By Tom Dodge, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX –
There were fifteen hundred people living here when we came to Midlothian thirty-five years ago. I wonder if they resented us.
It was a quiet rural town without even a Dairy Queen. There were two steak-and-gravy restaurants, three hardware stores, two service stations, and one of everything else - a bank, a lumberyard, a grocery store, a feed store, a drug store, and a hardware store. Oh yeah. There were also three railroads. These were needed to transport the cotton in the old days.
The residential section consisted of the houses clustered in the area extending north of downtown to Highway 67. Then developers built new houses north of the highway, a grocery store, and a baseball field. We moved in one of these houses in 1970. Four years later, we bought one of the bigger houses that were springing up south of downtown. We still live here. One of our sons lives across the street three houses down and the other lives around the corner. Not much else changed until 1995.
Then, as in that other Paradise Lost, "all hell broke loose." Somehow the word circulated that there were good schools here, though they consisted only of three elementary schools at the time, one middle school, and one high school. Now the population of the school system is 6,000. That's more than entire population of the town in 1995. Across the alleyway behind our house is the high school. There is an enormous empty playing field there and a running track.
In the beginning my jogging partners at the track were Four and Orca, my dog friends. Orca died in 1989 and Four died three years later. In those days, the coaches paid us no mind but the kids usually whistled at the dogs and sometimes played with them.
For the past ten years our Golden Retriever Tipper has been my partner at the track although we only walk now. Lately my grandson A.J. Dodge has been going with us after his school is out, along with his little dog, Crackers.
But urban sprawl is spoiling the little joys of small town life.
A.J. was playing on the pole vault foam and I was sitting on it reading the paper. Tipper and Crackers were running around doing dog activities. A young coach appeared. "He can't play on that foam," he said. "And you're gonna have to curb your dogs. One of them left a mess over there on the grass. You can clean it up with your paper."
I hadn't finished reading it so I folded it and put in my pocket. He handed me a flat stick and I followed him to the scene of the crime. He stood over me until I scooped it up. He was soft-spoken but rather like a policeman, robotically impersonal and unimpressed with my tale of all the fun I've had here over the years. "It's just the way it is now," he said. "The boy might get hurt. It's a litigious society."
"I've never sued anybody in my life and never will," I said.
"We're just protecting ourselves," he said. "And the dogs can't come back unless they're on a leash and you clean up after them."
Of course I understood this lecture but it didn't keep me from feeling embarrassed in front of A.J. If I saw an old man and a boy and their dogs playing, I would have cleaned up the dog's mess myself and let it go.
But, as the coach said to me earlier, that's not the way it is nowadays.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian. If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us.