Stand Still

Published Oct. 15 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Friday night, in Porterville, I had one of those moments of a lifetime, the kind where you know you’re home no matter where you are.  Writing about it now, I also know I’m home.
    
     I was singing with the Standlees, Tommy and Diane, with my regular singing partner, Jesse McCuin, playing standup bass fiddle.  We were singing “Stand Still,” a song recorded by The Isaacs in 2001.  Diane, with her beautifully clear, strong voice, was on lead; Tommy was playing his wonderful guitar and carrying the first harmony part on the choruses.  My job was to find the middle harmony note, to fill in the triad of the chords on the chorus, and then accompany Diane on the second verse with a kind of ooo-ing descant.
    
      As I moved to the microphone to join in on the first chorus, all I could do was pray the right note would come out of my mouth.  When it did, there was a release of energy I can still feel these three days later.  It was like finding the right word in a sentence, the word that makes the sentence sing instead of puzzle or conflict with the meaning lodged in your heart trying to get out onto the page.
    
     But it wasn’t finding the right note that gave me the thrill.  It was getting to be part of the music, part of the medium carrying the message.  I’d never heard the song before Tommy and Diane asked us to join them for the gig they’d gotten at Porterville’s Main Street Friday night “Concerts in the Park.”  I’d never even heard them sing before, much less the music they perform, which could be called an eclectic mix of old and new Southern Country Gospel.  It’s wonderful music, and they bring it to our ears simply and beautifully with trueness of heart that just shines.
    
     But “Stand Still” hit me right where I’m living, and opened a large window I’d had covered with curtains.  “Stand still - and let God move,” the chorus opens.  I have had so many instances recently when I felt completely confused about what to do, and felt conflicted about my confusion, only to be relieved of both conflict and confusion by going still and waiting until I felt the nudge.  The song reminded me that when I do that, I’m being led.
    
     Quakers have a saying:  “Proceed as Way opens,” and sometimes that happens by doors being shut.  But other times it’s as if someone turned on a light in a hallway you didn’t see before.  That’s what singing with the Standlees was like.
    
     Like so many artists in rural regions, we all make our livings doing something else.  Tommy works for Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District; Diane has her own dog grooming shop on Valencia; Jesse manages the mini-storage here in town, and I scan groceries.  But we sing to have a life, and we make music to help others enjoy or appreciate or understand their own.  So if you see Tommy or Diane or Jesse around, let them know you’ve heard they’ve got music in them.  And if you can think of a place where that music would do some good, let one of us know.
    
     But most of all, if you’ve got confusion and confliction, don’t know where to turn, where to go, or what to do, here’s my suggestion:  stand still.  Let yourself utter the two-word “Oh, help” prayer, and then just let God move.


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Trudy Wischemann is a flute-playing low alto who writes.  You can send her your favorite lyrics c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Sacramento Politicians

Published October 8, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette (slightly edited.)


     Sunday after church I picked up Saturday’s mail and found a flyer from the California Democratic Party (yes, I’m registered D, not R.)  It charged Andy Vidak with broken promises to working people and condemned him for being “Just another SACRAMENTO POLITICIAN.” 

     Considering the flyer’s source (an organization dedicated to getting politicians elected) and the Sacramento postmark, the irony was almost comic.  But then my eye lit on a small light green box near my name and address recommending yes votes on Propositions 1 (the California Water Bond) and 2 (The Rainy Day Fund,) and my sense of humor disappeared.

     Last week I intimated that I don’t think the Water Bond deserves automatic approval just because we here in Tulare County live in a semi-desert dependent on water imported from two watersheds north and are experiencing a drought that is drying up our main source of livelihood.  I still have water coming out of the tap, so perhaps I’m not appropriately panicked.  But these two propositions were crafted by Sacramento politicians to take advantage of the public’s uncertainties about the future, given this drought’s potentially long life, doling out enough goodies to the most powerful stakeholders so they’ll keep quiet.  (Prop 2 has nothing to do with rain, by the way.)  I think both parties should be ashamed.

    

     Governor Brown might be the biggest Sacramento politician with muck on his shoes from this.  Rumor has it he’d like to take one last shot at the Presidency.  I’m sure his good friends Lynda and Stuart Resnick would be glad to help out on that one.  Are there any provisions in the California Water Bond for buying back the Kern Water Bank from them, which they silently wrestled away from the public's ownership?  I didn’t see any - let me know if you find one, OK?

     While you’re looking, you might want to check out the website for “Vote NO on Proposition 1.”   It is a coalition of organizations concerned about the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta and San Francisco Bay, plus organizations like the Factory Farm Awareness Coalition and Food and Water Watch.  I find their arguments compelling, which range from what the bond undermines in terms of public trust doctrine and the principle of “beneficiary pays,” to the blunter facts that it provides “little cost-effective near-term drought relief” and that the proposed dams previously “had been abandoned because of low water yield and financial infeasibility.”

     The most compelling argument to me, however, is that it “sabotages efforts to meaningfully resolve California’s continuing water crisis.”  I agree with their problem statement:  “The water crisis is the result of the over-appropriation, waste and inequitable distribution of limited water supplies and the failure to balance the public trust.”  Let me bring your attention back to one key term:  “inequitable distribution.”  I wonder how Lynda and Stuart’s almond, pistachio and pomegranate crops are doing this year.  I bet their citrus groves aren’t hurting, either.  Somebody want to check?

     Governor Brown, in this term and his first, hasn’t touched inequitable distribution or the big boys’ grip on water.  He learned well from his father, under whose leadership we got a water bond creating the high-cost State Water Project that made farming feasible on those Westside lands the Resnicks farm now.  Now the Sacramento Politicians are asking the public to throw good money after bad, and have corralled most of the activists and media to co-operate. 

     When we find elected officials who can and will address the inequitable distribution of the public’s water supply, we can call them by another name: statesmen.  Until then, the only question left is “Will we ever just say ‘No’?”

     Visit www.ballotpedia.org for good information on the propositions.  See www.noonprop1.org to view the arguments mentioned above.  Note:  On Oct. 8 I received another Vidak flyer, this one from the Republicans claiming Vidak helped author the Water Bond - another reason not to vote for him in my mind.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who is used to being in the minority.  You can send her your reasons for voting yes or no c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

A Little Drought Music

Published in edited form October 1, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.
    
     Sunday morning, when I woke to a sunrise dampened by orange-edged clouds and robins singing for rain, I felt blessed to have such beauty in my life.  Then the first drops sounded on the patio roof, and I ran outside to the clothesline where I’d hung my cotton quilt to dry the night before.  In my bedroom I unfolded the heavy wooden clothes rack my aunt had used many winters in Washington and spread the quilt on it to continue drying, proud that I’d tricked Coyote into releasing some moisture from those clouds.  I was making a pot of tea when the drops increased to a shower, and went back outside to drag a few more things under cover.  Then I poured a steaming cup and sat inside reveling in this music so familiar to my Pacific Northwestern ears.
    
     Saturday I’d spent time working on an answer to Mas Masumoto’s call for some “art of the drought” in last Sunday’s Fresno Bee (9/22/14.)  He used the example of Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” and its impact on public opinion during the Okie/Arkie migration from the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.  I know the photo well, and many of her others:  I worked with the photographer’s husband, Paul Taylor, near the end of his life during my early days at Berkeley.  He knew the power of her art, and when they combined it with his facts and knowledge, they created a document of that drought’s causes and effects - An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion - that was never surpassed. 
    
     This drought is different, at least the one here in California that politicians are trying to fix with legislation and taxpayer monies.  There were no irrigation projects then in the midwestern half of the country when farmers (mostly small independent, tenant and sharecrop families) were dried up and blown off the land.  After awhile, politicians tried to fix things with legislation and taxpayer monies, but ended up benefiting mostly the larger farmers who turned their tenants and sharecroppers out, replacing them with tractors purchased with the government funds.  This, in turn, enabled them to buy out (for pennies on the dollar) their drought-stricken small-farm neighbors still plowing with mules.
    
     About two-thirds down in Mas’s column there’s an uncharacteristically political suggestion that voters should approve the water bond in the upcoming November election.  The point of the piece is that artists should find ways to the voters hearts to help make that happen, although he never comes right out and says so, or explains why they should.  That would be fine with me if I were sure the bond would be used to provide more water where it’s needed, which I think is on the smaller, independently owned farms the irrigation projects were built to support in the first place, but I’d have to be brain dead to be convinced of that.  In California water always flows uphill to the pinnacles of power, and we’re hardly even embarrassed anymore to admit that yes, the big boys and girls will get their share first, and we get to share what’s left.  I think the hope is simply that if there’s more supply, the shortage will have more acre-feet in it and go around a little further.  Maybe this drought’s not so different after all.
    
     Knowing Mas’s good heart, however, I think what he was really calling for was art that would call on us as a people to share the shortage, bond together and lean into the wind, to work on fixing the problems together that this drought has revealed.  Like “Come on, people now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try and love one another right now,”  that line from the Youngbloods’ song from our era, Mas’s and mine, our beautifully idealistic generation so crassly labeled “Boomers.”  To put our money, our water, our efforts and our faith where our mouths are.  That, of course, would require us to rise up united and take the power back from those who are using the drought to advance their family fortunes, like the Resnick’s and the Westlands’ Fortune 600’s.  Like John Vidovich’s Sandridge Partners, who Judge Harry N. Papadakis “just said no” to a couple of months back.  It would require us - even the educated “us” - to get educated about water in California, and from some entity other than the California Water Foundation, which serves as a mouthpiece for the big boys, teaching us the proper propaganda to make us good citizens of their empires.
    
     After Sunday morning’s blessed rainfall, when God let those raindrops blow where and when He willed, I have a song to suggest we learn to sing in these days of anxious anticipation of the coming water year.  It’s a song by John Pitney, that dairy kid turned Methodist minister from Oregon, titled “I Will Sing,” pure Judeo-Christian tradition straight out of the Book of Habakkuk.  It’s about being thankful for what we have and trusting God will provide, even in times of drought or other hardship.  Here’s the first verse:


When the fig tree’s barren in the field,
I will sing, I will sing.
And the produce of the olive fails,
I will sing, I will sing.
When the fields are yielding up no food,
And the flock be cut off from the fold,
And there be no cattle in the stalls,
I will sing, I will sing.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Pitney disciple who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your drought music ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

How long, Lord?

Published Sept. 24, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Friday, when I looked at the agenda for Tuesday night’s city council meeting and saw the continuing blockages to open government, the words “How long, Lord, how long we gonna have to ...” seeped into my head. 

           

     What was interesting was that it was Wilma McDaniel’s voice I heard, reading one of her poems on a tape I have somewhere, mimicking a black woman’s Biblical complaint as she stood in around waiting to be picked up after a long day picking grapes, with blisters on her feet and a baby in wet diapers.  I can only find scraps of the other words she used in the poem, but the picture it painted is as clear in my mind as a Paul Buxman farmscape.

           

     Writing this column before the meeting, which you will be reading after it occurs, is always an interesting project.  What they (meaning whoever put the agenda together) have planned to occur at the meeting (in this case, the approval of two items in the consent calendar that I think, in the interest of open government, should be discussed in public before being approved or rejected,) could actually change if enough people showed up at the meeting and requested discussion.  It’s even possible they might do it if I’m the only one asking.  It’s also possible they’ll go right on an approve the entire consent calendar as they have so many times before, no matter what I say.

           

     Two and a half years ago, one member of the public could request the removal of items from the consent calendar for discussion.  No one had done that in so long it didn’t matter, until residents began raising questions about the home loan program.  Then, under Mayor Murray’s leadership, they eliminated that right along with two others, seriously constraining citizen participation in city council meetings.  Since Mayor Padilla took the center chair I have been asking for the restoration of those rights, without real response.

           

     The two items “they” want approved without discussion that I think need to be aired are 1) the resolution “requesting action by Congress on Drought Legislation,” and 2) the approval of the contract for the new city attorney.  

           

     The first is a list of eight “WHEREAS”s, including one which states “just as the City and its residents have been forced to adopt progressively aggressive conservation measures to adapt to the current period of drought.”  Come on. There’s maybe 10 more dry lawns besides mine in the whole town.  They just passed mandatory conservation measures last month under pressure from the governor, after months of not promoting voluntary measures.  Nobody in Lindsay is suffering.  Our farmers are, but not us in town. 

           

     My complaint about the second item, the contract for our new city attorney, is simply technical.  During closed session at the last meeting, the Council apparently made a decision about two things:  not renewing the contract with Julia Lew’s firm, and who to choose instead, yet they reported at the end of that session there was nothing to report.  They chose Mario Zamora, a Lindsay boy, without even interviewing any of the other candidates, and while I can assure you from first-hand experience that Mr. Zamora is a pretty spiffy lawyer, I’d hoped we’d take a break from insider recruitments.

           

     How long, Lord?  Maybe only until November.

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Trudy Wischemann is a prayer advocate who votes.  You can send her your prayers c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

Cherries Garcia

Published in slightly edited form August 27, 2014 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This past Saturday we communally celebrated the life and mourned the loss of our friend Jim Chlebda in Springville, where he lived and worked during his days editing Southland Magazine and publishing South Valley Arts. His Springville “peeps” (as he called his friends) set up the memorial at River Ridge Ranch, a wonderful environmentally-run cattle ranch with full conservation easements lightly developed for open air events.  A cool morning breeze skittered cottonwood leaves around our feet and rustled them in the air.  The smells of dry grass and fall coming centered us in the moment.
    
     Patti Torrey, Springville’s remarkable, warm-hearted singer, emceed and sang; Kathy Everett and a host of friends spread tables of food and drink.  Jim’s favorite Grateful Dead recordings accompanied our conversations while we ate.  His beautiful sister Karen and brother Rob came up from Down South, as did his best friends Adam and CindyLou with their two incredible children.  The only thing that could have made the day better would have been to have him there.
    
     I had my first encounter with Karen and Rob, as well as many other members of Jim’s family, at his funeral the Monday before, held at Mission San Fernando del Rey.  The clear love and dedication of this family to each other and the world helped me understand where Jim came from, that it’s possible to live on earth as it is in heaven (or at least worth trying.)  The mass in that ancient church, given by a Franciscan priest, ended with the singing of the hymn “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” from the prayer of St. Francis.  The burial of his ashes in the cemetery there, in the same grave as his father, whose birthday he shared, and his sister who died at 20 of cystic fibrosis and who would have turned 50 that day - all of it brought the Divine Presence into the very air we breathed.
    
     The air had a different quality there at River’s Ridge: more natural, less personal, freer and to me, at least, more frighteningly real. By celebrating what we had when he lived among us here, I think we sensed our loss more acutely, the days past truly gone. As the mid-day temps rose, we began to pack up and disperse early.  A few of us re-grouped where Karen and Kathy were staying to say goodbye.
    
     That’s where we got to hear the Cherries Garcia story.  Karen’s husband Bob had told part of it to me at the cemetery, so I asked Karen to repeat it for the others.  On Jim’s last night, Bob had to pick up his son Dan at the airport. Before he left, he asked Jim if he’d like something, and Cherries Garcia ice cream was the answer.  So Bob and Dan scoured late-night stores until they found some.  When Jim heard their voices in the hospital hallway, he came awake.  They put on some Grateful Dead and danced while Jim woofed down his ice cream.  Late, they finally turned out the lights.
    
     Sometime in the early morning hours, Jim took off his oxygen mask, his lifeline.  Karen said they protested, but then she saw that the mask was not going back on.  A couple of hours later, he was gone.
    
     I have written that he was heroic in the way he lived.  Now I’m adding that he was just as heroic in the way he died.  He had lots of help and support for both, which is an important part of the story.  But I have been surprised to find that heroism has brought me to tears over and over.  Though it’s been a month since his death, I’m surprised to find that I’m still crying.
    
     The Quaker poet Ellen Sophia Bosanquet, wrote this beautiful poem about the work of grief: 

 “Since you have vanished from my eyes,

Since I have lost your blessed touch,
I own continual surprise
To find, in spite of loss, how much
Of all I cherished still remains:
Your thoughts that set my mind on fire,
And ever flowing in my veins
The urge to do what you require.          
Is it that death has more to give
Than love-companioned life can show?
And only as we learn to grieve we learn to know?”

     With 20/20 hindsight, what I’ve learned firsthand from Jim’s life, and now second-hand from the story of his death, is that he was a conscious channel of the Spirit.  He knew the Light within and made use of it.  What I’m learning from my grief, however, is that I want to grow in that direction.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives just one watershed west of Jim’s.  You can send her your channeling stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  The Bosanquet poem is quoted in Catherine Whitmire’s Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity, Sorin Books, 2001. Visit www.river-ridge.net to view their offerings and see a video of Patti Torrey singing “He Don’t Like Love Songs,” which she wrote for her husband Jared, another one of Jim’s closest friends.

Oh Captain, My Captain

To be published August 20, 2014 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     She came into the market Monday looking troubled.  A tough-looking woman whose appearance is meant to assure you she could kick your ass with one hand tied behind her back was on the verge of tears.  “Robin Williams died today around noon. Suicide.  He’d been depressed...” she said as she picked up her bag of groceries and wheeled to go through the door before she broke down.  


     “Not Robin Williams,” I heard myself say.  “My Robin Williams?”  Then a silent “Oh, no.”  Then my heart wailed “Couldn’t somebody have just held his hand or something until he got through it?” as my own tears began to build.


     As the facts trickled in over the next few days, and the commentators worked to define his life, explain his death, I worked to understand why this loss is so painful to me.  The heroism of his characters in three specific movies kept rising to the surface:  Good Morning Viet Nam, What Dreams May Come, and Dead Poets Society, the one I know best.  In each one, he’s in an impossible situation but throws himself into bringing light, joy, truth, beauty into some very dark spaces.  In each one he contributes these to the lives of his fellow human beings for awhile - and changes a few - before the darkness takes back its throne. But even as the light withdraws, we see the darkness for what it is.


     His loss is painful because he’s one of the humans I have identified with.  His characters have befriended me on my own journey.  I have quoted one segment of his lines in Dead Poets Society many times, not the “Carpe Diem” segment that took on a life of its own for years, but one just before or after that scene.  After noting that engineering, law, medicine are all very noble careers and worthy of investment, he says “But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.”  And I believe Robin Williams knew that in his core, not just his character.  I believe depression was robbing him of his access to those things.


     Depression can do that.  The Quaker writer Parker J. Palmer chronicled three major bouts of depression in his book Let Your Life Speak (2000).  One moment I remember best from his story was that a friend would come several times a week and wash his feet, not talking, simply caring.  He wrote that was the only time he could feel anything.


     I have thought for a long time that those who struggle with addiction are simply struggling to stay alive against the death of depression. That addictions strike artists in particularly high percentages isn’t really a surprise:  the job of keeping truth, beauty, romance and love alive in this world, despite and even because of the darkness, can seem so futile, so unrewarded.  So dangerous, even.  Robin Williams lost his job, after all,  for doing just that in both Good Morning and Dead Poets.  In What Dreams May Come, loving his clinically depressed wife almost takes him to hell.


     But then there’s the final scene in Dead Poets, which I’ve just remembered, which has just driven me to write this all down.  He’s in his classroom, gathering up his things to leave after the suicide of one of his students, for which he is silently being blamed.  And despite the overlord standing there, commandeering Robin Williams’ departure, the youngest, most timid student, the roommate of the boy who died - this beautiful young soul gets up and stands on his desk, quoting the opening line of a poem his teacher taught them.  “Oh, Captain, my Captain,” he says, the tears and snot running down his face.  And then the rest of the boys follow suit, despite the presence of darkness.


     Think of me as up there with them, saying good bye to a great fellow traveler.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on Robin Williams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Fire & Rain

Published Aug. 9, 2014 in my Fresno Bee column "Letters from Lewis Creek"

Mr. James Chlebda, Heaven

July 29, 2014

Dear Jim,

        There’s a pink tinge to this morning’s sunrise in the remnant of yesterday’s clouds hanging onto your mountains.  Maybe some of that’s smoke – I haven’t checked the news for fires, preoccupied with getting these things into words.

        It’s been a week since you took your last breath.  The news triggered James Taylor’s "Fire and Rain" in my head, that devastating first line “Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone.”  It was only hours in my case - your sister Karen texted Betty Blanks, who found the message on her phone during a break from court in Kings County.  She was crying when she called me.  I didn’t cry until we hung up.  Even though we knew it was coming, your death hit hard.  I’ll love her forever for getting up to Stanford to see you the weekend before.  Her reports from that trip have consoled me over and over.

        When I emailed John Dofflemyer, he wrote back and called you “a force in many people’s lives.”  That cowboy poet and fellow publisher who knows his ropes also said now you can operate with a freer hand.  I’ve been gratified to find that’s true.  I don’t know what you’ve been doing with the others, but your presence here with me has been a blessing.

        When I emailed Jeremy Hogan, he began sending YouTube clips of the Grateful Dead and Creedence, John Lennon’s "Mind Games."  I didn’t know 'til later that when he got my email, he left his office, went out to his car and cried for 45 minutes.  Then he began an outpouring of words about how you saved his life, how you were the pivot point between being lost and becoming a photojournalist.  I hope you’re enjoying the force of his flood of love and gratitude.

        Other people have said now you’re with Wilma.  I don’t know about that, but give her a hug for me if you see her.  I think you’re back at Back 40, communing with your brother floras and sister faunas, the granite and gneiss, unconstrained by property lines and deeds, not worried about the drought.  That’s where I feel your heart beating, anyway. 

        Sunday morning I found a crow’s feather on the ground on my way out to the car.  I stuck it in my hair and took you to church with me, where I read the Scriptures aloud, five parables from Matthew about the Kingdom of Heaven – what it is, what it’ll be like.  I still don’t know about all that, but I know better now than I’ve ever known before that when you walked this planet, the kingdom of heaven was near.  You brought it with you, sowed seeds of kindness and appreciation, love and respect everywhere you went.  Some of those seeds are on their way to being trees, nest sites for all those birds you love. The pearls of great price you found on every nature walk, in every poet’s corner, every encounter with the unconformed and wandering souls who became your friends – those pearls are shining now, right here on earth.

        It was hard, imagining what you were facing up there at Stanford: the antibiotics no longer keeping the pseudomonas at bay, the prospect of surgery to swap out those lungs you did your damndest to protect these past fifty-seven years, the need to take on a whole new and unknown medical regime to fool your body into keeping the replacement breathing apparatus someone else didn’t need anymore.  It was hard, but I imagined you daily.  When the Bee carried that great story about the young Clovis woman climbing Half Dome with her new lungs, we sent it right off, hoping the vision of being back in your mountains would help you cross that high desert of fear.  But that afternoon the doctors took you off the lung transplant list.

        I still don’t know all the reasons – do you?  Betty said… Kay said… Karen said… but I don’t know.  Last time we got to talk, you said “I guess now I have to go through this other window.”  I got to wail “We’re all grieving that you have to do that,” probably the most real thing I’ve said in a long time.  And you said, with your characteristic love, “And I’ve been grieving that I haven’t been able to talk with you when you’ve called, Trudy-bud.”  You took my breath away.  You get the last word on this.

        So, yes.  My heart’s still singing “Oh, I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen rain.  I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.  I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend.  But I always thought that I’d see you again.”  Despite my initial fear of that dead loss, that, in my life, you would go blank, here you are.  Thanks for sticking around all these years, and these last few days especially. Thanks for leading the way now.

Love,

Trudy

 

Editor’s Note:  Jim Chlebda was editor of Southland Magazine, then publisher when it became South Valley Arts serving Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern Counties between 1990 and 2000.  He published Valley poets with his Back 40 Publishing, most notably the Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel and Modesto poet Lillian Vallee (see www.back40publishing.com.)  He was a grateful recipient of excellent health care at Valley Children’s Hospital until he moved to Sonoma County and shifted medical service to Stanford.  He will be missed by many.

Big Jim

Published August 6, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     My friend Jim Chlebda took his last breath a couple of weeks ago.  Once he was taken off the list for a double lung transplant at Stanford, there was little time.  He got his papers in order, gathered up his family and friends for one last good day, and three days later he was gone.

     At least from this form of existence.  After  I heard the news of his passing, I was surprised how my days filled with the sight of him and the sound of his voice, how his normal way of saying goodbye – “hey, now,” became a greeting.  How his motivations and purposes suddenly seemed completely coherent, an integrity that was not only admirable but something to follow in my own life.  So I might say that Jim’s transformation from living to eternal is having a transformative effect in me.

     The Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, who Jim loved and supported with his publishing efforts as well as bringing bursts of new life into that old woman’s days, called him “Little Jim.”  He was no taller than I am and weighed significantly less, all muscle and bone with a beautiful skin covering topped by curly hair the ladies had trouble keeping their hands off of.  But there was nothing little about him.  It always rankled me that she could so casually mark him with what most men would receive as a slight.  I mean, even the Pygmy Bushmen of Africa greet each other with a sentence that goes something like “Hey, now, you’re so tall I saw you coming from a long way!”  But Jim just laughed it off.

     As he did most people’s foibles.  What was really big about him is that he did not let others’ faults impinge on his character.  He accepted people for who they were, but (for the most part) he did not let that subtract – or add – to who he was.  It has been easy for me to think that living his entire 57 years with a terminal disease – cystic fibrosis, which took his sister at 21 - was what shaped him into the purposeful, life-embracing, life-giving human I knew him to be.  But as his breathing days came to an end I saw there was more.

     Jim lived with the spirit of Christ, the heart of God, in him.  He wore no external sign of that affiliation, spoke few words of devotion out loud (at least with me).  His ceremonies celebrated the beauty and wonder of the world, particularly the natural world; his publishing efforts supported artists of all kinds.  The gifts he shared were natural shards from the land, like hawk feathers and sprigs of native plants, his photographs of those wonders, or music and books, the works of artists.  His publications were art, from the covers and insides of Southland Magazine and South Valley Arts, to the chapbooks of poets up and down the valley.  On one of Wilma’s little books of prose, Cooking with Eli, he even used spiral binding, like a church cookbook of recipes.  You know, you might want to lay it flat to read while whipping up a batch of pancakes.

     John Dofflemyer, the cowboy poet and fellow publisher who lives along Dry Creek, wrote that Jim was “a force in many people’s lives.”  He was, but not forcibly: it was the force of love.  John also added that “now he can operate with a freer hand.”  I loved that recognition of another realm from this other man of the land, this rancher who copes with the mysteries of life and death on a daily basis.

     But what I finally saw about Jim’s life after his death was that he walked softly and carried no stick at all.  To me, that’s an enormous life accomplishment.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in the Lewis Creek watershed, just west of Jim’s beloved home Back 40 in North Fork Tule River country.  Visit www.back40publishing.com to view Jim’s publishing accomplishments; visit www.drycrikjournal.com to see John & Robbin Dofflemyers'.

 

Having Say

Published July 30, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


            The Lindsay City Council took another step forward at the July 8 regular Council meeting when it refused to give direction to the city’s staff regarding historic preservation. While the Sun-Gazette’s article made it sound like the Council was indeterminate, actually they were holding firm against an attempt by staff to squelch community interest and involvement in the shape of our downtown.

            In early June, without the knowledge of at least four of the five Council members, the city staff sent a 2-page letter to all property owners within the Central Business District asking “if you desire an historic district” at this time.  The letter briefly described what that might include, and the potential impacts on their properties. 

             The letter also included a two-question survey which the property owners were encouraged to return, noting the survey’s results would be presented at the July 8 Council meeting.  The letter indicated that if the majority of those property owners answered “no,” the matter would be laid to rest until some future time. (This letter can be viewed in the Council agenda packet for July 8, either at the library, city hall, or online at www.lindsay.ca.us under Council Agendas. After the initial posting of this blog, the historic preservation "initiative" was added to the City's website.)

             The staff was clearly giving veto power to property owners, regardless of the Council’s response to the survey.  No one else was surveyed, such as business owners, who might have a greater interest in the benefits of historic preservation than property owners, who might bear some of the costs.  Forget the residents of the community, whose lives are shaped by the quality of the environment we live in.

            One sentence near the end of the letter showed their hand.  Before encouraging property owners to return the survey as soon as possible, a sentence underlined for emphasis read: “Do not leave this important decision to activists or other special interest groups.”  At the Council meeting, Councilman Mecum asked City Manager Rich Wilkinson, who signed the letter and said he was its author, to give his definition of “activists and special interest groups.”  After thinking a moment, Rich replied “Those who put their opinions over something they don’t have any say in.”

             Apparently that moment wasn’t long enough for a quality answer, because at the end of the meeting Rich asked to modify it.  After pausing much longer, he said “I think I need to give clarification on my definition of an activist ... for Mr. Mecum.  You caught me off guard!  So you got a real quick shot there, but you know really it’s someone that’s promoting their, or promotes social change that’s close to their … beliefs system.  And sometimes it infringes on those other rights that other individuals have that are important to them as well.

            “In this case the activist is that who is promoting a social change in respect to some of these personal property rights.  So there’s my reference there.”  To which Mecum replied “Cool.”

             Historic preservation is much more a public concern than private property owners’.  Historic preservation gets its energy from the recognition that preserving a community’s history, its physical record of existence in a place, is a community value to be weighed with property values.  It usually is instituted to balance the private property owners’ rights with the community’s needs for belonging, for maintaining a sense of place.  This is something the public very much has a say in, and the staff’s attempt to exclude us from the discussion is shameful.  Kudos to the Council for refusing to buy in.

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Trudy Wischemann is a carpenter’s daughter who loves old buildings more than new ones.  You can send her your thoughts on historic places c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or  leave a comment below.

Death and Life Revisited

Published in slightly edited form July 16, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

Monday, July 14, 2014.  I asked my customers at the market last night what I should write about.  One said “the heat.”  Another said “the city council.  Or the heat.”  When I woke up this morning to ominous cloud cover, it certainly looked like the heat was winning.  But what’s on my heart is death, and life.

     This past week had more than enough death in it for me, and more than enough life as well.  Two of the animals I’ve tended for years came to their ends, assisted by our beautiful vet Jamie Wilson and the women who work with her.  “Sisters of Mercy” ran through my head all week as I dug their graves and set aside their feeding bowls.

     Another cat I’ve loved since 1998, when she came as a one-eyed kitten, rescued from the park by some teenage girls, seems to have gone off her food.  She doesn’t do well in the heat, so I’ve been watching her closely and holding her more often, lining up my cat-saving supplies: oral electrolyte, tuna in water, canned Friskies, petromalt.  Thank God it seems to be working.

     On the life side, I found homes for two pups who’d been running loose in the neighborhood.  I’d corralled them on the front porch, re-establishing the fence that had not kept in the three little dogs who eventually were taken by the Central Valley Rescue Railroad.  When their owners didn’t come claim the pups, I changed my sign from “FOUND” to “FREE,” and two lovely families each took one home.  Now their lives as the family dog can begin.

     And all of that, it seems clear to me, was preparation for the news that came Saturday morning about my friend Jim Chlebda.  Some of you may remember him from the years he lived in Springville and published South Valley Arts Magazine.  Some of you may remember him as the publisher of Wilma McDaniel’s books of poetry and prose, and certainly her biggest promoter as well as stand-in son.  If you ever met him, you wouldn’t forget him:  he’s the most remarkable person I’ve ever known.

     Jim has been up at Stanford the last few weeks, waiting for the double lung transplant that could save his life.  He was born some 58 years ago with cystic fibrosis, and his lungs have finally succumbed to the bacteria that kills people with this disease.  The normal life expectancy for people with CF is still around 20; he’s tripled his life by taking care of himself and living with more abandon than most people risk.  His lifelong awareness of his own probable death let him live each day fully.  He helped people come into print who otherwise would have stayed wistfully on the margins, including me.  He encouraged people to risk living who didn’t have a life-threatening disease in their genes, including me.

     Friday Jim was taken off the list for a new pair of lungs.  We’re still investigating the reasons and hoping for a reprieve.  Today they will be meeting to set up palliative care and hospice arrangements.  My heart is still throbbing, dull, with the meaning of all this, trying to adapt to a new reality: that Jim will be living inside of me now, and not outside anymore.  That Jim will be present whenever two or more of his friends are gathered, but not physically in the room, able to surprise and delight us with his wildly life-affirming perspective and humor.

     Trying to adapt, finally, to this simple fact:  this is life.


(Note:  At 7:57 this morning, just as I was posting this piece, Jim Chlebda went through "this other window," as he called it the last time we spoke, and crossed into the eternal.  Thanks be to God for keeping him here as long as he was, and for taking him quickly in the end.)

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer, thanks to Jim Chlebda, who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your stories about Jim c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Home of the Brave

Published in slightly edited form July 9, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.

     Sorry to have missed you last week, but I was busy with Independence Day preparations: gathering signatures to protect the diagonal parking on Gale Hill Avenue against the machinations of the Lindsay Bicycle Plan. 

     As I worked, I kept hearing the last lines of the Star-Spangled Banner, a popular tune this time of year.  “In the land of the free” is the next-to-last phrase, escalating to the highest note in the song, often held out with a fermata and given a dramatic break before the final line.  The high note singing “free” sets our hearts on fire; fireworks explode behind our eyes, in our imaginations.  Then we drop back down to the solemn, peaceful thought:  “and the home of the brave.”  Home.  Always good to be home.  And brave.

     The importance of being brave when it comes to home -  that’s what we suddenly recognized two weeks ago when the city’s plan to install bike lanes and parallel parking on the four block stretch of Gale Hill between Hermosa and Apia to Mirage became evident.  For two years, since these blocks were repaved, the possibility has existed that this plan would be implemented, but few knew of it.  When I’d mention it to people who would be impacted, they’d look askance, as if I were just trying to stir up trouble.  But on Tuesday, June 17th, when the markings for the bike lanes were painted in preparation for the striping, people could see with their own eyes what we were about to lose. 

     The first to respond was Pastor Rosa Medina of Iglesia Del Nazareno Roca de Salvacion, who went immediately to city hall to ask for an explanation.  They told her they’d have someone call.  She was still waiting for that call Wednesday when I called to ask if her church would like to sign a letter requesting they restore the diagonal spaces. 

     The second to respond was Councilwoman Kimball, who was unaware that plans had changed.  Like me, she’d seen the markings for diagonal spaces marked in on Monday, June 16th.  When she heard those markings had been blacked out and the bike lane markings painted over them, she called down to city hall and got the striping stopped.  After pestering Mike Camarena’s office all morning on Thursday June 17, I received an afternoon call from Rich Wilkinson saying the issue would be on the June 24 Council agenda for a decision. 

     The possibility of influencing the Council’s decision kicked us into action.  All three churches - Methodist, Iglesia Del Nazareno and Iglesia de Cristo Mahanaim - asked their congregations to sign the letter, and to attend the meeting on the 24th.  Since most Spanish-speaking people are still getting off work at 6 pm, those who came were mostly from the Methodist Church and the Cultural Arts Council.  For lack of a quorum of Council members, the meeting was cancelled and rescheduled for Monday, June 30.

     At that meeting, most of those who came also spoke during the three-minute public comment period, overcoming their timidity in defense of home.  And though I’m sure the votes had been gathered beforehand to re-instate diagonal parking, our presence there was an additional victory:  we came, we saw how things are run, and we let them know what we thought about it.  

     For years people on staff and the Council have portrayed Lindsay’s residents as uncaring, apathetic.  For years I have been countering that the way they operate discourages participation.  Monday night we saw that Lindsay is the home of the brave:  when push comes to shove, we have what it takes to stand up and defend Home.   That's also what it takes to make it the land of the free.  May we continue to demonstrate our courage.

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Trudy Wischemann is a music major who writes.  You can send her your brave comments c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.