O Little Town

Published Dec. 20, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The gingerbread woman reappeared when I opened some boxes of ornaments this weekend.  I wanted to do a little light-handed decorating, at least in my kitchen window, my hearth. I pulled back the tissue paper wrapped around her plump little body, saw who it was, and tenderly wrapped her back up, deciding against that trip down memory lane.  Then I found the little wreath I’d hung to frame her years before, and my hands decided to go back after all, back to the time when she meant something real to me.

           

     I’d written about this cheerful kitchen angel in this column, so I dug up the piece from the notebooks where I’d once kept them organized. What I discovered when I re-read it surprised me.  In the first week of Jan., 2011, I was still in love with my community, tender toward its complexities, not yet tortured by them.  It felt good to remember.

           

     The gingerbread woman reverie was triggered by community pain I was just coming to know thanks to my new job at RN Market.  A much loved woman, Inglatina Huerta, had been killed on her way to work around 5 a.m. on New Year’s Eve Day.  She had a head-on collision with the son of one of Lindsay’s first families, who was coming home from a party. The story I heard is that he was not tested for alcohol.  An Hispanic woman on her way to work, killed by a white boy on his way home from a party and not made to bear any consequences: it was an old story that could have happened anywhere.  People suffered in silence.  That’s how we do it here.

           

     People had just begun to not suffer in silence two months before, when the revelations about high salaries Lindsay’s top employees were being paid splattered against the reality that a high percentage of the town’s residents have trouble paying their water bills.  In mid-October 2010 about a thousand people met in the high school gymnasium for a highly-guarded city council meeting, purportedly to hear their complaints.  At first I was reluctant to get involved, so I simply wrote about it.  The first families fought back.  In the columns before the gingerbread woman, I was just beginning to feel the effect of moving socially from one side of the community to the other, and still holding some middle ground.

           

     That was before the housing fiascos were revealed, and before the effects of Rich Wilkinson’s appointment to city manager could be accumulated.  It was before coming to the podium during public comment period at city council meetings and discovering we had to fight for the right to speak, before the plan to demolish the Citrus Exchange building, and before the lawsuits we filed to try to keep that from happening.  Back then I was afraid of losing my sense of home in this town through the act of protesting. I didn’t know that loss would occur inside of me.

           

     “It’s just love,” the gingerbread woman had told me about Inglatina’s accident and all the pain and silent discord that followed.  “Grief is the price we pay for love,” I’d quoted a fellow Quaker then.  It’s hard to remember.  But as we, against the dark, deck our homes with the lights of life and share our wonder about a birth on the wrong side of the tracks in Bethlehem 2017+ years ago, maybe perspective will come.  All this fighting is just about love for a little town.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can send her your ornament stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

           

The Gingerbread Woman

Published in the "HomePages" column Jan. 5, 2011 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette in slightly edited form


      She’s been hanging in my kitchen window for just a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to take her down.  But I know the time will come, so I soak her up every time I stand at the sink to wash dishes or pare potatoes.  She’s a gingerbread woman, a blown-glass Christmas ornament I found at a 99 cent store last year and brought home to hang in the center of a spare, spruce and holy berry fake wreath I bought there the year before.  And she means something, though I’ve been taking my time discovering what.

           

     She’s iridescent gold with pink crabapple cheeks and an infectious smile, a red ribbon bow at her white collar on the gold dress edged in sugary white, with a green apron tied around her wide middle and a pair of cranberry red boots that might have come from the army but for their scrumptious color.  Between her chubby hands is a string of gingerbread men cookies, an offering that appears to have pleased her as much in the making of them as they hopefully will please the recipients.  Her hair is as white as mine and looks like it’s still up in rollers.  I love this woman.

           

     I think she’s my alter ego, the woman I might have liked to have been if things had been different.  I think in some ways she’s a keeper of the hope, if not the promise, that things might yet still be that way.  She’s the Christmas maker, and I think she stands for the bravery of women everywhere who dedicate themselves to the arts of Home making at this time of year.

           

     I am slow to arrive at the task of Christmas making, and even slower to finish it, reluctant to let go once I have my hands on that plow.  But the Twelve Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day, not end:  they end on January 5^th, the day this issue will hit the stands, something I learned from my dear friend Wendy in Oregon.  In that lovely song, people are still giving gifts through the January New Year doldrums, so I feel quite justified in leaving my red and green decorations in place for yet another week or so.

           

     “It’s not going to be a good New Year,” my beautiful friend Nancy told me in the parking lot of R-N Market as I strode toward her to clock in New Year’s Day.  “Why?” I asked, stopping to listen.  “That woman who was killed yesterday morning, Friday, she was my daughter’s mother-in-law,” she answered, trying not to cry.  “She was always so full of life. . . .”  She told me what she knew about the circumstances of the accident, then we hugged and she left with her trunk full of groceries.

           

     Later, manning register #1 as the afternoon turned to evening on that first day of 2011, I got another glimpse of the impact of this tragedy.  One of the woman’s sons came in with friends and identified himself that way to me, even though I am a total stranger to him.  “She used to come in here all the time,” he mentioned, and I wondered how I would ever be able to identify her in my mind.  He left with two friends and three 30-can packs of Bud, and I called after him to drink carefully.  “I won’t be touching this,” he said softly.

           

     “What was her name?” the other checkers asked, and all I could remember was that it was Hispanic and her last name started with an “h”.  At the market, sometimes we know people by face and personality a long time before we learn their names unless they normally pay by check.  Those who pay cash often remain nameless even if the connection between us borders on intimate.

           

     Inglatina Huerta is the name of the woman who was killed early last Friday on her way to work at 6 a.m. in the dark.  Nancy said she’d gotten the frost off her windshield on the outside, but that the car was fogging up on the inside or something that made it hard to see.  Nancy said she was killed instantly when the car or truck plowed into her head-on, driven by one of Vahn Blue’s sons, Layton.  Despite the fact that the greatest degree of pain is felt through the families of the victim in these situations, I know that the Blue family must also be suffering.  I extend my sympathy in both directions, knowing neither family well enough to say it in person.

           

     After work, I went home and started cleaning up the kitchen, trying to make some peace in the middle of the chaos in my heart and mind.  I found myself staring at the gingerbread woman, still smiling, still offering her cookies and hope.  Still trying to make Christmas last even though the ball has dropped in Times Square and bare, dying fir trees are already lying on their sides in the alleys around town.  What is the hope that drives us, particularly us women, to add the work of making Christmas to our already full lives?  What hope is it that we anticipate breathlessly on Christmas Eve, anticipating that the next morning we will find ourselves transformed?

           

     “It’s just love,” she said, echoing something a man once told me about why he got up at 5 every morning to squeeze fresh orange juice for his two boys.  Just love.  And I imagine it was just love that got Inglatina Huerta up in the wee hours to drive to work on New Year’s Eve day, as she probably has been doing much of her life.  And it is just love that is causing the pain in those families and friends who now have to learn to live without her.

           

     “Grief is the price we pay for love,” Diana Lampen, a Quaker, wrote in 1996, and every time I remember that tremendous paradox, I am comforted.  It is the price we pay for being loved as well as the cost of loving others, because at some point in time all of our lights will go out and the loving we’ve offered and received will pass into memory, become passive rather than active vocabulary.

           

     And some of it may be passed on in strange, invisible ways.  In recipes for cookies and cranberry sauce, tamales and posole.  In wooden toys crafted in Dad’s shop, in doll’s dresses sown late at night on Mom’s Singer.  In saved letters and notes from boxes that arrived in the mail saying “Nothing special – just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you.”

           

     Just love.  That’s what the gingerbread woman is all about.  I’m glad she told me.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a remedial gingerbread woman who is grateful to be told people’s stories.  You can send her your thoughts on grief and/or gingerbread c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Home Land

Published Dec. 13, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the old song opens, and finishes “if only in my dreams.”  In between the beginning and end, the lyrics describe a peopled place, with weather and vegetation we have to go away to get, sitting here on the Valley floor.  Maybe the Sierra.  Maybe Dunsmuir, on the toes of Mt. Shasta.  Maybe Michigan.

           

     The imagination is a wonderful place.  You can find yourself winging home in a song.  And for most of us, “home” has geographic coordinates, a place on the map.  Thanks to that Mother, Change, we may not actually want to go there anymore, but the homing instinct mentally remains to that place we once called home.

           

     Do the people of Israel feel that way about Jerusalem?  As the site of the Holy City in the Bible, the three thousand years of history as the center of the faith that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed over the weekend, meeting in France with its new President Macron, it’s easy to feel compassion for the Israelites.  Our President has given them a great big Christmas present:  home.  In “their” land.

           

     Unfortunately, they are not the only ones to feel that Jerusalem is home.  That city is still the center of faith for the Palestinians and other Muslims, in that region and beyond.  It is also home for Armenian Christians, as my friend Caitlin Croughan reminded me on the phone Sunday.  She visited Jerusalem last year and brought me an Armenian cross from their quarter of town.

           

     She also raised an important point about political states and religious nations.  Our forefathers and mothers built America on the principle of separating politics from religion as a way of protecting religious freedom.  We believe in that.  Many nation-states do not.  Israel appears to be one of them.  That’s their business, but it surely is not ours.

           

     So why did our fearless leader hand them this gift?  Cait thinks it was actually a gift to Mike Pence and his fundamentalist followers.  Something to do with the Book of Revelations, apparently, which is strikingly clear to some about the meaning of the preceding 65 Books.  I’m not a scholar of Scripture, so I can’t help you out there.

           

     What little I do know about the Bible concerns land, particularly the notion of the Promised Land.  It’s a big topic that was opened by Walter Brueggemann in the late 1970’s, and has continued scantily into the present.  The main concept Brueggemann uncovered (for me) is the idea of Covenant.  The land was promised to the Israelites as part of the covenant with their God.  It was a gift, the gift of sustenance and placedness, but it was His half of the bargain.  Israel’s half, in return for abundance and security, was to love their God with all their strength, soul and might and to keep His commandments, which unfortunately have been broken century after century (especially in the West Bank and Gaza most recently.)

           

     Does Netanyahu remember the teachings about Exile?  How the Jews lost Jerusalem over and over again, and why?  More importantly for the current news, however, is this question:  does Donald Trump even know?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who stays home for Christmas in Lindsay.  You can send her your home-based dreams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beyond White

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 6th, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A friend and I were laughing last week about the insidious antics of someone, and the words “Oh, that’s beyond white!” came out of his mouth.  I don’t remember who we were laughing at.  It could have been something from the current slough of national politics.  Maybe it had nothing to do with politics whatsoever.  It could have been anything, anybody.  Outrageous arrogance associated with whiteness is a contagious disease in our culture, and it takes conscious effort to resist.  No one is immune, not even people from other races.

           

     Last Friday night Nikiko Masumoto performed her one-woman play “What We Could Carry” for the Reedley Peace Center.  I’d been wanting to see this play since I first read about it in the Fresno Bee five years ago, when she returned to the Valley to farm with her family.  The play is a re-creation of the 1981 testimonies of Japanese-Americans who suffered the WWII internment, testimonies which led, eventually, to formal apologies and minimal monetary restitution from the federal government.  It was one of the dark chapters in U.S. history, but, as one of her characters says in the play, this chapter, in terms of how our country has dealt with other (i.e., non-white) races, is not the exception, but the rule.  From that point onward in the play, we listened to their testimonies differently.

           

     Mas Masumoto, Nikiko’s father, has been a friend to me since he performed in my first Humanities event in Parlier, early in 1991.  He was teamed with the poet Omar Salinas from Sanger, a town which is less than 5 miles away from the Masumoto’s farm in Del Rey, but the two writers had never met.  Race and social inequality associated with different occupations can create divides “below” white, as Mas testifies in a beautiful short piece called “In the Fourth Grade” published in his first book, Country Voices:  The Oral History of a Japanese American Family Farm Community (1987.)

           

     I have always loved watching Mas give presentations, but Nikiko’s performance was something else.  It was breathtaking.  With only a kitchen stool and battered suitcase as props, she created times and places of the evacuation; with just a music stand and microphone she transported us to the hearing rooms where the testimonies were first given token (and only later serious) attention.  The civic necessity of a whole community speaking up in their own defense was overwhelming, as the different people who did so showed up in Nikiko’s body, came out of her mouth.  Her passionate representation of those people, men and women, young and old, quietly respectful and righteously outraged, gave me new respect for the power of theater, of face-to-face communication, however ephemeral it might seem.  In the blink of an eye, that woman can change hearts.

           

     And changed hearts is what we’re going to need if we’re ever going to move beyond white, beyond the supposed superiority of that race of people and the privileges still associated with it.  Beyond white is where we need to go.  And as we move into the season where Joseph and Mary take their historic, arduous trip to Bethlehem, where they, as swarthy folks of Jerusalem, would be counted and taxed for the white folks in Rome, we have yet another opportunity to move in that direction.  Peace unearth.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a rowdy mixture of European peasants who writes.  You can send her your beyond white experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 03247 or leave a comment below.

At the Table

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

           

     Visiting my family for Thanksgiving, we spent many hours at the table this past weekend.  Only a few hours were spent eating.  The table is a place to lay out conversation as well as food.  With both of my parents’ hearing on the wane, the table makes it easier to get ideas across, keeps the words from falling to the floor and being absorbed by the carpet.

           

     At my mother’s table I learned some new things about my grandfather and, accidentally, the geography of her home place.  She spoke of standing next to her dad with her hands in the back pockets of her overalls, mimicking his stance, watching trains come and go from the nearby station.  She asked him once why there were two steam engines groaning in unison on trains headed south.  “That’s to get them over Newaukum Hill,” he answered.

           

     I’d never heard that place name before, though I visited that territory frequently most of my childhood.  So when I got home I went to Google Maps.  There, amidst names I’ve heard for almost seven decades, names like Adna and Littel, Claquato and Napavine, southwest of Chehalis, there was the red balloon stuck on Newaukum Hill, elevation 404 feet.

           

     She also told about her father taking her to see the elephants raise the tents when the circus came to town.  He woke her about 3 a.m. and they went there together to see the feat, which occurred annually on a field next to the station.  My brother and I played together on that field, but I’d never heard about the elephants or the circus setting up there – not until we sat at her table 1000 miles and 85 years beyond that memory.

           

     Not long after that story my mother produced a photograph of her mother holding my younger cousin Teri.  I never met Mom’s mother, their bad relationship keeping them two states apart.  I saw portions of my aunts’ faces in hers, finally placing us within the missing side of the family tree.

           

     At my father’s table the next day, a lot of loose ends were laid out for reweaving.  Some of them have become too frayed for inclusion, but I learned some facts about his father’s time in the Revenue Cutter Service through a story about the recent discovery of one of its ships.  As the story trailed off, Dad said “Now I think I know why Dad and my brother Bill could never get along.  Bill (the first born,) came too soon and robbed my dad of the sea.”  Dad once lamented similarly about my own arrival.  I guess the Wischemann men didn’t know much about timing.

           

     When I’m at my parents’ tables, I have to do a lot of silent forgiving – for inconsistencies, for moral slips produced by their dates of birth, for mangled facts as time works its magic on their memories.  Once in a while, though, the appearance of a new truth absolves them and time both.  May you all be digesting your table scraps and being nourished by them.  Onward – Christmas is calling.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a story gleaner who writes.  You can send her your favorite table scraps c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.