It’s been an unquiet week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted hometown. With paycuts, petitions, and the usual propaganda, some of Lindsay’s many voices have been speaking outloud. Sorting the messages has kept me busy, although I think the cacophony is a healthy sign.
Underneath that din, there have been
other voices wafting through my days.
One is my cat Dot’s, who wakes slightly earlier than I do with a bleat,
not a meow. She is old, growing more
frail by the month, and deaf enough to be confused by sounds rather than guided
by them. An affectionate lick by one of
the others or her own sneeze can knock her down. When I look at her, I often see her entire
life passing before my eyes. Her time is
coming to return to dust.
When she arrived at my house as a
kitten, she was just a speck. Two girls
found her and her brother in the park one evening, wandering around with their
eyes glued shut by mucus. The girls
brought them here, and though I already had enough cats, I also had a tube of
antibiotic eye ointment in the feline medicine cabinet. The girls did not, so I was the kittens’ best
chance. That was June 1998. I’ve never been sorry.
I’ve been sorry about the park,
however. Where the kittens were born,
near the hospital bordered by the orange grove, where you could sit on the
grass watching kids run around like banshees and feel like you were out in the
country - that place is gone. It’s
buried under the concrete and blacktop of Ono City Parkway. The missing orange grove is now just a
paragraph in the resolution permitting the development of an up-scale housing
subdivision there. That paragraph
required the developer to remove the trees section by section as building
progressed. Instead, he bulldozed the
entire grove to install the underground utilities, which he never
finished. Now his plans have turned to
dust along with the ground itself.
So another voice I’m hearing is the
sound of my own regret. I hid my eyes as
the City began destroying the park to build the aquatic center. When I finally woke up, saw what was planned
and realized we should try to save the part they hadn’t deranged, it was too
late. The photographs they used to get
the grant from the state to renovate the park showed its terrible condition but
didn’t mention that the City was the agent of that destruction. When I called the state seeking help in
delaying the renovation until public input could be included in the design,
they didn’t believe me and forged ahead, turning our once pastoral place into
an urbanized space.
Arm-in-arm with regret are the voices of betrayal. Sitting in the Memorial Building Thursday evening for a community meeting on the proposed rate increases for sewer and garbage, I was jolted by flashbacks of two meetings almost 4 years ago.
In one I heard the voice of Mike
Camarena, director of city services, telling many of these same people in that
same room how the park redesign would suit their needs. When he discovered that the audience had other
ideas and that they would rather see the funds used to fix their neighborhood
streets, he “misspoke” about deadlines on the source of funding. In the other flashback I heard the voice of
Bill Zigler, our new interim city manager, reassuring these citizens who came
to a city council meeting to request input on the park’s redesign that “There
will be swings.” Swings were at the top
of their list. There still are no
swings.
Friday, when I asked Bill and Mike
why there still are no swings in the park, they responded that they have other
priorities. May they be hearing voices
soon.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a writer trained in environmental planning who is mortified by
this city’s priorities. You can send her
your list c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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