thenorphletpaperboy: Christmas in Arkansas

thenorphletpaperboy: Christmas in Arkansas: Christmas in Arkansas I don’t think I have to tell anyone who knows me, even casually, that I really love Christmas, and decorations,...

Christmas in Arkansas

Christmas in Arkansas

I don’t think I have to tell anyone who knows me, even casually, that I really love Christmas, and decorations, gifts, music, church, and family are all key parts of my Christmas experience.

I don’t have a lot of Christmas memories from when I was young but I actually remember delivering newspapers on Christmas morning as a 13-year -old Norphlet paperboy. Of course, since I was up and heading for the newsstand at 5 A M, I had already opened presents on Christmas Eve and had checked out what Santa Clause had left me. Those early Christmases were special, but not in the abundance of gifts, but in what our family put into the preparations before Christmas.

It was my job to find a suitable Christmas tree, and I spent several days a few weeks before Christmas looking for a good cedar tree. A couple of years back I tried to slip in a pine, but Momma, after doing the best she could with decorations, put her foot down, “No more pine trees, Richard!” But since I spent most of my free time in the woods, I had usually already spotted a decent cedar, and about two weeks before Christmas Day, I would take my hatchet and cut it down, drag it home, and put it on a wooden stand I had made. However, Momma wasn’t just a one tree decorator. Not on your life. Next, I had to find a holly tree with plenty of red berries, and then climb some big oak to get mistletoe. After Momma finished decoration the living room, kitchen, and porch, you could sure tell it was Christmas by the way the Mason House looked. I guess Momma gave me ‘decorating for Christmas’ as part of my heritage.

That Christmas morning Santa Clause left me four steel traps, some smokers, and in my stocking I had two oranges, some nuts, and a candy cane. I had a trap-line to make a little money selling furs and the smokers were little six inch tubes that when lit the smoke would run animals out of a hollow log. 

I don’t remember any of my paper route customers every giving me anything when I delivered the Christmas morning paper, but since it was usually before six o’clock, they probable weren’t up. I finished the paper route that Christmas morning at six and headed for Flat Creek to run my trap line and add the four new steel traps I had received from Santa.

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Another Christmas memory has me fast forwarding to the late l970s when our family decided to take a Christmas Vacation in Egypt. A flight to Little Rock in a blinding sleet and snow storm stared a very different Christmas experience. Dr. Robbie, an El Dorado Physician and native of Egypt, helped us with the arrangements, and since his family still lived in Cairo, his brother-in-law met us at the airport. We had just stepped off the plane and were about to get into a long line to go through immigration when a well-dressed Egyptian walked up and asked if we were the Mason Family.

 “Yes,” and after a welcome, he said, “Follow me.”

“But the line….?”

He just shook his head, and as we followed him around the long line, he just waved at the customs attendants.  Well, with Dr. Robbie’s family helping us, we have a great time in Cairo, but the Pyramids where just our first stop. After three days in Cairo, we flew up the Nile to Aswan to see Thebes and the Valley of the Kings. Since Vertis and I had lived in Libya for two years, we didn’t bother with tours, so when we got off the plane, I walked out to the taxi line and quizzed drivers until I found one who spoke good English.

“How much would you charge to be our driver each day while we’re in Aswan---in American dollars?” Dr. Robbie has advised me to take several hundred American dollars because the Egyptian Pound was so weak.

“I’ll charge you twenty American dollars a day,” he replied.

So off we went and it was the best $20 we have every spent. At the drivers suggestion we stayed on the south bank of the Nile in the morning to see Thebes and Karnack while the tour busses crossed the river to the Valley of the Kings, and then when the tour busses returned at noon, we went across to visit the pharos’s tombs. But we didn’t just go in the few tombs open to visitors. That’s when a few extra dollars to the guards, opened sites that weren’t available to others. We had been advised to bring large American flashlights since the lighting in even the tourists’ tombs was bad. So on Christmas Day, Vertis, Lara, Ashley, and I took our flashlights, and with an Egyptian leading us, ventured into tomb after tomb, until in one, we had to get down on our knees to slip through a couple of passageways into the tomb chamber. This tomb was unbelievable, but what was in a side room deep in the tomb chamber took our breath and sent Vertis heading back to the entrance.

The floor of the side room to the tomb was covered in strips of mummy wrapping and bones were scattered everywhere. Our taxi driver-guide commented, “Tomb robbers; from probably hundreds of years ago. The village here has made their living robbing tombs for hundreds of years.”

Not the most spiritual Christmas day I have ever experienced. 

As I write this column, Christmas memories just seem to flood back, and a rather unusual one from elementary school is still on my mind. It had a lesson about Christmas that I haven’t forgotten.

I was back in school just after Christmas when Mrs. Newson, my fourth grade teacher, announced, “Class, I hope you have had a wonderful Christmas, and before we start class, I want each of you to stand up and tell what you got for Christmas.”

Well, that started an ‘I got more than you’ contest and kids were stretching those gifts like nothing you have ever heard, and shoot, I was too. I hated to admit my main present was a Sunday shirt, but I quickly jumped over that and rattled off everything else, even what was in my stocking. Heck, most of the class was just about like me, but I noticed Elizabeth, who sat at the desk right beside me was kinda hanging her head, and of course who we all knew her family was as poor as Job’s turkey, and I figured she didn’t get much.  I was the next to last in the class and Elizabeth was going to be last.

“Elizabeth what did you get for Christmas?” asked Mrs. Newson. I glanced over at Elizabeth, who still had her head lowered, and I watched her take a deep breath and slowly stand up. Then she raised her hand and said as she held up a plain, yellow pencil, “I got this pencil for Christmas.” It was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop. That’s when I knew Christmas didn’t mean presents for everyone.

thenorphletpaperboy: In Praise of Trees

thenorphletpaperboy: In Praise of Trees:                    In Praise of Trees “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree…” Of course, we recognize that line fro...

In Praise of Trees

                   In Praise of Trees

“I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree…” Of course, we recognize that line from the poem Trees by Joyce Kilmer. We remember that opening line, but Mr. Kilmer goes on and on in his beautiful poem to reflect the beauty and worth of what we here in Arkansas think of as simple trees. That’s right. We mostly ignore the Arkansas forests, but where would we be without them? Think West Texas. We lived in Texas for ten years before we moved back to Arkansas, and in the Kingsville---Corpus Christi area there are plenty of mesquite and a few scraggly palm trees along the Bayfront in Corpus Christi. That’s about the size of it. Actually, mesquite might be classified as a tree, but to an Arkansas boy it’s a bush.

A year before we moved back to Arkansas, we drove home to El Dorado for Thanksgiving, and as we drove along highway 82 approaching the town, we pulled over into a dim road where large oaks towered over the road their branches touching. It was one of those falls such as we are having this year, and the clear, crisp air and gorgeous leaves planted a seed in us that ultimately drew us back home to Arkansas.

This fall we’re having one of those knockout falls where the hickory, oaks, and maples are absolutely breathtaking.  Back in the early 1980s I started working with the city of El Dorado and the Arkansas Forestry Commission to plant downtown trees. Our mayor, at the time was Mike Dumas, and he agreed to cut three foot squares in the downtown sidewalks for the planting, and I had funds from a parking lot in a defunct downtown improvement district to use for the landscaping on public property. I partnered with the Arkansas Forestry Commission, which at that time, had a 50-50 matching fund that enabled us to plant a lot of downtown trees. In the early years we planted as many as 75 trees a year and over the twenty years of planting, 1000 street trees were planted in our downtown.

This year, as the leaves turned, the Bradford Pear Trees, Sweet Gum, Cypress, Maple, American Elms, and Oaks have never looked better. I know the Bradford Pear Trees have picked up some negative comments because, if they aren’t pruned properly, they will split. However, we still have dozens planted in the 1980s that have been pruned properly and, as I write, gorgeous. If I had to pick the most important part of downtown El Dorado’s Renovation, it would be the downtown trees, and we’re still planting them. When you have as many as a 1000 trees, you will have a natural attrition and that means each year you will replant 15 to 20 trees. El Dorado’s downtown now has MAD, (Murphy Arts District) and they have added hundreds of trees to the area a block off the square. As those trees mature, MAD will look even more spectacular.

 Of course, downtown trees look good and they do attract visitors, but they also take away the city center hot spots that infrared aerial photos note. Yes, all that downtown concrete and asphalt soaks us the summer sun and shows up as hot spots, and trees not only give an overall cooling to the downtown, but they can reduce the summer electrical bills of adjacent stores by 25%. 

Our moto, The Natural State, should reflect nature in everything we do. However, it rings hollow if we view blank parking lots without even a blade of grass. Yes, you can plant trees in parking lots and not lose a single parking place, and get a bonus. Several studies have shown a landscaped strip center parking lot will attract more shoppers and have more sales than a strip center without landscaping, as much as 25% increase in sales from the landscaped parking lot offering the same merchandise. Of course, that hot spot parking lot will be cooler than a bare lot and utility costs to the stores will be lower. Honestly, with those facts, developers should be planting trees by the thousands. However, old habits are hard to break, and when someone who views a bare lot that has just been cleared of every living thing to put yet another shopping center, and remarks, “Well, that’s sure an improvement.” You know we have a long way to go before we really become The Natural State.

However, we can learn as we watch other towns and cities wholeheartedly planting trees, and a most unlikely city is showing us how to do it---Chicago. I know one of the last things you might think about Chicago is being a tree friendly city, but it is. We travel to Chicago every year or two and the result of their “Plant a 1,000,000 Tree Campaign,” is evident. Fifteen years ago downtown Chicago had a smattering of trees, but today their downtown is a lush forest of trees. The program was so successful that the city started a citywide free tree planning service. If you would like a tree planted in your yard, just call the city and they will, at no cost to you, come plant a tree. I haven’t checked lately on the program to see if it is still in effect, but while it was active there were thousands more trees planted.

It seems to me that every town in Arkansas needs a plan similar, and although a lot of downtown street trees are planted each year, we are woefully under-planted, if we view the overall need. Little Rock has a great origination called Street Trees and they have planted 1579 trees over 183 city blocks. What a great example for other towns in the state to emulate.

Of course, most of us don’t live in a downtown environment, and we don’t plant street trees in the sidewalks. However, the need for residential trees in single family housing is certainly something we should encourage. According to published reports, home ownership is usually has the highest asset value of a family, so why not enhance that value? Yes, a significant yard tree can add thousands of dollars to the appraised value of a house, and according to the IRS, a casualty loss of such a tree is a significant tax deduction. The idea that someone would pay several thousand dollars to cut a major tree from their front yard is a step from reality. Pay a trees service several thousand dollars and watch as they cut the tree and see your house value drop?

But I’ve just scratched the surface on the need for city trees. In other sections of the country where four lane streets serve the heaviest traffic areas in the city, I see street trees between the lanes of traffic. However, Arkansas cities usually opt for an endless turn lane and not only that, but they don’t line those busy streets with sidewalk planting. How difficult would it be for the city to plant a few thousand crepe myrtle along those streets? Evidently we’re not there yet. Maybe our grandchildren will plant them.