Here Today

Published April 26, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There’s a scar healing slowly above my left ankle that I hope will remain.  It’s the gash made by a cat I loved, John Coffey, when he got so excited by my attentions that passion overtook him.

           

     It was his last gash, as it turns out.  About a week later, as I was trying to wipe his nostrils free of mucous, he inexplicably died in my hands.  One moment he was here, the next moment he was gone.           

    

     Between those two moments, my concern for him turned to grief for myself as I was flooded by the love I’d felt for him the past 6 years.  So dear, that cat; so important, our relationship. Gone.  In shock, I buried him, then went wobbly on.

           

     That shift in perspective, from busy-ness to dead still, is what many must have experienced in Fresno this past week as the news spread of the mad man’s shooting spree.  Certainly the victims’ families and friends did:  he was just here this morning, talking about his new job, what we’d have for dinner with the groceries from Catholic Charities, once we get this check in the bank, we’re goin’ for coffee, friend, you and I.  The next moment he’s on the ground bleeding to death or on the way to the ER and there’s a phone call that suddenly makes nothing else important.  For a moment, there’s nothing else.  Nothing.

           

     I got a phone call like that once.  I was a young wife baking cookies for TrickerTreaters while my husband attended a night class for his speech therapist certification.  The phone rang, my mom said “Sit down,” and the rest of the world sliced away as she told me of my brother’s death.  That was forty-five years ago, and I can still feel the shift.

           

     It would turn out to be a turning point for me, once I recovered from grinding to a halt.  The loss both catapulted me forward and dragged me back, over and over, but from that point onward there was no real return to what I had envisioned as a normal life.  I think now that was good, though I try not to be arrogant toward people with normal lives.  Everybody’s got their own row to hoe.

           

     If there is anything good to glean from those senseless tragedies in Fresno (and there were many other deaths in Fresno reported that day – an older woman who’d left her walker behind to eat her nachos on the tracks, in the dark, by herself, run over by a southbound Amtrak train, despite the warning horn and lights – what’s more senseless than that?)  it’s the miracle that we’re still here.  Life is so incredibly fragile, and yet we’re still here, friend, you and I, still breathing.  Still thinking there might be something to accomplish or enjoy in these minutes we appear to have today.

           

     Peace.  Breathe in the day.

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Trudy Wischemann is a reluctant activist who writes.  Thanks to whoever left John Coffey on my porch as a kitten.  Send your sympathy/recovery thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or  leave a comment below.

 

The Landed

Published April 19, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


      On the radio last week, I heard Johnny Amaral, the spokesman for landed interests in the Westlands Water District, complain about the April 11^th announcement of the 100% water allocation from the CVP.
    
     “It’s good news,” he said, “especially for those who have permanent crops and other high value crops like that.”  But farmers won’t be able to use all that water.  “There’s not going to be land or crop to irrigate because it’s come so late.  It’s not because farmers don’t want to.  Clearly, they want to.  That’s, you know, what they do.”  But: “In order for this to work, the allocation announcement has to come much earlier.”
  
    In all the years I have lived here, I don’t remember a single one where the final allocation was not announced in April or later.  The timing of the announcement is driven by the surveys of the Sierra snowpack, where the water is collected for those allocations.  In some years, they (meaning the state’s Department of Water Resources and the federal Bureau of Reclamation) know earlier, but considering the 5 year drought behind us and snow still falling above us, the timing doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.  Considering that the water delivered to Westlands is Class II water, water deemed “surplus” to the Class I water served to most eastside irrigation districts from the Friant-Kern Canal, Amaral’s comments sounded like the words of a spoiled teenager to me.  Who do they think they are?

           

     They’re the landed.  Those words are often followed by another, like “gentry” or “aristocracy.”  Amaral refers to them as “farmers” to keep the dirt on their hands and off their reputations, but most of the people who run the tractors, sprayers and harvesting crews in the Westlands Water District are not the owners of the land.  Mostly they’re the landless.  The landed keep their hands – and their noses – clean.

           

     I felt the same disbelief when I heard that the decision to drop the Mother of All Bombs (actually, Massive Ordnance Air Blast,) for the first time ever, was made over a piece of chocolate cake.  I don’t care how beautiful it was.  Eleven tons of destruction that cost $16 million to build (according to the website Newsmax) came down on and blew up a piece of earth never seen, never visited, much less understood, with impacts we’ve heard little about except the hoped-for impact on other nation’s views of our president’s willingness to go ballistic, literally.

           

     His decision was dessert, nothing to it.  Made while eating a beautiful piece of chocolate cake at a resort he owns, along with many other properties around the globe.  The purported  words of Marie Antoinette, who was landed in the worst way, filled my head.  Let us eat cake.

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Trudy Wischemann studies land tenure from her home in Lindsay.  You can share your thoughts on land c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.      

   

Landless

Published April 12, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last Friday, as that rain arrived, I saw a man walking down the sidewalk pushing a bicycle with his left hand and pulling a shopping cart with his right.  His cart was full to overflowing, covered with a blue tarp that flapped mightily in the wind.  His head was bent forward against the pelting rain.  He was headed somewhere, but from all appearances it was not to be under a roof. 

     Our word for such people now is “homeless.”   Years ago we used another word for people who carried all their worldly possessions with them, wandering, looking for a place to perch, and that was “landless.”  Back in the thirties, when dust and drought and the misplaced hopes of government programs drove people from their farms and sharecrop shacks, from their places in the economy as well as their communities, we called them “landless Dust Bowl refugees.”  Sometimes we called them other things, especially we in the receiving regions where their in-migration stretched county welfare budgets past breaking, where their tenuous camps trampled the ground, where their pitiful existence ripped at our hearts and made them hard.

     Even then we did not know that it was having land, even just a little piece of it, that made us suspicious of those who didn’t.  We did not know that it was having a warm place to lay our heads that made us fear these unsheltered ones.  We didn’t know that it was having a place in the economy and in our communities that made us want to drive off these displaced people, send them somewhere else.  Get them out of our sight.

     “Land is the source of all wealth,” wrote Henry George, a philosopher and economist from California’s Gold Rush days.  His first book, Progress and Poverty (1879,) noted the connection between advancing capitalism and increasing poverty, understanding how wealthy people tied up land and made it less available to those who work on it.  Have you ever been in an audience and heard a speaker point out the terrible contradiction that this part of the Valley produces the most food and yet has the most hungry people?  That’s Henry George’s insight written into our economic landscape 150 years later.

     The book I have been editing is a collection of writings about this divide between the landed and the landless.  For years, fear has kept me from finishing it, and not just fear of the largest landed interests.  It is fear of you, the ones with the smallest holdings who have the most to lose, those of us who sit so close to the margin between landed and landless that the very thought of being pushed there makes us push back.

     The question is where to push.  I hope this book will help us ask it and find some answers.  In the meantime, plant your gardens, treasure your neighbors, and keep your powder dry.  There’s work to do.

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Trudy Wischemann writes in Lindsay.  Gratitude to Manuel Mesa for leading the way in personhood.

 

The Aquarium

Published April 5, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I had a change of heart about our current President last week, a small softening after hearing a news piece on NPR about his listening session on opioid addictions.  That he, one so prone to bombastic output, should entertain a session where the purpose was to hear, to take in, caught my attention.  That it worked, increasing his awareness of one of the problems we little people suffer, also impressed me.  Clearly more listening sessions are in order.

           

     Of course, being part of the tawdry media myself, it was not hard to find something to scoff.  After the listening session was over, the President declared that opioid addiction is a huge problem, “huge,” and that “no one is talking about it.”  Of course, it’s been in the news frequently for the past year at the very least.  TV programs like Frontline and 60 Minutes have already done programs on it, NPR covers it regularly as does the PBS News Hour.  Perhaps if he watched something besides Fox News, he’d have heard about it before now.  Perhaps if he watched PBS he’d know how important it is to have public (i.e., non-commercial) support for the media, like the NEA and NEH.  The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities are not just about symphonies and art museums.  They’re about keeping truth and beauty alive.           

     But when he said “and no one’s talking about it,” I heard just the tiniest glint of embarrassment in his voice.  It  must have been something, hearing the hard details of how so many people’s lives had been taken to the brink (and some over the brink) by the accident of over-prescription.  Hard to hear the connection between the proper world of pharmacies and the improper underworld of heroin and the streets.  It must have been hard to recognize the big hole in his own mind that growing awareness filled.  Chalk one up for the Donald.

           

     The next morning I told my mate what I’d heard.  The phrase that came out of his mouth took my breath away.  “He’s been living so long in the aquarium of wealth and power that he doesn’t know how the rest of us live,” he said.  And there it was:  a perfect lens through which to view and try to comprehend Donald Trump.

           

     I don’t know much about aquariums except that they make me uncomfortable.  I think it’s empathy for the fish:  I’d die being on display 24/7.  Some people must glory in it, or learn how tolerate being observed, even examined, on demand.  Learning how to get attention, which includes making those fish flakes suddenly appear on the surface of the water and slowly filter down, not to mention keeping the water aerated and the bottom gravel clean, might not be too hard.  Not as long as there’s someone there on the outside of the tank who’s fascinated by looking through glass at gilled, contained lives.

           

     What do we do with this Goldfish-in-Chief who doesn’t even know where his fish flakes come from, much less whose hands sprinkle little pinches of them into the water twice a day?  I don’t know about you, but I know that I’ve got to put my jealousy aside, that little knot of envy that tells me I wish I’d had it as easy as he’s had it, or has it now.  I’m not livin’ in no fishbowl.  Heck, God might have put him in the Presidency to help him, not us, just so he’d have some slim chance of getting through the eye of the needle after all.

           

     I think what we do is keep talking, keep helping him learn the things he doesn’t know, the things he couldn’t learn living in his aquarium.  And maybe we keep listening to each other while we talk, so that we can help him figure out what to do with that knowledge.  Heck, I learned something from that listening session:  heroin is cheaper and easier to get than Oxycodone and Percocet.  What does that tell us about the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment?  Maybe it tells us that public support of health care is cheaper in the long run than supporting all these big fish in their little ponds.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who is grateful to have health care – at long last - thanks to the ACA.  You can send her your gratitudes c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

As If It Were

Published March 29, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “It’s beautiful,” wrote my friend Caitlin about my column from two weeks ago, which I’d sent for her opinion.  “There’s just one teeny grammatical error I’d correct if you like.”  I’ve only known Cait for 27 years, but her English is impeccable, so I asked for her editing.  “It’s the subjunctive,” she wrote back, changing one sentence fragment from “By treating my fear as if it is a gnat-sized annoyance” to “as if it were.”


     Now, I know from stumbling over the decision of how to write clauses that start with “as if” that I missed the subjunctive in junior high.  Maybe I was sick that week.  I was sick a lot.  But I must have heard about it, because I actually know that it’s supposed to have “were” attached to “it” even though the plural verb tense doesn’t match the singular noun, and moves the idea into the past tense instantly, dissolving the subject’s place in the present.   But I don’t know why I’m supposed to use “were” instead of “was” or “is,” and I’ve built up a teensy resentment over the past 50+ years that I’m supposed to do it anyway without understanding why.  Two weeks ago when I wrote my column, I think I used “is” instead of “were” as a little explosive device in my silent war against the inconsistencies of English.


     So, what is the subjunctive?  Wikipedia helped me out a little.  “The subjunctive is a grammatical mood found in many languages. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language.”

           

     “Various states of unreality.”  Did you catch that?  I get it now, why “treating my fear as if it were a gnat-sized annoyance” qualifies.  The fact that “gnat-sized” is unreal is what I was trying to convey.  Much more like a cobra most of the time.  I stand corrected.

           

     As I’ve thought about it, however, I’ve discovered that I have a bone to pick with the words “as if.”  There’s a pretense inherent in that coupling.  For instance, when I say “as if I were a real person,” it’s like saying that I’m not.  If the truth is that I’m not a real person, why not just say so?  See?  You can really get snarled up in that two-word hook “as if.”

           

     Yet it is exactly that pretense that most of us live with most of the time.  Commercial advertising feeds on the prospect that if we have that Cadillac or those Madden Girl shoes, it will be as if our lives are (or were) as successful or carefree as the models in the ads who appear to be really enjoying life.  When we don our gay work apparel with the corporate logo on the shirt pocket or hat brim, it is as if we are (or were, when we put it on) happy to be part of that business, to be an important cog in its wheel.  Or at least we are happy to appear to be happy, or were happy to appear to be happy.

           

     There are places in the work world where the phrase “as if” gets more insidious.  In a job description for a manager position I saw recently, it said the manager’s essential function is “to run the day-to-day operations of the facility as if it was your own personal business.”  Forget the improper verb tense:  listen for the unreality.  To work in someone else’s business as if it were your own is a lofty expectation, but seldom do these jobs come with the conditions that would make that experience real.  A person filling that position must put themselves in various states of unreality in order to act as if the business were their own without having the authority to make essential decisions or to experience the actual costs and benefits of those decisions.  Yet the prospect of working in a business “as if it were your own” is mighty tempting.  I could fall for that one hook, line and sinker.

           

     So, friends, watch out for the subjunctive.  When you hear the words “as if,” keep your eyes peeled for the pretense.  Maybe it’s just a pretty metaphor, a way of coloring words to deepen understanding.  Or maybe it’s a lure with fishy bait.

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Trudy Wischemann is an aging employee with no benefits who also writes.  You can send her your favorite subjunctive treats c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Home Bound

Published March 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A good book came into my hands last fall from the hands of a Reedley grape grower I’ve loved and admired for over a decade, Fred Smeds.  Some of you may remember him as the producer of Ruby Red organic raisins that we bought in 25 pound boxes and gave away by the bags-full as an expression of God’s earthly abundance in a time of Man’s economic drought.

     The project was small in scale, but with big impact.  It helped keep that man farming until it was time to retire, helped keep him home on his farm where he belongs.  It was the spiritual support we offered more than the money.  In exchange we got to experience the fruit of his labor on some truly holy ground.  The fragrance of those raisins when we opened a box and peeled back the plastic liner was a waft of heaven.  No one was unmoved by it.           

     So when Good Fred came up to me at one of the land symposium events at the First Mennonite Church and said “There’s a book I want to tell you about,” and came with it in his hand the next week, I understood it as communion.  Through the holidays and the rest of winter, the book kept me company where I write, sitting on top of the stack of books I want to read.  This weekend brought the opportunity to sink down into it and receive its blessing.

     The book is Lila, by author Marilynne Robinson (2014), who, according to notes on the back cover, has written three other novels around this theme (Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping.)  I almost don’t want to read them because the beauty of Lila is that it is spare, singular somehow.  I almost don’t want to write about it, either, or even try to tell people what it’s about.  Yet here I am, typing these words. . . .           

     The story is about a homeless girl who starts life so disconnected from love and nurture that she doesn’t even know her own name.  She’s given her names by those who rescue her from certain death by parental neglect, if not violence, but they have little more to offer than food and the shelter of their bodies, itinerant themselves.  There is no home in the sense of a physical structure or geographic place; Lila learns to be at home in the world at large by fending for herself.           

     But those little scraps of love she received from her rescuers make her hungry for more when they’re gone.  Reluctantly, fearful of people and the unknown requirements of living in one place, of living in a community, Lila reaches for more tiny scraps, people’s leftovers.  As they come into her life, she begins to learn how to receive.

     It’s a more difficult process than you’d think, learning to receive love.  Through the author’s delicate sentences, I could identify easily this struggle in myself, and the temptation to return to a state of solitariness as security.  But like Lila, I also know that there is no real security in aloneness, in one-hood.  We need each other.  And as Lila becomes part of the community, even though she’s still half feral herself, it’s not hard to recognize the benefits of civilization. 

     To be at home in the world of people, we have to know each other.  We have to trust each other to be what and who we are, even if we’re not who we say we are.  Learning to navigate this world of people as an equal is what it takes to make home.  Allowing ourselves to become bound in this way is a big deal, which Lila’s struggle shows me in a way I’d never seen before.  But the benefits are real.  

     Does anyone else remember the fragrance of those Ruby Reds rising from the newly-opened box?  That’s heaven.

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Trudy Wischemann is a small farm advocate who writes.  You can send her your raisin memories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Many thanks to Fred for contributing his writing to A Little Piece of Land, due out this year.