Charlotte Dreams

I always have Dreams about Charlotte, NC (of course, when I'm in Charlotte, I have dreams about Atlanta). Just mundane random stuff. My favorite is driving over this overpass overlooking a park with kids playing, weather being chilly and wet, and the sky scrappers just around the corner. Sometimes, I have time flash backs where it is Christmas in 1958 and a couple with young kids are celebrating with friends. Yeah, I'm influenced by shows or events that happened there as well.

My favorite is where in the midst of a party of a supposed happy family, you see tension but you don't know why? I go to this room and see a older teen-age boy stoned quiet with his younger sister whimpering. The year is around the early 1960's. My mind is like what is going on here but it never gives me the answer. That is what many of these scenarios do for me. Slyvia Plath and Anne Sexton images hit me when it comes to those times. I remember a sentence from Betty Feezor's book about her kids wanting her to stop yelling and she felt that she didn't but promised to follow their advice.

When I lived there, I walk by graves and read about them from newspaper microfilms. Highways that ruined neighborhoods in Charlotte. I think of a couple: one from Central and the other from First Ward meeting secretly in the early 40's. A Greek family living in the late 19th century to the late 20th century. Charlotte's own version of Geisha girls who weren't allowed to go to temple, churches, businesses, or other functions but always served the men behind close doors at all times in all decades.

Children failing in classrooms in the 00's, 10's, 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. Some Parents understanding but worried. Others impatient and abusive. Most angry and resentful. Scholars and successful types. Cliques and groups. Laziness and ambitiousness. Jealousy and resentments washed away as new wave of people come in. Gossip and churches. Kids wanting to rebel and develop racial views to fit their peers or push their family anger towards others. Dorothy Counts comes to mind.

I think about loneliness a lot. Family working behind the scenes of the city to feed their family and paying bills while maintaining a calm frontier front. Domestic arguments and violence. Women not wanting to go to work in the 50's because she wanted to fit the 50's housewife stereotype but her man had trouble with booze and left the family (Most claim that the husband died or left). Children is all they can help so say the social worker. Some are truly happy no matter what, they got each other and that is all they need, no front needed.

What do I know? Just images that flash in my head. Nobody lives where they grew up except for visit. Some tell me that nothing has changed. One thing bothered me: Betty criticized other families in how they raised their kids but did they criticize in how she raised their's? My point why can't get you work together instead of constantly proving yourself to each other since you claim to be "God's children." But religious people are not exactly saints either. TV doesn't help either. The point is: you are boxed in like everybody else with little time to spare. When your contribution is done, no one remembers you but the building and its time for you to save.