Morningside's Best

Morningside is an old neighborhood, dating back to the 1920s if not before, but Wessyngton Road is much newer - connecting North Highland and Cumberland Road, it is straight and much wider than other Morningside streets that are not major thoroughfares. The official descriptions of the property on this street calls this the F.P. Smith Estate subdivision. I don't know who F.P. Smith was, but I am assuming that sometime after World War II the property was sold for development and you can't develop it without a street - so Wessyngton Road was built, and the houses started to appear. The lots are only 50 feet wide and the older houses on the street are (by current standards) small ranch houses nearly devoid of the architectural charm of the older Morningside neighborhoods. (We also have no sidewalks on our street, except along the apartments, at the corner of Wessyngton and Highland, and in front of two of the newly built houses across from the church. I assume that this is because the street was built in the Era of the Automobile.)

Our house was built in 1950. When I bought it in the late 1980s, it had a funny cupola sort of thing on the roof that accommodated an attic fan. The fan was nice, but (along with many of the other houses on street) it didn't look anything like the classic Morningside houses. That's the reason I could afford it at the time - I couldn't believe I could find a house in this neighborhood that I could afford, and of course it was because this wasn't one of those Morningside streets with the big old houses.

We put a second floor on our house in 1998 which not only meant we did not have to give away a couple of our three children, but also that the house looked more like it belonged in the neighborhood than it had previously. (Kudos to Ben Dooley, the architect, who did the magic in design, and Fernando Reyes, who at that time lived across the street, who was our builder.)

Iain and I were walking the dog the other evening and I picked up a flyer for a house on the street that is for sale. The flyer is advertising an "adorable home on one of Morningside's best streets." I was stunned by this. Not the "adorable home" part - it may well be extremely adorable - but the "one of Morningside's best streets" part. Presumably this was written by a real estate agent who actually knows something about Atlanta real estate, and I don't know who in their right mind would characterize Wessyngton Road as "one of Morningside's best streets" from the real estate point of view (unless of course they are thinking "buy a relatively affordable 1950s ranch house and knock it down and build a Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses," but that is too depressing to contemplate.)

There are plenty of wonderful things about our location - proximity to both Highland Walk and Virginia-Highlands commercial areas, so we can walk to both Alon's and San Francisco Coffee, and we are in the district of Morningside Elementary School, a public school with high test scores, even though it is chronically infested with head lice - but plenty of other streets in Morningside can say the same thing, and might not be wide enough that the cars cutting through assume the speed limit must be 50 mph. (Our neighbor Tim tried to get a speed bump but no luck. Tom and Dan had proposed pot holes to slow the cars down. Really big ones. You get the picture.) Little ranch houses, no sidewalks, and a real estate agent says this is "one of Morningside's best streets"?

But of course, the real estate agent is right - it's just that what makes Wessyngton one of Morningside's best streets is not captured in any statistic that anyone can look up in a table somewhere. There is a tradition here - I am not sure what to call it, but for lack of a better term I will call in neighborliness - that one doesn't expect to find in a city. Years ago, people who don't live here any more hosted parties and invited me, and I got to know people I otherwise might not have met. The social committee baton has been passed, and now there are several of us who pick the dates and send the emails, but we didn't start it - it was here already. Morningside Presbyterian Church has been a wonderful neighbor and has let us hold block parties in their parking lot, but there are also baby showers and going away parties. If you met someone at a block party, you might stop and talk when you're out walking the dog, and then, if you see someone you don't know carrying a flatscreen TV out of their house, you might call 911. There's the informal network of flat tire repair, pest control, and plumbing help. The race car bed went from one side of the street to the other and back, from Max to Iain to Benjamin.

So that's the story. Even with the speeding cars barrelling down the hill toward Cumberland Road and no sidewalks, it is a great street.

But it's not the houses, it's the people in them.

More about Head Lice

We got the dreaded letter from the school a couple weeks ago. It wasn't the most dreaded letter ("Your child is infested with head lice") but it was the second most dreaded one ("A child in your child's class is infested with head lice"). Iain's hair is pretty long, and we've told him if he gets head lice we are going to cut it really short. I personally do not believe that this constitutes child abuse, but I'm not sure that that's how Iain sees it.

I got out the industrial strength lice comb, which we haven't used since the girls were much younger, and combed him out thoroughly. No bugs, living or dead, but I did find a couple of bits of blue-green stuff that Iain identified as duct tape. ("How did you get duct tape in your hair?") We are still on Level Orange alert, but hopefully have dodged the bullet (or the bugs) this time.

I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting an update on the head lice committee. I couldn't make it to the meeting (it probably conflicted with some other meeting I had to go to), but I have reviewed and commented on the proposed new policy - and we just got the word that it has been approved.

The new policy requires parents to sign something that says they have treated their child before their child can return to school. We hope this will help. We shall see.

Coffee with the Principal

Tom and I went to the coffee with the principal at Morningside Elementary this morning. The big news is that Becky is expecting the new school zones to be posted on the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) website today -- or if not today, no later than Tuesday. Because of growth in enrollment at Morningside and other nearby elementary schools, a new school is being built on Ponce de Leon, where the Morningside kindergarten campus currently is. She said that she expects that APS will convene a Community Meeting about three weeks after the new school zones are released, and then after getting that public input APS will develop a final proposal that will go to the school board for a vote.

She also said that a new assistant principal has been selected, but is awaiting final approval by the school board. The new person is expected to start September 9.

Lots of discussion about air conditioning (an ongoing problem in a few classrooms), strep (should announcements go out if there are strep cases at school?), but the big topic was head lice.

I never had any experience with head lice until I had kids in elementary school. I will never forget that first time I washed the girls heads with RID® and as I rinsed their hair, the dead bugs came streaming out. It was one of those unforgettable moments as a parent, when you realize that your beloved children have been infested with bloodsucking insects for God knows how long and you didn't even know it. And at that point you don't even realize that you don't just do this once. Head lice is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually six stages that parents go through, when they learn that their child has head lice. The first five - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - are well-known. The sixth one - humor - is highly recommended. Tom thinks that part of the reason they like him so much at the pediatrician's office is that the message he left on the Nurse's Hotline when the girls got head lice that first time included that we were all seriously considering becoming Hare Krishnas and shaving our heads. I have to say that at least based on this meeting this morning very few Morningside Elementary parents have reached this higher, transcental level.

Here's the deal. Head lice are not a health problem. They are a nuisance, but nobody gets rheumatic heart disease as a consequence of head lice infestation. In contrast, that can happen (although it is not common) following strep infections of the throat, so a little perspective is in order here. In a 2002 clinical practice article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Roberts wrote, "In 1998, half the school nurses in the United States would not allow a child with nits back into school. Excluding children from school because of head lice results in anxiety, fear, social stigma, overtreatment, loss of education, and economic loss if parents miss work -- a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Management should not harm the patient more than the pest."

I did volunteer for the head lice committee (why, I don't know. Maybe I thought I would run out of things to write about otherwise.) So more to follow, I am sure.

ADDENDUM: As of August 30 no information on the new school zones on the APS website that I could find, but according to yesterday's Digital Dolphin it should be available at http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/apsrezoning.aspx by no later than September 2. No doubt more to follow on this story as well. It is at least as important as head lice, but maybe not as important as streptococcal infection (at least not the kind that is associated with rheumatic fever).