Thursday, February 19, 2015

Three to Two

Published in slightly edited form Feb. 18, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
 
- - for Ruby and Serafin
 
    The people of Lindsay scored a large win at last week’s City Council meeting.  It was a playoff between Rich Wilkinson’s pocket and the Council’s growing sense of fiscal responsibility to the residents.  After a hard-fought ninth inning, the Council voted 3:2 to reject Wilkinson’s bid, and the people moved into first place for the first time in decades.
 
    The next morning, before the sun turned the clouds crimson and the sky aquamarine, I dreamed I was telling Ruby about the meeting.  You remember Ruby.   For decades she served this community behind Checkstand 2 at RN Market, always warm and gracious with a gentle laugh. A redhead, she also had a decent fire in her, a sense of right and wrong that really wasn’t negotiable.  When she was revealing that fire, her eyes would glisten.
  
   In my dream, her eyes were glistening.  Before she moved to live with her daughter, she read this paper.  Even after she retired she’d tell me how she appreciated what we were doing, trying to get this city back on its democratic feet.   I always felt blessed by her appreciation.  In many ways, Ruby kept me going.
  
   I saw Serafin twice during the day of the meeting.  You remember Serafin – Mr. Rivera.  He’s the one who stood before the City Council in that crowded high school gymnasium on a mid-October evening in 2010, when the people rallied for the first time in decades to cry out in rage at the salaries that were being paid to our small town officials.  He’s the one who said, first in impeccable Spanish, then in impeccable English, “I don’t think you know what it’s like to lie awake nights not knowing how you’re going to pay your water bill.” 

      Unfortunately the Council missed his point completely, and went on to explain how the water bill has to be that high because it’s what it costs the city to provide those services.  Only later, after the first decent audit in decades, was it discovered that some of the high salaries had been paid for out of the water fund.  Mr. Rivera also reads this paper, and his appreciation for what we are doing, trying to get this city back on its democratic feet, has also kept me going.  Seraphim marched with Cesar.  I feel blessed just seeing him.  Pray he gets over the last remnants of this winter’s flu.
      Some on the Council are not missing his point any more.  At the meeting, when Wilkinson’s contract came up on the agenda, Councilman Mecum led off, staking a claim to our turf.  “The people elected me to represent their interests, and there is nothing in this contract that serves the residents.  It’s off the table as far as I’m concerned.”  Shortly thereafter, Councilwoman Kimball moved to approve the contract. 

      Mayor Padilla then said she had more questions, and opened a discussion about many of the contract’s provisions.  Councilwoman Sanchez also had questions, which were interrupted by Councilman Salinas seconding Kimball’s motion to approve, essentially calling the motion to a vote.  He was surprised when it was defeated 3:2.  After further discussion, Mayor Padilla kindly explained her position to Rich and the rest of the room:  “No disrespect intended, but you’re just too expensive for us.”
     There also was much discussion about Wilkinson’s “succession plan,” which was conceived to explain the need for his new contract.  “I’m not your man,” he said strongly, referring to his unwillingness to serve as finance director in the event one is not in place when Tamara Laken retires sometime this year.

     We know, Rich.  That’s why you don’t get the big bucks.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who is grateful to be able to serve the people of Lindsay.  You can send her your democracy-restoring ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Still Here

Published in edited form Feb. 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Juni Fisher will be in town this weekend, singing her heart out to us on Valentine’s Day at the Lindsay Community Theater.  I’m grateful I’m still here to hear her, and grateful she’s still willing to come home and share her gift with her people.


     She makes my heart sing with her songs about people and horses, about intimacy between these two species that has few words, but a huge vocabulary in body language.  I suspect that we humans would all communicate better if we comprehended the importance of touch and gestures.


     But last year she brought us a different song folded in between the horse-people songs like a foxtail woven into a saddle blanket or a slicker tied on behind the seat.  It’s on her album Listen … to the horse (2013), titled “Still There.”  It’s all about Western attitudes to land and how they affect our behavior toward each other.


     Here’s how the song got born.  Waddie Mitchell, the cowboy poet from Nevada, called Juni one day to read her a poem he’d just written.  “When he finished, I had to sit down.  It was that stunning,” she wrote in the liner notes.  “The melody came easily, because he had written the words in such a perfectly lyrical way.  I love when that happens.”  I love that it happened, and think the Great Spirit had a hand in its birth.  This song is telling us about some adjustments we need to make in our lives here and now.

            “The Iroquois and Blackfoot, the Seminole and Crow/
            Were there as we discounted where they live and what they know,” the song
opens, then continues: 
           “Staked claim to plain and mountain range/
            Spread weeds of ways to suit and change /
            The pallet and the pantry full of all we would not share /
           We did not care / That they’d been there."

     We know this story, this black shadow of our history in this place.  The song reminds us that we keep it in the shadows, where it does its black work.   Rising to the light on the back of a song helps.  Let us say Amen to that history, and begin to work with its meaning.

     But the bridge of the song brings us to the present. 
        “They’re still there / And for all the selfish choices that we made /
         They paid a debt they never should have paid” it starts boldly, then ends
       “Who are we to think that we could have their souls? /
        They’re in the places where the grass grows through their bones /
       Their spirits ride the air / And they’re still there.”

     I was telling our new pastor, Mark Smith, about this song.  Mark serves both the Lindsay and Exeter Methodist Churches, which is wonderful because he grew up in Tulare County amidst our land-people relations.  He’d just mentioned that one of his grandfathers was part Yaqui, and that the family still knows the story of his land loss as the Americans took over California.  It struck me that the grass may be growing through his grandfather’s bones, but the part of Mark that is part Yaqui is still here, like the parts in his parents, siblings and all their children.  Still here.

     And while we are sitting in the theater Saturday night having our hearts challenged and mended all at the same time, another experiment in being still here will be going on at Quaker Oaks Farm just north of Farmersville.  Darlene and Lalo Franco, with other members of the Wukchumni tribe who have been meeting on that land for almost 3 decades, will be helping to host a camp-out for youth (of all ages.)  They hope to share the meaning of that land with the newcomers, to pass on what it means to be attached, to know yourself as part of a place.  Still here.

     They’re still here.  We’re still here.  Maybe we can learn more about what that means.  Thank you, Juni, for delivering the message so beautifully, and for still being part of this place.  Thank you, Darlene and Lalo, for telling your story.  May we all have major heart breakouts this weekend.
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Trudy Wischemann is a land advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your family land stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Monday, February 9, 2015

leftovers

Published Feb. 4, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I woke up with popcorn hulls stuck between my teeth one morning this week, leftovers from my bedtime snack the night before.  I hadn’t gotten up to brush or floss, I just crashed and left them there for tomorrow. 


     “What a perfect metaphor for the City of Lindsay,”  I thought to myself.  Watching their posturing, hearing their words, reading their statements leaves the same feeling in the pit of my stomach as the hulls leave on my gums.


     In a recent article in this paper, Mayor Padilla was quoted as saying “We hope to reach out to those who are discontent or have been discontent with the city before.  We hope to bring those people in and maybe draw some attention to the fact that we are working really hard to heal those relationships.” (Jan. 7, 2015.)   I don’t know if she was thinking of me, but last week’s double city council meetings did little to reduce my ongoing discontent.


     Monday, Jan. 26th, they held a special meeting that started at 4 p.m. in a conference room, not the regular council chambers.  The agenda was 1) the presentation of a succession plan for the pending retirement of finance director Tamara Laken and the return to one hat for Rich Wilkinson as Director of Public Safety; 2) long range financial planning and mid-year budget update; 3) 2015/2016 goals and objectives of the city council; 4) discussion of submitting an RFP for an update of the city’s general plan; and last, but not least, 5) the approval of a city representative on the “One-Voice” trip to Washington, D.C. by TCAG.  There were no supporting materials on the website, and the Councilmembers received none before the meeting.  As a member of the public, if you read only the agenda, you would not have known the scope or content of this meeting.


     The agenda for the following day’s regularly scheduled council meeting was paltry by comparison.  It contained a normal consent calendar (including approval of a cost overrun on a street project, which shouldn’t be normal but is;) the closing of a public hearing on a conditional use permit that wasn’t ready to go; a public hearing on a variance of a lot line set-back on one property, and council reports.  In terms of the public’s interest, the material discussed at Monday’s special meeting was far greater than Tuesday’s, which easily could have been handled by a planning commission if we had one.  Farmersville has one.  (Farmersville also paid $16K to find a professional city manager.  It seems like we could do as well.)


     I can hear them now, saying “We’ve always had these special meetings starting at 4 pm in January - that’s the only way we can get this important work done.”  What they mean is that this work is too important to risk having public scrutiny, much less public input.  One kudo goes to the Council for requiring the staff to repeat this important information at a regularly scheduled meeting.  Until we have rules that allow for real public participation, however, the chance that the public will attend is small.


     Three years ago this month, current city manager Rich Wilkinson removed language from the agenda packet describing the rules for public participation in these meetings.  He did so at the request of then-Mayor Murray, without Council discussion or approval.  Two years ago this month I asked Mayor Padilla to restore this language and begin to take other steps to encourage our real participation in these meetings.  One year ago this month I repeated that request.  We are still waiting, reasonably discontent.


     In order for relationships to heal, changes must be made.  As long as we have staff in charge who do not want public input, and a council willing to comply with their behavior, this city will continue to fester.  It’s time to do some serious flossing.
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Trudy Wischemann is a negligent tooth-brusher who writes.  You can send her your clean-up stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Remains

Published in edited form January 21, 2015 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     My pile-sorting project at home was interrupted last week by three blessed days of work.  Those three days away, however, helped me see my piles in a new way.


     I’m the relief person for a mini-storage in Exeter, where I’m appreciated for my attention to detail despite the fact that I’m frequently late.  I keep track of my tardy minutes and try to compensate for them, including staying past quitting time if a customer needs me.  Saturday one did.


     It was twenty minutes before closing.  I was ready to go home and start facing my piles again when a woman flew through the door asking was I closed?  "No,” I said, hoping she only wanted to make a payment.  No, she wanted to rent a unit.  “No,” involuntarily erupted from my mouth, then I asked what size she needed.  “Do you have pictures of them, can I see one?” she asked back, semi-frantic as the story of her need began to pour out.  “We can go look at some,” I told her, knowing this was going to take longer than twenty minutes.  I silently said goodbye to my going home plans, silently acknowledged that I recognized her confusion, her state of disrepair, that I’d been there before myself.  Determinedly I said “I can help you.”


     Her story is not mine to tell, but it’s one we hear often in the mini-storage business.  A person feels their life beginning to unravel, relationships turning to melted wax.  Sometimes it’s divorce or the loss of a home; sometimes it’s death itself.  The stuff of our existence, the things we’ve collected to make life good or bearable or creative are suddenly at risk.  We need a safe place to put what remains of that life until this storm blows over.  We rent a unit, buy a lock, and begin to sort what needs saving from what can go.  Renting a unit can feel like finding a little eddy in a tidal wave of despair.


     Sometimes taking a rental feels just right.  A young couple came through the door Saturday morning wanting a place to store things they were collecting for their new house in Exeter.  Our buy-one, get-one-free special served them perfectly, since escrow is supposed to close this week.  They plan to paint walls and install new flooring, making the house theirs before they move in.  I rejoiced in their stable lives and organization, their partnership in the decision-making.


     A lot of the time, however, renting a unit to someone feels like triage.  I can’t keep the bank from taking the house, can’t cure the cancer, can’t mend the marriage, can’t even promise their stuff will be totally safe while they work on the problem, however long that takes.  All I can do is find the right-sized unit to fit their needs, walk them through the paperwork and obligations entailed, say a prayer, and say goodbye, good luck moving in.  It leaves me feeling pretty helpless sometimes.


     Mid-day a couple about my age came into the office looking tired.  They had just finished cleaning out her mother’s unit, a 10x30, after her death in November.  They had been working on it six weekends, had three yard sales, and paid someone to come take what was left.  I congratulated them, knowing how painful it was, as well as exhausting.  We’re just glad it’s done, they said.


     After they left, I finished the paperwork and discovered that I had rented the unit to her mother a year before.  I tried to remember the occasion, her face or story, what the weather was like, but it was all a blank.  I went to clean the unit and found a few shards of her life left on the floor amidst the dust.


     The scraps said she was a craftswoman, a person who loved to make things, uniting her spirit with the materials of this world.  It’s a love I share, although I don’t give myself that pleasure much anymore.  In a plastic bag I bundled up a few ceramic tiles, a window-shade pull, a piece of nylon webbing and a funeral program she’d saved since 1998, and tucked them in the back seat of my car, a salute to our shared humanity.  Then I swept away the last of her mini-storage remains, making room for the next customer.


     My piles look a little different now.  I see that what’s in most of them are the remains of former lives, mine and others’:  spirit-infused material goods whose time in our lives has expired.  I can’t bring back my field work days any more than I can my once-sharp eyesight, though in remembering who I was back then I might find a compass for restoring my path.  In that hope, I’m digging back in.  See you later.

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Trudy Wischemann is a fiber craftswoman who writes.  You can send her your thoughts about stuff c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Data Crunching

Published Jan. 14, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last week’s warm, spring-like weather had me crunching some raw data I mentioned in my previous column.  “Data crunching” is just academic slang for processing facts in some way that shows relationships between categories of things.


     My processing began in the form of laundry.  I washed piles of clothes from my past, looking for clues to my true identity as a child of God despite the clear evidence of massive strokes of sin.  A flannel shirt from my field work days, for instance, helped offset some guilty-looking underwear.  A pair of jeans I’ll never squeeze back into reminded me I once thought size 12 was large.  Examining one’s conscience through the lens of previous wardrobes can be a growth experience in humility, one trait of the saintly.  But hanging wet stuff on the clothesline, letting it dry in full view, preparing for its new life as a rag or thrift shop donation - man, that’s cathartic.


     I keep wondering how Val is doing with his data crunching.  His job is a little different from mine:  he’s got to organize his raw data well enough to contradict the data provided by his clerk.  His data need to provide a different picture of relationships than the one her data paints.  His data have to convince a panel of people not from his home town or county that he’s a child of God qualified enough to keep serving up justice here at home despite the clouds on his apparent character.  All I have to do is convince my internal judge and jury that I qualify to keep breathing.


     When I crunch the data in the judicial committee’s report, the relationship I see is one of invidious paternalism.  He was trying to take over her life.  With the anonymous letter accusing her of having an affair with another court employee, supposedly sent to her husband’s workplace and cc’d to Judge Val, he was inserting himself between her and her husband as well as the other employee with whom she was still on a friendly basis.  By instructing her to tell no one about the letter, he was also inserting himself between her and her other friends.  He then began depositing cash into her bank accounts and providing other luxuries, from AAA coverage to a BMW.  As benign as he tried to make these look, they are steps toward a predatory relationship, how paternalism goes ugly.  Ask any daughter of incest.


     I probably wouldn’t mention this again except for the possibility that Judge Val has been using his power in other inappropriate ways, particularly within our community.  The most blatant example I know was his signing the LPD’s search and arrest warrants over a 3-day weekend in the unwarranted arrest of Councilman Mecum last year.  The Saucedo’s home is three doors down from Lindsay’s police station, which made it convenient, I’m sure.  But his past history on the city council and multiple terms as mayor leave too strong a connection to City Hall to guarantee impartiality in evaluating the validity of those warrants.  Most judges refuse to sign warrants in the communities in which they live simply to avoid the appearance of potential conflict of interest.


     The other was his attendance at Lindsay City Council meetings during the LARGo lawsuit on CEQA violations and neglect of historic preservation provisions in Lindsay’s outdated general plan.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that may have been a violation of the judicial ethics code.  At the time, however, I felt it was some kind of betrayal of the community, his appearance and comments meant to sway the Council back toward the staff’s direction at a time when they were beginning to move away.


     I hope the community will come to understand that the loss of this “local hero” may in fact be a gain for our efforts to build real democratic process.  Maybe it’s time Val did some laundry.
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Trudy Wischemann is writer who loves to get her hands into soapy water and make things clean.  You can send her your data crunching stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

           

 

 

 

           

Raw Data

Published Jan. 7, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A friend visited me from the coast over New Year’s, a dear friend.  For the most part our time together was a blessing, a re-visitation of our shared interests and beliefs after many years apart.  When he saw the way I live now, however, he interpreted the state of disrepair and chaos in my home as major moral backsliding, a dangerous degree of failure on the brink of collapse.  His solution would be to bring in the biggest dumpster available and wipe it all away, give me a fresh start.  He left without implementing his plan, thank God.


     Afterward I wondered why I wouldn’t appreciate his help.  I came to the conclusion that it’s because I see these piles of stuff and badly mingled projects as raw data, possibly containing important information about my state of being and how I got here.  It’s because I have hope that I’ll learn more about myself as I unmingle and sort, then deliberately remove that which does not belong here anymore, keeping what does.  I have hope that would be the real fresh start.


     Raw data is all we have at the moment about Judge Valeriano Saucedo, our local Lindsay boy known familiarly as “Val” by classmates and teachers, family and friends.  His list of successes and contributions, including mayor of this town, is a source of pride to many in the community, Anglos and Latinos alike.  The story that hit the front pages of several papers last week about the investigation and pending hearing before the Committee on Judicial Ethics was a blow not only to his reputation, but also to us.


     Thanks to a link in the first Fresno Bee article, I found the Committee’s report and printed it off to read carefully.  The picture that emerged on first reading was raw, a story of smooth but persistent entrapment like a spider’s web.  The words in the text messages quoted made me queasy, not just for the woman, his courtroom clerk, but also for Val.  I began wondering if he was having a bout of temporary insanity, the kind that comes with falling in love.


     On second reading I realized this story is partial.  Although the report does not state where the information came from, it must be supposed that it is the clerk’s story and that the documents (including electronic messages) were delivered to the Committee by her.  Until Val’s story is told, we will have only her half of the raw data to process.   And even then, we will never know the ephemeral raw data:  things spoken between them, and all the forms of non-verbal communication exchanged between humans like glances and touch, postures and movements.


     As I read her story, however, I couldn’t help but wonder what possesses men to make such power plays on women.  I could identify with the situation entirely, unfortunately from the woman’s place.  It took me far too many years to understand men’s power plays for what they are, and not real advances of affection.  From the picture presented in the report, I could imagine that even the man may not have realized his motivation for making such improper moves until he was called on it by her.  Maybe not even then.


     This is why we have rules about ethical behavior and laws about sexual harassment.   It’s all too common for this kind of thing to destroy families, make work environments intolerable, erode people’s mental health.  If the clerk’s allegations are true, where Val made his real mistake is in not following the rules, abusing his power.

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Trudy Wischemann is a non-native Lindsayite who writes.  You can send her your thoughts and stories c/o P.O. Box 1374 or leave a comment below.

Here, Now

Published Dec. 31, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Here we stand, 10 days into the new solar year, 7 days past the miracle in a manger, now ready to turn the page on December, close the calendar on 2014.  It’s a threshold, a movement away from honoring continuity with the past with gifts and traditions, through a doorway toward self-conscious resolutions and hoped-for newness.  What lessons of Christmas will we take into the new year?


     We live in a Post-Manger world.  Pastors in some of our churches will continue with the Jesus story: the warnings in dreams, the trip to Egypt as a refuge from homeland insecurity, the massacre of all Jewish male children between the ages of 1 and 3 ordered by their king.  The dark night in Israel that forced God’s hand to deliver his Son through the womb of a teenage peasant girl, the lowliest of the low, continued for another 30 years while the boy grew into a man, a lifetime for some people.  Indeed, the darkness continued after his death three years later and continues to this day.


     We are not there in Judea, some of you might say, that flash-point, hot-bed Middle East.  We are here in the Tulare Lake Basin, in the central, holy portion, neither on the forested upland slopes with thin soils in the headwaters, nor in the swampy end-point full of tules and cattails.  Especially here in the Kaweah’s drainage, we’re in the fertile section of the sweetest, most productive watershed in California.


     And it’s not then, you might say, when Caesar and Herod rode roughshod over everything and everyone.  It’s now, when we have law and order and a democratic system to keep things functioning properly, an economy that produces the good life for many.  It’s not there and then, it’s here and now.  What lessons apply?


     Water is one.  When Caesar built an aqueduct to serve his new city of Caesarea on the coast of Israel, it deprived lands of water in the surrounding countryside and impoverished the peasants who depended on that water for survival.  The inability of Tulare County’s Board of Supervisors to come to the aid of those whose wells were drained by the CEMEX mining operation demonstrates that our democratic law and order needs some fine tuning.  Citizen participation is needed in 2015.


     Land is another.  Near the end of his ministry, Jesus warned the daughters of Jerusalem that their good life was coming to an end, that they would be moaning before it was over.  The complicity of the Jewish kings and priests with the Romans, forgetting their compact with God and impoverishing their own people, would bring an end to that urban religious fortress.  The impetus for the good life that deprives others of life whatsoever won’t be tolerated, Jesus was warning.  Inequitable relations between people and land, people and natural resources, people and the good life, result inevitably in destruction.


     If that babe in a manger means anything, it is that we must seek judicious distribution of the earth’s resources, must find ways to share the wealth.  Here, now in the Tulare Lake Basin and in the entire state, we are ‘way overdue in addressing imbalances of power over water and land, and facing more enormous challenges than ever before.  In 2015, let us resolve to take this birth more seriously and bear upon our administrators and representatives the crux of its message.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Methodist Quaker who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your interpretations of the Christmas/New Years threshold c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

           

Earth and Heaven

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


     For the past month, as the days have marched quietly toward the Solstice and the Manger, I’ve been reading two experts on the relationship between earth and heaven to keep me centered on the realities of this season.


     Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterian pastor and scholar who translated the Bible into contemporary language in The Message, has a book of daily reflections called Living the Message.  The December 15th entry was particularly meaningful for me, because he wrote about the importance to his family of the book by Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It.  He said they loved it because “it gave dignity and a sense of holiness to our place, a place that was home to us....We already knew it was a holy place, but the book confirmed and deepened our reverence.  The book functioned as a shrine, calling attention to this place:  this is holy ground -- worship God here.”


     Walter Brueggemann, also a Presbyterian and theologian who wrote The Land:  Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith in 1977 (reissued in 2002 in an expanded second edition,) has become the grandfather of a growing movement in land theology.  Briefly, he has reinterpreted the Old Testament message from a placeless chronicle of God’s acts in history to one of “storied place” in which the main theme becomes the covenant with God in the land (a state of landed-ness) and the movements to and from land-less-ness when God’s people weren’t holding up their end in covenant.  The refocus of the connection between God and Earth is radical, but heaven-sent.  It’s a window on a new faith relationship with land and place which is long overdue.


     In this season we’re keenly aware of the journey of Joseph and pregnant Mary from their rural home village, Nazareth, to Bethlehem.  And it’s not because they had better hospitals in Bethlehem, but so that they could be counted and taxed for the new cities the Roman Caesar was building in their country with the complicity of the Jewish priests and King Herod.  In effect, Joseph and Mary and the majority of the Jewish people were in exile in their own country, occupied by urban foreigners who extracted the wealth of the land through the fingers of the rural peasants.  The night the star shone bright and the angels came down singing hosannas to this newborn child and scaring the wits out of some innocent shepherds who went away singing - that night was not dark just because it was winter in Israel.  It was a dark time in the history of God’s people, and he was shining a light on that, too.


     And who were God’s people?  In the Christmas story we see that being Jewish did not ensure that status.  Herod was Jewish, but he’d broken his covenant long before the angel Gabriel gave Mary the good news.  The Wise Men were not Jewish, but they listened and followed God’s instructions, tripping Herod and saving the infant Jesus from the king’s murderous scheme.  My reading of Brueggemann suggests that God’s people were those who kept covenant in the land and the poor, those who had been dispossessed of land but still honored their Maker, having faith that sooner or later, God would redeem his people and restore them to land from which to make their living.


     In the Lord’s Prayer we say “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  I pray that message will become bright and clear this Christmas:  that this means here, now.  Watch for the light tonight.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Quaker writer who worships with the Methodists in Lindsay, where there will be a Candlelight service tonight at 6 p.m.  Send her your starlit sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Uncovered

Published Dec. 17, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


Dear Friends and Neighbors,


     Since Thanksgiving I’ve had difficulty writing, not only this column but anything else.   At first I thought it was just my transition from worker to self-employed.  But as the days passed, I realized my muteness was caused by a sense of being uncovered.


     To be “covered” can mean a lot of things.  We use the word to describe everything from having insurance or a financial backer to having a roof over our heads or a tarp on the car.  Protection from the elements, whether natural or man-made, is the usual implication.  To be uncovered, then, is the removal of some layer of protection we consider normal, expected.


     The fire in Lindsay two days after Thanksgiving which destroyed the century-old brick building that once housed Stamper Motors left me feeling that we, as a community, have become uncovered.  The transition to our current state, in which the city’s fire protection is supplied by the police department, began many years ago when the police and fire departments were merged into one department of public safety under the leadership of Rich Wilkinson and Scot Townsend.  Despite protests by fire protection professionals and a grand jury investigation, that merger led eventually to the cross-training of policemen for fire work and the loss of professional firemen.


     Although there have been other examples of problems created by this double-duty arrangement, November’s fire was the handwriting on the wall.  According to one eyewitness, only two officers were on duty when the fire was called in.  It takes two people to man a fire truck, so both were employed fighting the fire and no one was available to direct the traffic that naturally began accumulating at the scene.  By the time two more officers responded to man the ladder truck (almost an hour after the fire started,) the streets were clogged with cars.  It took twenty minutes for the ladder truck to reach the fire two blocks from the station.  By that time the flames had stopped licking the skies behind Webb-Sanders Funeral Home, but the fire burned for hours, filling the streets downtown and lungs of every resident within a quarter mile with black smoke that lingered for days.


     I can hear their protests now:  this is the best we can do in a small town with an impoverished population, shrinking tax base, increasing absentee ownership, whatever other definitions of handicap that have become normal to many rural communities across the nation.  When people hear the name “Lindsay,” they no longer think of it as the center of Tulare County’s orange production or remember it as “a nice town, a great olive.”   They think of it as a farmworker town where people are regularly made hungry and thirsty by freezes and droughts.  We’re a town that regularly needs some kind of bailout by the government at one level or another, and the City’s become expert at raising the cry.


     But this dearth in fire coverage is the City’s own making.  I don’t think it’s the best we can do.  There’s some uncovering needed down at City Hall, and I hope the newly-elected City Council will address this question in the New Year.  In the meantime, everyone be really careful with those Christmas tree lights and New Year’s Eve fireworks lest we discover the hard way just how uncovered we really are.

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Trudy Wischemann is a volunteer fireman’s daughter who remembers the death of her friend Kevin Suttles in the Brown's Point Cliff House fire in the second grade.  You can send her your suggestions for improvements in Lindsay’s fire protection c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Pilgrimage

Published Nov. 26, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Here we are, Thanksgiving time, entering the holidays.  Holy days.  And the two darkest months of the year:  November 21 through January 21.


     My father turned 89 as we walked through that door.  He said it was a hard birthday for him when we talked on the phone.  Then he said goodbye and went out to his shop where he makes things to give away.  Been doing it all his life.  Right now he’s making scoops -- you know, implements to scoop stuff up with.  I have one I treasure that he made early in his scoop-making career maybe 10 years ago, beautifully varnished.  He sent me another from his most recent batch, this one from the heart of a redwood tree with only a light coating of mineral oil, “nothing toxic” he scrawled on the note that came with it.


     He’s the kind of person you would want to have along if you set sail in the Mayflower headed for who knows what, just wilderness.  No homes with running water and electricity waiting to shelter you when you arrived.  No stores to go buy pots and pans and scoops to scoop oats out of a barrel.  No oats. No barrels.  No schools for the children, no constables to keep the peace, no armies to keep the enemies at bay.  No enemies, at least not until you arrive and show what you intend to do with land somebody else already occupies.


     I’ve been with him, more or less, for two-thirds of his journey.  I don’t think he knows yet how much of his life plays out in mine, how his deliberate, daily passages to the shop are replicated in my daily moves to the computer, or how his projects find their way into my columns.  I think 89 is hard for him because he senses the end of his pilgrimage approaching, the clock ticking as relentlessly as he is, making scoops.  One of the hardest things for me to imagine when that time comes is how lonely his shop is going to be.  It struck me yesterday that I’m quite sure his table saw will never run again, like the grandfather clock in the song, when that time comes.


     Yesterday I finished typing a manuscript for the book I’m editing, written 22 years ago by Father Bill Wood, a Jesuit.  I called him earlier this year at the retirement center where he’d gone to live and finish the book he’d started more than 22 years ago, which the manuscript briefly summarizes.  This piece is brilliant, full of light, a fusion of theology and ecology applied to the relation of agriculture and the common good.  In it, he takes a stand on where the church should be in the discussion.  But when I sent the freshly typed file to his email address, it came back undeliverable.  The prospect that Bill Wood has completed his pilgrimage on this earth and gone to join the eternal community gives me pause.


     But not too long a pause, because I don’t know that I’ll see 89, or even 69.  None of us knows, do we?  All we know is that, at the moment, we’re on this pilgrimage, heading off for who knows what, pure wilderness in some ways, frightening and beautiful all at the same time.  Every day, give thanks for another shot at an idea, another morning in the shop, another chance to make something to give away.  Give thanks for those people who have gone before, clearing the brush and paving the way, and for those still here, helping carry the load.  And give thanks for this Wholeness that holds it all together, us included.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer in reading mode who lives gratefully in Lindsay.  You can send her your pilgrimage stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beating the Devil

Published Nov.19, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This summer I learned a song that has become my flagship:  Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil.”


     I didn’t know then where the song would carry me, but one of the ports has been resigning from my job at RN Market.  For five summers and four winters I have served this community, for better and for worse, at Checkstand One.  I am grateful for all I’ve learned about our people and for the friendships I’ve gained with customers and co-workers.  To those I have aggravated or hurt in some way, I humbly apologize for taking out on you the normal hardships of employment.


     But there was another source of aggravation I didn’t see amongst the cans of hominy and cases of beer.  I didn’t know I was wrestling an angel in disguise as the devil.  That devil is one every artist has to stare down:  the despair of ever being heard.  With my work on land, through research and essays, photographs and poems, I’ve trumped that guy over and over again, but he always comes back for more.  When I signed on at RN, I was taking a break from fighting - or so I thought - while waiting for the opportunity ship to dock.


     With the emergence of the West of West Center, celebrated last week in Fresno, I think that time has arrived.  There was something new in the mix of people who attended the opening/book signing.  One friend said it felt like being in an estuary, that place where rivers meet and mix with saltier water from the ocean, a new environment for organisms from both sides of the salt/fresh water divide.  Estuaries are very productive ecological zones, and I think Mark Arax’s intuitions about pooling people from both sides of another kind of divide - the old wealth of the Valley and the longstanding critics of inequality - are going to be fertile, if also delicate.


     Last week, while suffering round two of the crud, I sat and read an article in the July/August Smithsonian a dear friend had sent me.  The article described the current economic devastation in the rural South, as overwhelming to residents as it is baffling to onlookers from outside: the loss of agricultural jobs to mechanization, the loss of industry to Mexico and China, the highways bypassing small towns linking burgeoning urban centers.


     It also mentioned the havens some of these small rural places have become for people who decide not to accept the inhuman conditions in urban areas, and ended with a brief description of a program in Arkansas helping people get back on the land where they can make a living from it as well as a life on it.  That ending was a brief reprieve from the description of economic despair that preceded it, conditions not unrelated to our own.


     “The devil haunts a hungry man,” sings Kristofferson near the conclusion of “To Beat the Devil.”  “If you don’t want to join him, you got to beat him.”  He pauses just long enough for the meaning to sink in, about wrestling that angel in disguise.  Then he breaks loose with his re-write of the devil’s despair song:


     “And you still can hear me singing to those people who don’t listen to the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear.  And I’ll prob’ly die explainin’ how those things that they complain about are things they could be changin’, hoping someone’s gonna care...”


     See you around town!

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who has returned to self-unemployment status.  You can send your devil-beating recipes to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.