Turning Points

Published in slightly edited form June 18, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last week, graduation.  This week, the year’s longest days approach and then begin to shorten as we roll up to and over the summer solstice.  June, like December, has many turning points in our lifecycles.

     June contains another, more artificial turn: the end-beginning of each fiscal year.  At the next Lindsay City Council meeting the city’s staff will present a finalized budget for the Council’s approval.  The budget is the place where the rubber meets the road of our immediate future.  Although the columns of figures and oblique categories are daunting to those of us not schooled in the dismal science, the staff’s past actions and future intentions are there, even if hidden.

     But after the last two Lindsay City Council meetings, I sense we might be at a turning point here as well:  the point where our elected officials, the city council, take back the control and oversight responsibility they’re supposed to exert over the city staff.

     One of my reasons for quiet optimism occurred at the last meeting (June 10.)  Councilmembers Rosaena Sanchez and Steven Mecum questioned items in the budget, particularly one large salary increase and 1.5% COLAs for all staff except City Manager/Chief of Police Rich Wilkinson, who already makes $149,032 per year.  “You can quote me on this,” Councilman Mecum said, “I’ll accept zero percent salary increases.  Zero.” 

     Councilmember Pam Kimball and Mayor Ramona Padilla also questioned staff throughout the meeting, drawing particular attention to the State housing loan grant proposals and staff’s suggestion for “blending” loans from different programs to prospective home buyers.  After the problems created by “stacking” loans from different programs that were discovered two years ago, the hairs on the heads of every person in that room should have been standing straight up.  Pam and Ramona's questions made it clear that we've learned something from our history.

     Another reason for optimism was delivered at the prior meeting on May 27.  A reconsideration of the request by Central Valley Asphalt to hook up to the City of Lindsay water supply had been placed on that agenda, purportedly by Mayor Padilla.  That request was defeated by a tie vote back at the January 28 meeting, and the process of having it reconsidered was discussed immediately afterward.  A reconsideration would have required one of the two councilmembers voting against the measure to bring it back to the council.  By placing it on the May 27 agenda, someone on the city's staff was pretending that conversation never happened.  Luckily, Councilman Mecum remembered and questioned the city attorney, who reluctantly agreed that yes, indeed, this was not proper procedure, and the issue was once again laid to rest.

     I won’t say the staff lies: it’s just hard to figure out which side of their mouths they’re talking out of at any given time.  When they say, as reported in the June 4 edition of this paper, that “Lindsay may begin search for next city manager” (news that made some hearts jump up and dance,) they may just be blowing smoke.  These positions they’re amplifying in the budget to “groom” replacements may be nothing more than staff rewards for good behavior and departmental empire building.  Rather than grooming replacements (because someone not familiar with Lindsay’s “challenges” might not do so well, according to them,) we might wonder what someone from the outside would see - let's say, someone with a graduate education in business administration.  We might find ourselves with fewer challenges.

     The biggest reason for optimism, however, is that the public may yet have a place at the table if the Council reclaims their proper role.  We might get those sentences back about participating in these public meetings.  Come see our awakening Council at work and give them your support.  It helps.
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Trudy Wischemann is a reluctant optimist who writes.  You can send her your turning point stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Dreams from Our Fathers

Published June 11, 2014 in edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“For we are strangers before them, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.” 
1 Chronicles 29:15

     Several weeks ago I found a book at Lindsay’s new Dollar Tree that I had to buy and bring home. The cover photo shows a dark-haired white woman holding a light-skinned black child to her chest, maybe four years old, with facial features similar to her own. That child is now our President, Barack Obama; the book, titled A Singular Woman (2011) by journalist Janny Scott, is the biography of his mother.


     It’s the story of a woman nobody guesses. Born only eight years before I was, who died twelve years younger than I am now, she lived an adventurous, international life that I am not brave enough to choose. But reading her story drove me back to the book by her son, Dreams from My Father (1995, 2004,) that I’ve had on my shelf since Christmas 2008 and had read only part way through. This time I couldn’t put it down.


     Barack’s father was the first Kenyan student in the new East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. His mother was a freshman at UH when she met him, fell for him, conceived his child and married him, only to learn later that he already had a family in Africa. Barack was two when his father went back to Kenya; he saw him only once after that, when he was about 10. When he was 21, he learned of his father's death in a car accident, which eventually led him to go to Kenya to meet the rest of his large, extended and not untroubled family.


     Listening to Barack’s story after reading his mother’s, it’s clear that at least half of the dreams he received from his father came through her. She was diligent to keep the image of his missing father alive and well, for his sake as well as Barack Sr.’s. It was the elder Barack she fell for, after all: his dreams of making his country better, making the lives of his black countrymen equal to the British who colonized, enslaved, and developed the economy around white values and white definitions of monetary needs. But it was also her child she was protecting from self-doubt and the discrimination he would eventually face. She armored him with an understanding of why he was half black and that it was a good thing.


     That halfness drove him to start seeking his career, his calling, off the beaten academic path, into community organizing in the inner-city black sections of Chicago’s South Side. Raised white (but not on the mainland,) he had to learn what it meant to be a black man in America. And that’s where his dreams intersected his father’s, where his father’s dreams touched down on the son’s own soil. Anyone doubting that our president is American, or Christian, need only read the section called “Chicago.” His book opens with the passage from 1 Chronicles at the top of this page.


     While reading our President's story, I was struck by the power of his biological father's absence. In his pre-teen days, he had another father figure, an Indonesian diplomat who, despite his education and state position, taught him some of his native village ways while living in Djakarta. As a teen, sent back to Hawaii to get a better education, he had some fatherly relation with his white grandfather. But the man who could tell him why he was there, what his role in the world could or should be, and teach him the ropes to get there - that man was a ghost figuratively before he reached adulthood, and literally when he turned 21.


     The national columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote a Mother's Day piece this year titled "It's not OK for fathers to skip out." After telling the story of Kevin Durant, this year's NBA Most Valuable Player, who grew up in a single-parent household and dedicated his success to his mother's stamina and dreams him, Pitts made this simple declaration: "The absence of fathers matters.


     "We have evolved a society wherein we pretend the opposite is true. The disappearance of fathers is now nearly the norm. Almost one in four American children lives in a household without their biological dads. For brown kids, that number stands at about 28%. For black kids, it's a little better than half.


     "Mass incarceration and the War on Drugs have certainly played a role in this. But just as surely, a role is also played by the new social more which says it's OK for a man or a woman to be feckless, for him to wander away because he is immature, selfish and young, for her to have a baby on her own because the clock is ticking and really, she doesn't need a man for anything more than sperm. This is the new morality, the new American mindset.


     "And we tell ourselves it's OK, that this haphazardness has no impact upon the child, that father is not irreplaceable, that his disappearance leaves no scar. But the statistics on poverty, drug use, education and incarceration suggest otherwise. . . . (Durant's MVP acceptance speech) was a testimony to the power of a mother's love. But it was also a reminder: A father's absence has power, too."


     The powerful absence of Barack Obama Sr. in Barack Obama's life is something I felt throughout the book, a driving force in some way as important as his mixed blood and international upbringing. I think it allows him to identify with more Americans than all our presidents over the past 100 years combined. His successes - his incredible command of the English language, his rapid political rise to the highest office in the land, and his incredible strength and compassion held tightly together and employed during these last 6 years - these successes stem from what others would call handicaps.


     My father was a powerful presence in my life, something I tried to tell him in his father's day card this year. But until I read this book, I hadn't realized that most of what I inherited from him was from his dreams. A carpenter, he believed in building up the community and did it by building something the community needed: a clubhouse, a fire station, a square dance hall, engaging people in the process who didn’t know how to hold a hammer much less use one.


     My father understood my move to Lindsay as an immersion in community building long before I did. He would ask me how the town was doing even before I became involved, while I was avoiding it. Now in his late 80’s and tired of politics, we share only what we can stand to contemplate together. But I’ve got his compulsion to improve just as surely as I’ve got his hammering techniques. It changes the way I feel about the last four years here in Lindsay.


     When we celebrate the gifts we’ve received from our fathers this weekend, don’t forget the dreams.
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Trudy Wischemann is a dreamer who writes. You can send her your father's day dreams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

           

Godsends

Published May 28, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Sometimes what looks like trouble turns out to be a blessing, God sent.


     I called them the Three Stooges when they arrived on my porch:  three little dogs who had been running loose in the street for weeks.  The shaggy one showed up one night curled up on Alfredo's empty bed.  She looked hungry, so I put out a little food and water.  She went back and got the other two.  So then there were three:  Curly, Moe and Larry.


     From the beginning it was clear they were a family.  They wrestled and rolled over each other like a pile of puppies, moaning and chawing in fake hostility, then collapsing into a snug three-headed ball.  They chased children and bicycles in a string of three, unconscious of the community hazard they were creating, then came cavorting back, thrilled with their group accomplishment.


     So then I built them a fence to keep them confined to a small plot of ground surrounding the porch.  Then I became the fourth member of the family, the parent/guardian whom they challenged daily with creative breakouts, requiring additions to the fence.  And though I'm sure there are those passersby who viewed my construction techniques with dismay, I was reminded of my carpenter's-daughter creativity in the process, and my relationship with the dogs grew as well.


     Their original names didn't stick.  Curly became Maggie Muppet, Moe became Mollie Moe, and Larry turned into Jeff, for reasons I still don't understand.  Right about the time their names stuck, it became clear that Maggie and Mollie were destined to become mothers in the near future.  I had a nightmare about it:  puppies crawling all over the front yard and out under the wheels of cars.  When I mentioned this to our vet Jamie Wilson one evening when I went in for tick information, she said "Bring them in - tomorrow."  The world was saved from 15 additional dogs nobody wants by the grace of Lindsay Vet Clinic.  That Lindsay has such a clinic is a godsend itself.


     I contacted the Central Valley Rescue Railroad (another Lindsay godsend) to see about getting help finding homes for them.  At first they couldn't imagine accepting them as a family, and I couldn't imagine breaking them up, so I examined my reluctance and found that I was showered with love and kisses every night when I came home from work, and that meant something.  Between the dogs' antics and their growing affections, Mollie, Maggie and Jeff got me through some really tough times.  Fence building and repair is so much more rewarding than fighting city hall . . . not to mention bestowing love where it's needed.


     Then a big black Shar-Pei in heat showed up, drawing a string of admiring males through the neighborhood.  She took a liking to Jeff, who, despite his small size, thought his talents were needed.  Fearing fights with much bigger dogs, I retrieved him from her flank day and night, only to be outfoxed by hormones minutes later.  I took him to Jamie for his naturalization papers, then to the CVRR's safe kennels where, still feeling his testosterone, he promptly escaped, answering love's call.  Two days later, when he showed up unscathed at the porch with his black girlfriend, I felt God's hand on my heart once again.


     But a baling-wire pen in the front yard of a writer is no place to spend a life.  So Friday morning I took them, trio intact, to the welcoming arms of CVRR.  They're now getting lessons in collars and leashes, how to behave, and how to become someone's best friend.  I can attest they're genetically designed for it, smart enough to learn, and will pass on God's blessings to the next available owner.  You can check out my godsends, plus a wide range of other heavenly beauties, at www.cvrr.us.


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Trudy Wischemann is an animal lover who writes about all kinds of beasts.  You can send her your favorite godsend stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.