By Elliot Doomes, January 17, 2019 — My holidays is good. I didn’t travel and I just stayed home, but I had communications with my whole family. My great grandson was on the phone and he went “Ah-bah-bah!” He can’t talk but he’ll let you know he’s there. My family keeps me going, because otherwise, it’s too easy to do the same thing over and over again. It gets lackadaisical. On the other hand, I really don’t want to go walking around in the cold, especially not at night and especially not in this neighborhood. Every kid on the street wants to be a gangster rapper and shoot people in the streets because those rappers have all the gold and jewels and cash, But that’s not real.
Kids today don’t have the same opportunities that we had. We used to have playgrounds every two blocks and during the winter they could go inside and play basketball and table tennis. Nowadays, they don’t keep those places open anymore. Now we just have open fields.
The other day, at 18th and Lombard, I was thinking about sitting in the park and relaxing. During my childhood, we went there all the time. But i can’t sit there for two long. Nobody there looks like me anymore. So, if I sat there for long enough watching the kids playing, somebody would come over and wonder what the hell I was doing there. Nobody from my childhood lives there anymore. I might be paranoid, but that’s the way it was when I was a kid and that’s the way it is now. If a white man came over and asked me what I was doing there, I could never give him an answer he’d think was believable. I didn’t think it’d be safe to be there.
There also used to be a Marton Anderson Center named after the first and foremost African American contralto opera singer. And she lived there, even after going to Europe and Carnegie Hall. I did know a lot of her history back then, but I forgot most of it. Most people today don’t know who Marton Anderson is. Star Garden, Syggis Playground, all those places were after school havens. You actually felt protected there and you respected the people in charge. Nobody wanted to be banned, but they wouldn’t ban you forever. I could say a lot about the things I’ve seen change, and not for the better.