October 2014 has been quite a month for my slice of East Dallas. I was in a downtown Dallas office building on Oct. 2 when, in a span of a couple of minutes, the sky turned an ominous shade of dark gray, the windows started to reverberate, and the wind whipped up debris that was reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz.
After a long drive home, I pulled up to my house and saw neighbors and people I had never seen before trying to clear a fallen tree out of the street before darkness fell. The buzz of a dozen chain saws filled the air. I walked into my backyard and saw an awful heap of what used to be magnificent trees. The trunks of the oaks and pecan tree were still upright, but their enormous mangled limbs had taken out the power lines.
As I looked closer, however, I noticed that some of the limbs on the ground were clean cut. The next morning as the neighborhood came back out to resume the cleanup and trade stories and rumors about Oncor’s power restoration, a man passed by and said he and some guys had chain-sawed my broken limbs off the fallen power lines. Before I could even thank him, he walked off and probably went back to cleaning up his own mess.
That’s the kind of place East Dallas is. I know, I know — acts of neighborhood kindness crop up all over town. Other parts of North Texas from Lancaster to Gainesville have taken hits of our crazy weather. But in the last few weeks, I can’t help but feel East Dallas is taking it on the chin. I also know we’re going to make it through this together.
Power outages and property damage now pale in comparison to the loss of life and the sense of danger to health and safety that have put East Dallas on the international stage of 24-hour news scrutiny. Just like a frightening storm that sweeps in and wreaks havoc, Ebola reminds us that we are not in charge of a lot this world brings to our doorstep.
But we are in charge of our response to it as a community. And in East Dallas, we already have a good deal to be proud of. There is no playbook on how we’re supposed to respond to the whir of news helicopters overhead, yellow caution tape, or reverse 911 calls. We may worry in private, but we’re also keeping our chins up.
When two nurses who live in East Dallas contracted Ebola after caring for a very sick Thomas Eric Duncan, that news scrutiny revealed that the first concern of their neighbors was how those women were doing — not whether they needed to don a mask and gloves to walk through the neighborhood.
Some of us are learning a lot more than we ever knew about our neighbors in Vickery Meadow. How many times have I driven past The Ivy Apartments and not given it a second thought? The residents of those dense apartment complexes may speak different languages or practice different faiths. Many are refugees who, like myself, came to East Dallas from other places.
I came to call East Dallas my home out of choice while others came here through less-fortunate circumstances. But I am pretty sure we want a lot of the same things: safe streets, healthy families, and neighbors who may not know you well but do care enough to remove dangerous, fallen tree limbs from power lines or pray for your recovery from a deadly virus. Let’s do this, East Dallas.
Caryn Carson of Dallas is an attorney and a Community Voices volunteer columnist. Her email address is carsonc505@gmail.com.
