the weekend
by jimmy – 10/29/06
I went to see family this weekend; my parents and my wife’s family. We (my wife, two kids and I) spent the weekend in the town where my wife and I grew up, just wanting the whole time to not be there. Don’t get me wrong. We love our parents, and we love each others’ parents, but we absolutely despise the town in which we were raised. The place is over-ridden with crime, meth-heads and racial hatred (from both parties involved). And I suppose we both have memories attached to that place that we would just rather forget.
When we are preparing to go there for the weekend we can feel the stress building up. It is actually a strain on our relationship for a couple of days before we leave. We drive our car for a couple of hours and usually stop in the small pleasant town where we started building our own family. That’s about the place where things start getting worse in our little trip. From that town, we have about another two hours of driving before ending up in our destination.
The tension escalates to the point that we sometimes end up in fights by the time we get there. It’s ridiculous and probably petty, but we (mostly me) end up yelling at other drivers on the highway and driving like a maniac just to make the driving stop sooner! (Did I mention that I can’t stand the town where I grew up?)
After about five hours of driving, and griping, and having to eat fast food because we were in too much of a hurry to beat rush hour to get anything decent to eat, we end up at either my parents’ house or my wife’s parents’ house… in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. For those of you who have heard of the place, you get why we hate it.
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a quick aside:
My grandmother is in a nursing home there. It is probably the best nursing home in the town, but that is a lot like saying that a particular skunk is the least offensive skunk in the bunch. Too many of my family members live in the area to have Grandma in a home anywhere else. They simply wouldn’t get to visit her often enough. So she misses out on visits from those of us scattered all over the country and we only get to see her occasionally. My mom used to care for Grandma in her home until she got worse, and Mom’s health started to fade as well, so with no one else in the position to take her on 24hrs a day, the only option was a home. It’s not “ideal”, but Grandma looks better, acts like she feels better and has a much more active social environment from which to benefit. Not to mention that there is a preacher on staff that she likes a great deal and we all have the peace of mind offered by immediate medical attention if anything happens. She broke her hip a few weeks ago and she was attended to very well and has already made great progress. At any rate, I wish she could be at a home near me getting the state-of-the-art care I know she deserves. I’m sure the folks at her home are “qualified”, but they are far from the level of professional care we have here.
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back to the main post:
So we are in Crime Bluff, as we affectionately call it, and trying to make the best of it by staying at our parents’ houses and avoiding the city limits. Unfortunately, the activities of the city limits are now breaching the once-quiet rural areas. The nights are now flooded with sirens and the sounds of speeding ricers buzz past the houses as if they are in our living rooms. My mom told me about a man that went to my church who is in serious trouble with the law and another former church member whose parents are trying to get him released from prison “before they pass away”. I told her they should start exercising and eating right because the judge would have to be insane to let that guy out any time soon.
We lock our car doors and check them a couple of times to this day because of the environment in which we were raised. We don’t trust many people. It takes a while for us. It’s not necessarily the other people’s fault, we just don’t trust people because life has taught us not to.
I love where we live now. I feel safe raising my children here. I feel secure that my kids are safe at school because I know that 90% of the folks in this town are like me. They want to make a living, spend time with their families and be good to their neighbors. I long for this place when I’m “back home”. So much so that even the gas stations and the restaurants there make me angry.
As we were trying to get out of that town this afternoon, I pulled into a gas station where you are required to pay before pumping. No problem; just whip out the ole debit card and start pumping… only… there is no Pay-at-the-Pump at this po-dunk establishment. So I tear out of the parking lot like an idiot and head for the station down the road. That station is closed down. Lovely. I turn around and hit the by-pass and pull off at the next exit heading out of town. Wow! They actually have pay-at-the-pump! But the stupid nozzle keeps shutting off so I have to pump the gas at 1/4 speed. 10 minutes later, the tank is finally full, but the machine is out of receipt paper!! My blood pressure is really out of control now. I’m thinking these rednecks are trying to use every ploy in the book to get an extra 50 cents out of me; the pumps read inaccurately when they keep shutting off like that, they are trying to lure me into the building to buy chips and cokes when I go to get my receipt… What else? We need to get some lunch and hit the road before I run someone over! I fight the terrible traffic and pull into the taco bell parking lot (the only option, by the way) and there is a line to the street of out-of-churchers at the drive through. By this time, I’m livid. I stop the car, get out, and let my wife drive. She takes the wheel, hits the highway and we don’t stop until we get to Little Rock. It was a very quiet ride. It’s past 2 o’clock before we get to eat lunch, but at least we aren’t in Pine Bluff anymore.
Just as we could feel the pressure increase as we went south, we felt it release as we got further north. Our lunch was horrible but we were on our way home and we weren’t in Pine Bluff anymore. By the time we got to Conway, we had all pretty much settled down.
It’s amazing the affect it has on us and how negative we can get. What else is amazing is that it happens every time we go down there. If I could just convert the rest of my family to the idea that Southeast Arkansas is a terrible place to be, we’d never have to go there again.
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http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=Pine+Bluff&state=AR
http://pinebluff.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm
http://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/crime1.aspx (worst small cities)
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006181.php
http://www.pinebluff.com/ (warm friendly people…. right.)
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