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.