Having New Eyes

 

 

 

 

 

My Park Hill, Celeste Thurman Archer

 

Five years ago, my family left Park Hill for what we thought would be a move to Mayberry: Little Rock, Arkansas. As we pulled away from our house on Albion, a car came speeding from the alley. The driver paused long enough to flip a middle finger salute. At the time, we considered it a sign that we made the right choice to relocate.  Now, we are back, humbled.
When we left we weren’t happy. Some fellow Park Hillians have said that I wrote a letter to share those feelings. I don’t have that anymore, but let me respond to what I probably said.
Seven years ago my toddler’s favorite place to play, the playground outside of what was then Perk Hill on Kearney Street, was being challenged, even though it was part of a boom for a block which four years earlier had been an economic desert. There was a fabricated letter to my principal at East High School, claiming that I made my students “rebels” when I made the playground controversy a civic project for them.
I was also just plain busy: I had just finished a term as a city education commissioner; the nonprofit, Women for Education, that I helped to create had completed its task of bringing early childhood education to the forefront; a class on the world’s religions that I’d written for Denver Public Schools had a waiting list at East High School; I had introduced another organization with two friends, the Student Interfaith Peace Project, which taught teens about the world’s most desperate conflict zone.  A favorite philanthropist, Noel Cunningham, had me working to highlight starvation in Ethiopia and the impact of “one.” It was dizzying. I fed on it, but it also fed on me. I worked eighty-hour weeks and felt burned, burned out or both. I resented the lack of education funding and lack of serious consideration teachers were given. I saw dedicated folks working to the core, then blamed for what should be understood as societal and systemic shortcomings.
So, when my husband was offered a promotion requiring a move to the place where I had grown up, it seemed right. We moved to Little Rock on July 3rd, 2008. I’ll never forget the look on my husband’s face that first day, just after he and our son returned from the lake behind our house with a box turtle. It felt like we were five minutes into the American Dream. I got a teaching job at Little Rock Central High School, the birthplace of American desegregation. We reconnected with some of my family. My husband was assured job security.
But after the election, my husband lost his job. And so began what we consider the worst four years of our life.
In our new home, I was exposed to a potentially fatal disease caused by mold on chicken manure. My son was bullied for, among other things, saying that Martin Luther King, Jr., was who he most wanted to meet. The principal of the school I taught in lectured me for teaching “feminism,” having shown a PowerPoint on the history of the Women’s Movement. Arkansas was no longer my home, if it ever was.
Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” For the first couple of years, I clung to Proust, willing myself to make it work there. Then I realized that there was a different message: we weren’t in the right place. There are so many stories beyond chicken poop and school politics, we had made a mistake in moving.
I felt a physical need to be back in Park Hill on Kearney Street eating ice cream and pizza. I wished for Monica from Bang Salon during haircuts. I missed our Albion neighbors, Elbert and Connie across the street and Miss Joyce on Ash who is like family.
Sure, all the issues and politics are still here: contention on Kearney and less than pleasant meetings on school reform, but Park Hill is a strong community of neighbors.
Being recognized at Eco Cleaners after four years; welcome home hugs at Oblio’s and Grape Expectations; spare rooms offered by Park Hill neighbors Barb, Denney and Woo; classes with Mr. Marion at The Art Garage; and, falling right back into meaningful education reform without missing a beat – home is where the heart is, and we are fortunate to call Park Hill home.
So, “crunch, crunch,” I’m eating words. We’ve decided that last middle finger salute wasn’t a push out but an admonition for leaving.

 
Celeste Thurman Archer is now the developing director for a summer learning opportunity called the Colorado Governor’s School. She can be reached at cogovschool@gmail.com.