach and Wal-Mart’s shelves would be empty, just like the logic behind point #2 & #3.

#4
The False Cosby: “All retired military personnel will be required to man one of our many observation towers on the southern border (six month tour). They will be under strict orders not to fire on SOUTHBOUND aliens.”

The Contrarian: So we’re gonna start shooting north bound boarder crossers? Sounds like the East Germans at the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.

#5:
The False Cosby: “Social security will immediately return to its original state. If you didn't put nuttin in, you ain't getting nuttin out. The president nor any other politician will be able to touch it.”

The Contrarian: So we're going to start putting elderly people out in the streets when their money runs out? Housewives who raised children instead of working in factories and children whose parents have died will no longer get benefits? Whose values does that reflect? Attila the Hun? Marie Antoinette? Kim Jong il’? How about a little WWJD?

#6
The False Cosby: “Welfare - Checks will be handed out on Fridays at the end of the 40-hour school week and the successful completion of urinalysis and a passing grade.”

The Contrarian: Okay, the False Cosby is pretty close to right on that one. I would also throw in long-term, systematic corporate welfare, like that our corporate farmers have been enjoying for decades. If you’re mad about the GM bailout, better stop eating American farm produce. It’s been socialized for decades.

#7
The False Cosby: “Professional Athletes--Steroids. The FIRST time you check positive you're banned for life.”

The Contrarian: Okay, that’s 2 for the False Cosby.

#8
The False Cosby: “Crime - We will adopt the Turkish method. The first time you steal, you lose your right hand. There are no more life sentences. If convicted of murder, you will be put to death by the same method you chose for your victim; gun, knife, strangulation, etc.”

The Contrarian: Turkey is our model? P-lease. Did the False Cosby ever go to church or read the Constitution? First, we don't inflict cruel and unusual punishment, not because we're weak on crime, but because we're better than the criminals and we're trying to build a culture in which elevated morals are embraced, not mocked. I'm with Martin Luther King: "An eye for an eye leave everybody blind."

#9
The False Cosby: “One export will be allowed, Wheat. The world needs to eat. A bushel of wheat will be the exact price of a barrel of oil.”

The Contrarian: Sounds good at first, but equating oil with food reveals how sick our love of cars truly is. Contrary to American cultural norms, the right to eat and the right to drive an urban assault vehicle are not equal.

#10
The False Cosby: “All foreign aid using American taxpayer money will immediately cease, and the saved money will pay off the national debt and ultimately lower taxes. When disasters occur around the world, we'll ask the American people if they want to donate to a disaster fund, and each citizen can make the decision whether it's a worthy cause.”

The Contrarian: Think the world hates us now? Do this and find out what it's like to sit entirely alone: hated and looked down upon rather than admired and emulated. To the nations whose democracy was nurtured or protected by our aid – “Hey guys, you’re on your own! All that business about us being a beacon of hope for the world? Well, we’re really not in that business anymore. I mean, come on. We’re already letting the elderly starve (#5) and shooting immigrants at the border (#4). You think we care about you?”

#11 & #12
The False Cosby: 11-“The Pledge of Allegiance will be said every day at school and every day in Congress, and 12-The National Anthem will be played at all appropriate ceremonies, sporting events, outings, etc.”

The Contrarian: I thought it was only communist Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea that demanded obedience. You'd have to ignore a lot of what America has stood for (and our soldiers have died for) over the past 230+ years to force people to follow this medieval list and then also say the pledge.

The list ends with this salutation:
“Sorry if I stepped on anyone's toes. GOD BLESS AMERICA.”
-Bill Cosby

The only toes the False Cosby stepped on are those who have read and understand the Constitution, those who have at least a rudimentary understanding of foreign policy, and those who put their religious faith into practice. The fake Cosby platform is an attack on reason, and a beckonning call to mob logic. It’s a reminder that the Internet, for all its technological brilliance, it’s also a chalkboard for nuts, extremists and axe-grinders.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Send this to everyone you know who loves America!

It's None Of Our Business 6/10/09

The television and radio debates I hear about gay marriage confound me. They constantly miss the heart of the issue.
Those who oppose gay marriage immediately pull the debate toward broad critiques of homosexuality. Does God approve or disapprove? Is it natural or unnatural? Will it destroy marriage as we know it? And way too often, supporters of gay marriage get drawn into those pointless questions.
I’ve got nothing against asking those questions. They’re completely reasonable questions for an individual to ask themselves, but they have nothing to do with the public debate in a free democracy.
We don’t try to regulate what church our neighbors attend, if any, nor whether they are Republican or Democrat, whether they and their lover are married or not, all of which have important social and political implication. We consider those issues private business. Why treat marriage differently?
But opponents of gay marriage don’t want to talk about that. They pursue abstractions instead. Such as “Gay marriage threatens traditional marriage.”
With America’s divorce rate hovering around 50%, it’s hard to imagine what gays could do to hurt marriage that heterosexuals haven’t already done.
And opponents want to argue that gay marriage is wrong.
But that’s easy to fix. If you think it’s wrong, then don’t marry a gay person.
When I taught school, it was clear that some of my former students were taught by their parents to hate Jews, or Catholics, or African Americans. And I shudder to think of some of the dangerous, fringe religious beliefs some people hold dear in this country. But the only way to make it illegal is to force other people to accept my view of the world.
The simple truth is, what someone else believes, deep in their hearts, is none of our business to regulate. Even if we think the practice of those beliefs like bigotry are damaging to our culture, at some point you have to step back and accept that as long as it does no physical harm nor infringes on another’s rights, it probably can’t be regulated and we don’t want to do the police-state sort of intrusive things one would have to do to regulate it.
So if you think gay marriage is bad, teach your children it’s bad and for goodness sakes don’t enter into a gay relationship. But other than that, mind your own business.
But proponents still argue, “The Bible says it’s wrong!”
But that’s their Bible, from their religion. It’s not what everyone believes.
One of the things our forefathers believed was that everyone should be free to worship as they wish. The fact that the Bible says something is a perfectly good reason for a Christian to order their lives accordingly, but it doesn’t give them the right to force others to live out their idea of a Christian lifestyle.
What two consenting adults do with their lives is none of our business, no matter how wrong one’s individual faith might say it is. Christianity also teaches that adultery is wrong. Yet it’s not illegal. To control that, you’d have to start meddling in people’s bedrooms. That anyone would want to do that to heterosexuals or homosexuals is at best, bizarre.
There’s something else that’s never mentioned in this debate. Those trying to insure that government forbid gays and lesbians the right to marry are generally also part of a political movement that claims to want to get government off our backs.
Really? They apparently want less government involvement unless it’s something they personally want to control. And then, they want absolute control.
Those who want to tell gays and lesbians that they can’t marry strike me as awfully similar to the men in the Middle East who insist a woman cover her face or wear a burka. They seem say, “My moral view is so superior that I will not tolerate you living your life as you see fit. I know better for you than you know for yourself. And if you won’t willingly do what I say, I’ll pass a law that forces you.”
The idea that people wanted to go to the polls in California last year to make sure another adult of legal age couldn’t live in a loving, legal relationship with another adult of legal age is mind boggling. Because it’s none of our business to make that choice for others.
Gay rights forces have a slogan that says, “Can we vote on your marriage?” It sounds like a stab in the heart of opponents, but opponents would only reply, “That suggests a moral equivalency where none exists. We’re not equal. Hetero is right and homo is wrong.”
And we’re right back to judging gays as bad people.
But opponents don’t really want the argument to be about that because it sounds mean and un-American to label a class of adults involved in legal behavior as secondary citizens, entitled to lesser rights because their nature or behavior offends some. But that’s really what this is all about, judging some Americans to be less equal than others.

Trouble In The Heartland 6/3/09

Driving out to Bonge’s in Perkinsville in the summer is a treat. The road between Strawtown and there winds and turns, rises and falls, following White River that flows beyond a line of trees to the north. Oceans of corn spread out in all directions rolling like waves on a gentle breeze. As I pass the picturesque farms, I’m often moved to comment, “It still looks like Indiana out here.”
Of course, my comment is as much a reference to that bucolic landscape as it is about the endless miles of asphalt lined with strip malls and subdivisions in Hamilton and Marion Counties where I spend most of my time.
But in reality, the parts of the state that still look like Indiana, beyond the relatively wealthy confines of Hamilton County are not fairing so well.
After publishing a book in the early 2000s, I drove all over the state in my GM pick-up truck with a case a books and slide projector in the back, doing my little dog and pony show in small towns and dying industrial cities like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle. I spoke in libraries, bookstores, churches, museums, private residences, and yes, a time or two, county highway garage conference rooms. I got a good look at Indiana’s dying rural, small town and industrial fabric. A lot of those places look like a war was fought in their old downtowns and residents took up safer ground in little plastic and asphalt enclaves by the Interstate.
Growing up in Tipton in the ‘60s and ‘70s, everybody’s folks were either family farmers or worked in the auto industry. Tipton had FMC, a firetruck manufacturer, and Perfect Circle, a piston ring maker. My dad, uncle, and eventually my older brother worked at Chrysler in Kokomo and an aunt worked at Delco.
The auto industry got caught with its pants down in the mid-’70 when gas prices spiked and they had little to offer suddenly energy-conscience car buyers. You’d think they would have learned, but last year it happened all over again. And the family farms started dying out and going corporate when I was in college.
The heartland’s fall from grace has been coming a long time.
My dad told me over the weekend that an acquaintance of his had bought that old, long empty FMC property in my hometown for a song, in fact, for less money than my last car cost.
Yesterday I drove out of Hamilton County up 213, through Tipton and into Howard County to meet with clients, driving through places I knew well in my youth. I came upon the cemetery south of Hobbs and thought of old high school buddies who rented a place near there after graduation. They tore the racks out of an old refrigerator and plumbed it for a beer keg. One of them, Donny, hired me to build an oak stereo cabinet. I remember taking it to him out there when it was done.
Cornfields pass my window. Some little seedlings are springing up in obedient rows. Others fields lay fallow with their low ends under water and the remnants of last year’s stalks rotting atop some of the richest soil in America.
Pulling through Hobbs I recalled going to Kent’s wedding at the little church down the road in the early ‘80s. Corporate farms forced his family’s small farm out of the hog business a long time ago.
I pass a well tended home with a gleaming pole barn and extravagant landscaping. Then appears a 1920s bungalow with boarded up windows and a driveway littered with rusting cars. In the side yard a long forgotten grape arbor tilts disastrously close to the ground.
Along the way I pass two old depression-era WPA rest stops.
Driving into Windfall, I remember picking up a pizza with my high school friend, Max at a little pizza place there. To my surprise it’s still in business. After graduation, Max went to work for Firestone, now just a few blocks down the street from the Noblesville home where Greta and I have raised our kids. I haven’t seen Max in 30 years, but know the jobs there are few and set to disappear entirely this year.
I pass a Wilmoth Group real estate sign. Non-real estate folks don’t know Wilmoth primarily represents banks selling repossessed houses.
In Europe you often come upon castle ruins as you travel. Half of a stone archway will rise out of a hillside, hinting at long-gone glory. In Greentown I pass a sad old Victorian home covered in fading aluminum siding. Its porch and sidewalk are gone, but the two concrete steps that once served the porch still rest alone and useless in the middle of the yard, leading to and from nowhere. In America’s compressed historical cycles, these are our ancient ruins.
In Kokomo, ten miles west of Greentown, the news is glum. Chrysler has merged with Italy’s Fiat. Who would think that a member of Italy’s rickety, union-controlled industry could buy an American giant. Delphi is on the ropes, and the radio tells me GM has just filed for bankruptcy.
There are cries of socialism about the GM bailout. In fact, one client told me recently he was so mad at Obama about the bailout he’d never buy a GM car again. But the corporate farms I’ve been passing all afternoon have been taking federal subsidies – essentially corporate welfare, for years, a practice as socialistic as any GM bailout could be. Guess my client better boycott American food, too.
Things in the heartland haven’t been right for a long time.

Jack Graduates 5/27/09

We named him Jack, after my uncle, and gave him the middle name Lloyd, after Greta’s uncle.
From the time Jack was little he’s looked like me. His younger sister giggled recently holding up his senior picture alongside mine from 1978. It’s the sort of thing I think most kids are ambivalent about. You struggle to be your own man, but get the constant reminder, “You look just like your Dad.”
I’ve always tried to console him with, “You’re a new and improved version of me; taller, smarter, better looking and a harder worker.”
The years of his childhood seem a million miles away. When he and his siblings were babies I always checked on them before I went to bed, leaning down to their faces to hear them breathe. Now when I peak in Jack’s bedroom, I’m sometimes startled at the sight of this 6-foot tall young man sleeping in his bed.
When he was a small boy and I peeked in, sometimes he’d wake up and say, “Hi Daddy,” The six foot tall man responds now with, “S-up?” or a stern, exasperated, “What?”
He got that irritated impatience from me, too.
You can gauge the stages of a child’s life by the stuff they leave laying around. Over the years the Legos that littered the house gave way to skate boards leaned against the wall in the entry hall, and now, and I mean literally, today, there are car parts on the dining room table. We parents grumble and moan, but the hole left in our lives when his older brother went off to college will get bigger when evidence of Jack’s changing interests disappear from the house next fall.
In his childhood he often reminded me of an over-eager puppy, jumping and yipping, pulling at his collar, dragging his master down the street. To this day he’s still straining against the collars life wraps around our necks – school, work, parental rules. I’ve never seen a kid so eager to get on with life.
You hear people refer to those with a big heart. Seems Jack’s oversized heart comes out when things are the toughest.
On a 4th of July weekend when Jack was 12 he paddled at the front of a canoe with his younger sister and cousin seated between us. As we left the swamp and decided to cut straight across the lake toward his grandparents’ lake cottage the sky above was blue and the air still. But behind us a straight line of black clouds carried on vicious winds was hidden by a line of tall trees. We were totally unaware as it bore down on us. It hit us just as we were most vulnerable, in the deepest water and the furthest from shore.
When our fight against the storm was lost and the canoe overturned in the midst of the violent thunderstorm, Jack popped back up from beneath the waves and kept his head. That calm and cool helped keep his sister and cousin calm and cool, too. One of my strongest memories of Jack is of him bobbing in the water amid thunder and lightning and battering waves, his face studying mine, trying to measure my reaction to figure out how much danger we were in. We were in one hell of a lot of danger. But the boy kept his head.
This past winter I told him real estate sales where thin and I needed his help cutting costs around the house. Without a complaint he stopped asking for lunch money and spent the last semester of his senior year coming home and eating lunch.
Small things say a lot. Right or wrong, Meyer men won’t often tell you they love you. They show you in other ways. Right or wrong, perhaps he’s learned that was well.
The volatile temper he displayed as a child is long gone, trained away by as good a mother as any child could have. When the kids were small Greta regularly put them down in front of an old black and white video of the Mary Martin stage version of Peter Pan. When Peter is trying to teach the children to fly he urges them to think “Lovely thoughts.” When the smallest boy is having trouble Peter urges him to think, “Lovelier thoughts!” That was Greta’s frequent respond to Jack’s angry outbursts in childhood. “Lovelier thoughts!”
In a framed print above a computer in our house is a picture of that little blonde boy in a Peter Pan costume for Halloween –green tights and tunic and the cap with an orange feather in it.
That boy flies away now on skateboard road trips with a lovable and dedicated gang of friends to Louisville, Cincinnati and Bloomington. As the weather has warmed this spring, they dash off to the train trestle in Cicero where they literally fly off into the reservoir – as his mother sits at home wringing her hands.
Jack graduates from high school this Friday. In the fall he’ll pull free of our collars and reigns and fly away to college.

A Blast From The Past 5/20/09

Last time I saw Barks was June 22nd, 1986, the day after I got married. She and my old college roommate, Renner were getting in her car and leaving the weekend gathering.
We’d been part of a group of friends who met on a Ball State study program in England. But within a few years of coming home, we each graduated and scattered. After my wedding I never saw the two of them again.
After driving by my real estate signs and reading my newspaper columns for the 5 years she’s lived in Noblesville, Barks recently surprised me with an email.
A week ago we met for lunch at the Marketplace on Logan Street and sat at an outdoor table reminiscing while her small son listened.
We shot through a list of names and long lost friends, sharing tid-bits of information. We talked about her relationship with Renner and about mine with a girl named Miller. We talked about our London professor and leader, Dr. Heady.
Dr. Heady once took me and Miller around Munich on the subway, urging us not to pay. “It’s the honor system,” he said. “Nobody checks to see if you’ve got a ticket.” But on the ride back from Dachau, the three of us got arrested for riding without paying.
On another occasion, Dr. Heady lied to the British courts, claiming to have a group of American law students who wanted to meet with a judge who could explain Britain’s legal system. None of us were law students. Yet, by some freakish miracle we got a private meeting with the legendary Lord Denning – then, England’s equivalent to an American Chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Barks said that Dr. Heady died a few years back after a life of hard living and alcohol.
And Dr. Kasabaric, who had recruited us all for the study program, was presumably still in a British prison. The year after we returned to the U.S. he left Muncie to take Dr. Heady’s place in London. While there, he murdered his wife.
As our food arrived, Barks asked what I remembered most about the camping trip our two couples, she and Renner, and me and Miller made to Devon and Cornwall, along England’s southwest coast.
We’d rented an old car from a place called, Rent-A-Wreck and drove out of London on a spring morning with a cooler and a tent. I have old photos of me and Miller, Renner and Barks, each couple snuggling beside a campfire. We drank local mead and alcoholic cider. We explored castle ruins and drank beer in country pubs with locals.
I told Barks a story about the trip she’d never heard. At a campground lavatory with its banks of showers and sinks, Renner and I washed our faces and brushed our teeth while the girls did the same on the ladies side. As we shut off the water and started to walk out, Renner pulled me aside with a finger to his lips. He nodded toward an air vent. The sound of the girls talking as they primped echoed through the ductwork. We listened as they chatted lightly about how they missed their boyfriends back home in Indiana.
As we slunk out, defeated, I told Renner, “When we get back to Indiana, this, (the 2 romantic affairs) will be over in a heartbeat.”
“”Over’, is the end,” Renner winked. “This is still the middle. Enjoy it.”
Barks laughed hard with the sun in her face and her 5-year old squirming in her lap.
Her significant memory of the trip:
On a rare sunny afternoon, along a Cornwall beach we’d hiked through a sandy opening into a rocky cavern the size of a church sanctuary. Overhead, light spilled in from random gaps in the rocks. I don’t recall how we spent the time in that magnificent space – perhaps lunched as we often did on cheese and baguettes, Spam, and bananas – whatever survived in a backpack, and as we did so, the tide came in, submerging our exit. We country bumpkins from land-locked states had trapped ourselves.
Barks recalled the panic, the four of us climbing ever higher in the cavern for an opening big enough to fit through. We eventually found one and clamored out into the sunshine.
We talked about our children, our spouses, our careers. And we talked about Renner, who neither of us had seen in 23 years. Knowing him had changed us both, opened our eyes to the world a little. He was a free spirit who was always trolling for beauty and wisdom off life’s beaten path. I recalled him arriving early for a party I held in Carmel at my first apartment after graduation. He was standing in the empty driveway loaded down with a camper’s backpack.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“Hitchhiked from Cleveland,” he shrugged.
Renner turned me onto jazz, Bob Marley, and Scottish singer-guitarist John Martyn. Riding on a bus or a subway, he’d put his Walkman headphones on your head and say, “Check this out, man.”
How old friends slip away, I’ve never understood. Talking with Barks over lunch I felt like I’ve often felt looking back at my past. It can sometimes seem so distant; like remembering a book you read about somebody else.
As I headed down Logan Street after saying goodbye to Barks and her little boy, I promised myself I’d do better at keeping in touch with old friends. I have been too much of a bridge burner, too immersed in each new phase of life to stay in touch with those who populated the old ones. That is not a compliment.

Driving in Denial 5/16/09

A few years back I was in the Wal-Mart parking lot during a gentle rain. As I approached the driveway in front of the building, the cars made me wait as they passed. Drivers sat dry and warm in their cars, avoiding eye contact with the pedestrians they made stand in the rain and wait. At such moments I am reminded how callous cars have made us. Cars have desensitized us to the world we’ve made for them.
A trip to Europe or to a pedestrian-friendly U.S. city like San Francisco or Portland reveals through contrast what an ugly mess we’ve made of our land for the sake of our cars. Here in Noblesville we’ve seen restorable historic architecture – irreplaceable pieces of our heritage, leveled for random handfuls of parking spaces. Over the years the city has taken patches of wetlands and removed the ancient trees so a road can be cut through it.
Nothing is so stupid or heartless that we won’t gladly do it for the sake of our cars. Some recent Christmas I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic in Castleton looking about that repulsive landscape. Asphalt deserts stretch forever, punctuated with harsh 24-hour halogen lighting, garish signage, trash blowing in the medians, gray guardrails and cast concrete pillars – and cars, lines and lines of cars. A pedestrian in this place is a menace and a fool.
That we create such large “public” spaces that are too dangerous for pedestrians and bicycles is not a complement to our culture. When land planners hold public forums to see what kind of growth taxpayers want, nobody votes for a Castleton kind of place. But it seems every town gets one . . . or two . . . or a dozen.
That Europeans get it so right and we get it so wrong is a national disgrace If you ever get a chance to sit in an outdoor café in Paris on the Champs Illisay, look across those six lanes of traffic passing through the Arc De Triumph. You’ll be left wondering how a nation as functionally bone-headed as France can make a six lane road a pleasant place to sit and sip a cup of coffee, while we struggle to do it with just 2 lanes.
But the answer is really pretty simple. They build places for people. Cars are forced to adapt. We build places for cars. People are forced to adapt. We go to Europe or “quaint” places in America, and marvel at the old world charm. Yet, look at some of the barren, ugly areas near Indianapolis’ downtown, like sections of Meridian, Pennsylvania and Delaware streets just north of the circle. A hundred years ago these were lovely places, built primarily for people. Yet nearly every modern fault to be found here was caused by foolish compromises made with the automobile.
Please don’t tell me that such compromises keep our economy strong. Start with Japan and look across Asia at countries that are increasingly kicking our asses economically. They are, almost universally, like the rest of the developed western world, pedestrian/mass transit societies. When gas prices spike, it hurts us a lot more than it hurts them.
It’s ironic: During WWII our fathers and grandfathers went off to save Europe, then came home and began dismantling the ways our cities and towns were similar to Europe. We let the world’s best rail systems fall into disuse and built an Interstate system whose use would destroy small town economies across the nation as businesses, their locations now dictated by the automobile, were drawn to the highway. Whites, unwilling to live alongside blacks, abandoned them and our cities and built new, disjointed communities in the suburbs, places where shopping, school, work, worship and entertainment could not be reached without a car. This ugly, physically dysfunctional world is now taken for granted by generations who can’t remember or don’t know what life was like before.
What is beyond our windshields seems not to matter. We fear the slums of the inner city, yet drive daily through strip mall hells like East Washington Street in Indy, seeming not to recognize they’re every bit as bleak. As a nation we spend tens of billions of dollars a year building and maintaining roads, but can’t find the money to upgrade our rail systems. Indiana automatically spends hundreds of millions annually to build and maintain roads but wince at the thought of diverting a portion of that into a commuter rail system to serve our most congested areas. We send our children off to war in the middle east, drive our big gas-guzzlers, and give barely a thought to the fact that the tyrants, their wars, and our involvement with them is built almost entirely around oil – who has it, who wants it, and who gets rich off it.
Let’s look beyond our windshields and take a hard look at what our over zealous love of the automobile has done to our communities, to our lives, to our health. This doesn’t mean abolishing cars; it just means their needs won’t automatically win every debate regarding community design.