Flickers of Hope....

Hope comes to me in little flickers of conversation.
“I hate what they’re doing to the park, cutting down the trees,” a customer said Sunday night.  “I live two blocks away,” said another, “and my kids ride their bikes.  I don’t want traffic through there.”  So I said “Come to the meeting Tuesday night, March 14.  Tell them what you think.”
Thursday someone had alerted me they’d started cutting the trees around the Community Center.  We’d already lost the big trees that once shaded the parking side of the pool.  I’d photographed trees growing in the path of the road construction that Thursday became sawdust.  But Thursday night, two trees were still standing, and Friday morning I went to bat for them.
They’re the trees you see driving west on Sierra View toward Parkside.  They’re landmarks, cornerstones signaling the end of pavement and the beginning of turf.  They mark the entry to nature and softness, shade and refreshment.  One is a tall, graceful evergreen, the other deciduous with spiky seed balls.  I don’t know their names, just their meaning.
So I posted signs saying those trees belong to us, and that anyone harming them will be added to the lawsuit pending.  
Someone tore down the signs later that morning, at least the ones facing Parkside.  I’d posted signs on both sides of the trees, however, and they left the ones facing the bulldozers, a flicker of recognition.  Friday night those trees were still standing.  Monday morning I put up new signs facing Parkside and added two more to the old pool.   
Built in 1948, that pool is a historic resource that was not considered in the CEQA documents for the Wellness Center and park renovation.  This pool, which produced an Olympic swimmer and thousands of ordinary ones, is still needed.  This year the city doubled the use rates for the Lindsay Skimmers, which is pricing them out of the new pool contrary to the regulations in the grant contract for the park.  Most farmworker families can’t afford Wellness Center memberships or the day-use fees for the new pool.  I think restoring the old pool would be a better use of Hospital District money than building a road that reduces our city park to a shadow of its old self.
Walking through the park early Monday morning, I heard a familiar drumming, then a bird call I recognized.  It was a flicker, a member of the woodpecker family, at the top of the dead sycamore near Parkside’s curve.  Walking toward the golf clubhouse, I saw two more in a bare tree.  Then I heard the drumming again, this time metallic:  a flicker was sitting on top of a street light, hammering valiantly on its metal surface.
It made me laugh.  Lately I’ve felt going to city council meetings was just that futile and as hard on my head.  The truth is, though, that it’s helped me feel more at home and not so helpless, and has joined me to others who feel (often silently) like I do.  
So let us be flickers of hope, and keep drumming until we get the city we need.  Come to the council meeting Tuesday at 6 and let your thoughts be known.