We can't have nice things!

I drive down Geddes Street almost every morning. I have two routes that I can take. Geddes is the worst of the two, but feels, somehow faster. I can tell the difference when I drive through the Tipp Hill area, as the stress and 'icky' feelings just aren't there.

As you might figure out, one way is a nice dive through green trees and parks and dainty neighborhoods. The other a city trek with shopping carts and graffiti and boards where windows use to be.

what makes a neighborhood go 'bad'?

The city, for the past couple of years, has tried to improve the quality of life on Geddes. They put in all new sidewalks, with brick parkways. It did make the look of the street improve. Then they placed sapling trees into the green spaces between the new pavers. They blew in grass seed, which came up like clock work the next season.

The building are still a mess. A crooked set of beige teeth in a jack o'lantern's smile, all in a row up one side of the street and down the other. Mismatched siding and broken off eves with shingles hanging like dark frowning eyebrows, scowling.

And the windows....what is it with glass and this city? Can't a building sit vacant without the glass being shattered from its frame? It's like people that rob homeless folks...can you really make a person feel any lower? What have they got left for the love of Oprah! Can you make a house look any worse? It's already got no family to live in it and love it, then you smash it's eyes with rocks and sticks. What is left to reflect light and sun into a dark street if there is no windows?

A couple weeks ago someone, I'm assuming the city, put out huge terracotta planters on every corner of the main drag of Geddes. I looked at my girlfriend and sighed, "I give them a week."

Sure enough...2-3 weeks after my depressing prediction, the pots had been upturned. The tender flowers and plants, barely given a chance to take root, laying on the hard, cement....I could almost hear them gasping for the moist soil they had been spilled from.

As I drove, I passed one after another, the dirt flung from the pots. After passing 6 or so I came to a light. On this corner was a woman, probably in her sixties. She was on her hands and knees, an old coffee mug on the sidewalk in the spilled dirt. I watched her as she pulled from the dirt a small flower, it's colorless roots dangling from her caring hands. She placed it into the righted pot and pressed the soil around it. She then took up her mug, scooped the spilled soil into it and poured it around the flower.

Here was a woman, a neighbor, a citizen, at seven in the morning, with not even the basics of gardening tools, making right what someone made wrong.

My first impulse was to pull my car into the lot at that corner and help her with the six or so pots she still had to do. Then I let my fears creep in: was it even safe to stop my car, let alone leave myself in the open like that?

Maybe neighborhoods go bad.....cuz "neighbors" stop caring about other "neighbors"

Guilty as charged.