Sawdust

Published in slightly edited form August 22, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

“A friend is someone who holds you in their hands,

wheat and chaff together,

and blows the chaff away.”

    

George Elliot

           

     “He changed my life,” the stranger said at my father’s memorial.  It turns out that he’d worked with Dad at the Coast Guard station at Two Rock.  “I was a dope-smoking kid with no interest and no skills, and in three short months of working with him, I went from rebellious to respectful.  My whole life was turned around.  When I left the Coast Guard, I went out and got a job working in construction, and from there to running community water systems.  I never saw him again, but when I saw his obituary, I cried.  I knew I had to come.”

           

     As I stood there surrounded by chattering friends and family, the one lucky enough to receive this stranger’s story, I realized that this is why we have memorials, or celebrations of life, or funerals – whatever you want to call them.  It’s so that people who have known a person on the outside of family life can bring their stories, their remembrances, to the ones who knew that person wholly, wheat and chaff together.  The ones who now stare death in the face and may be suffering the fact that sometimes the chaff was all they saw.

           

     The stranger described the tender, dedicated way my father had shown him how to think about a problem and find the answer, how to pick up his hammer and saw, cutting up pieces to pound together, making something new.  As he spoke, I remembered the time my father almost hit me with his hammer when I moved in too close, trying to learn how to repair a double-hung window.  But the stranger was telling me something I needed to know, so I stayed quiet and just soaked up his words.

           

     “I hope he was the same as a father,” he ended, looking around the room full of people who were all strangers to him.  I followed his gaze and my eyes caught on my brother, who suffered the most from my father’s attention given to other people.  I didn’t answer, mostly because I was still sorting my wheat and chaff and didn’t want to mar the stranger’s glowing distillation, which was helping.

           

     In another part of my sister’s house, where we had gathered to celebrate Dad’s life, some  students were chatting from Sebastopol high school’s wood shop.  He’d volunteered there for years, right up to the last weeks of his life.  The students had brought their most recent projects to display in honor of what they’d learned from Dad.  “Before, I didn’t really care about anything,” one young man told me.  “I was sitting in the back of the room texting and goofing off, so the shop teacher told me to go talk to Dave.”  The stranger’s story from the 1970’s replayed forty years later, cementing its truth: my father loved to show people how to work with wood, how to make things, fix things, how to be resourceful and creative and survive, spirit intact.  That’s really what he gave away freely to life, and somehow we are all better for it.  That’s really what I learned from him, even if I can’t turn bowls on a lathe or repair a double-hung window.

           

     The chaff is not nothing.  It is necessary: it protects the wheat kernel as it grows and becomes a byproduct after it is separated.  It is like the sawdust on my father’s shop floor below the table saw and the planer, a byproduct of some pretty terrible cutting and shaping of what once was a living tree into a table or bowl, relatively inert.  We’ve all got our piles of sawdust to deal with, even after the carpenter who made them is gone.  The blessing of memorials is that we also have the kernels, sometimes held only by others, to appreciate.

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Trudy Wischemann is a recovering carpenter’s daughter who writes.  You can send her your sawdust stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

MADA

Published August 8, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The national news has been intertwining with my personal history over the last few weeks, snarling my thoughts.  I’m hoping that by writing to you, dear readers, they’ll get a little less knotty.

           

     Trying to sum up my father’s 92+ years on the planet, whose story is marked by a major political turn from staunch Republican to rejection of that party during the second Bush’s second term, has been interesting to say the least.  Dave Wischemann fit properly in the category of “The Greatest Generation.”  He deserves a 21-gun salute and the Stars and Stripes draped over the casket of his memory.  He served his country during WWII while still wet behind the ears, but continued to serve in the Coast Guard Reserve for four more decades, and proudly, too.  He served his local communities by voluntarily building places where people came together to work and play; he contributed his building skills to people who needed help, and, near the end, gave away the proceeds from his woodworking projects to his daughter-in-law’s church and Sebastopol’s food bank.

           

     It is only by grace, I think, that the MAGA slogan gagged him as it gags me.  Prior to his political conversion, every conversation between us was marred by the political canyon we couldn’t cross.   Making America Great Again would have made sense to him BB (before Bush.)  Greatness was something his generation aspired to, having fought for it and won.  My generation was sent to the swamp of Viet Nam, and what we fought for instead was truth, justice and greater humanity.  To the extent that Nixon resigned and we finally withdrew from Saigon, however shamefully, my generation won something other than greatness:  we won accountability.  I wish we could have kept that ground.

           

     Donald Trump’s base (and I know that you may count yourself among them,) seems composed of people who ache for a better time, a time that might be restored if we kill enough swamp projects and deport their promoters.  Our swashbuckler-in-chief wields his verbal sword, and his base feels protected and encouraged to wield their own where before they had been fearful, suppressed.  Seeking greatness, but without seeking definition of that term, we stumble on the rough turf left by the battles of my generation:  equality, fairness, the power of moneyed people to make being human harder every day.

           

     I would like to offer a different goal from our 300-year history of trying to become the greatest nation on earth:  Make America Decent Again.  Decency is something we’ve fought for (or at least said we’re fighting for,) in every war.  Decency has been the goal of social and economic programs we’ve promoted between the wars, like the War on Poverty or rural electrification, the Civilian Conservation Corps and VISTA.  These programs were designed to fight the battles inside our country between the privileged and the disempowered.  Decency is a way of being human which contributes to and conditions Greatness.  Without decency, at least in my eyes, greatness is just an empty dream.

           

     I’m throwing this idea out there for your consideration:  decency is what made the Greatest Generation great.  It was decency combined with bravery and self-sacrifice for the common good.  I don’t think there’s any way to become great without decency or without addressing the common good.  So let’s work on our decency first.  Greatness could follow.

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Trudy Wischemann is a long-embattled word worker who is grateful for the truce with her father.  You can send her your stories of decency discovered c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Passages

Published August 1, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This year has been marked by the deaths of several men I have loved, including my father.  The discovery of how much I loved each one came the instant I heard of their passing, a common experience, I’m sure.  Had these deaths not come in such rapid succession, however, I might have missed a curious phenomenon:  that the person became more present to me, not less.

           

     As these men have ridden around with me as I move through my days, I’ve come to see our time here on earth not as a journey, but as a passage:  a paragraph punctuated with commas and periods, with a beginning and an end.  A ticket on a steamer, a route through the mountains navigated with difficulty or ease, but short term, in fact.  Here and gone, yet not gone without effect.

           

     This past Saturday at the Visalia Friends Meetinghouse we memorialized one of this region’s most adorable and pugnacious Quakers, Bill Lovett.  The stories of fights he entered on behalf of the common good were as numerous as the people who came to tell them.  One of my favorites was of Bill and his wife Beth and four other people standing off Tulare Irrigation District’s bulldozers over the canal concretization project.  Eventually they were joined by local farmers and others who realized the impact on the groundwater table would have been horrible, but had felt helpless to do anything until that standoff.  Eventually TID became a positive force in recharging the aquifer, which might not have happened but for that standoff.

           

     I know that story was somehow responsible for my own conversion, if you will, to the Friends.  So was the place they built there just off Highway 198 adjacent to Kaweah Oaks Preserve: a meetinghouse handcrafted of wood and stone tucked into a wooded glade, garnished with a Christmas Tree farm that served to bring people into that beauty once a year.  But the story I offered to the gathering Saturday about Bill’s impact on me was more modest, a small example of a big effect.

           

     We were renovating the billboard along the highway.  That old billboard had also been responsible for my eventual move to the Visalia Friends, announcing as it did their very existence and some smidgeon of what they stood for.  New poles were sunk into the ground, new panels created to hold the message, and our job one November Saturday was to raise those panels from the ground and connect them to the posts.  As much planning as possible was done in advance, but you know what they say about plans.  Late in the afternoon, we had those panels suspended by ropes tied to the bumpers of pickups, but somehow the linking mechanism fell through and a new one had to be devised.  Bill gave orders for retrieving certain items from his now infamous scrap pile, and then scaled the tallest ladder to the top of the poles and hammered the essential link into place.  “He was only in his eighties then,” I said with only a little irony, but it was his lifelong ability to know what needed to be done and then do it that made me a follower.

           

     And it seems to me that what Bill’s passing has done for me is allow me to accept his passage through my life with new joy and gratitude.  To arrange his contributions with the others’ on the deck of this ship, and plough forward.  Some are longer than others, but all our passages are limited.  Make them count.

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Trudy Wischemann is a grateful carpenter’s daughter who writes.  You can send your stories of passage to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

"All of Me"

Published July 25, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     On a hot Friday afternoon I straggled into the Lindsay Public Library to look for a few movies to check out for the weekend.  I’ve already borrowed some of the flicks on their “new releases” shelf, and some of the juicier, older ones in their drawers, so it seemed unlikely I’d find something tantalizing enough to override the heat.

           

     But there it was:  a DVD called “All of Me,”* with a Mexican peasant woman on the cover, smiling and holding out something as a train passed by.  With only a few moments before closing, I handed it to the librarian, who added it to my stack of books on hold.  I left wondering what all I had in this bag of delectable offerings.

           

     The title, of course, had set up my brain for singing the song “All of Me” for the rest of the night.  My favorite version is Willie Nelson’s, but I’ve had that song in my head since I was little, probably from hearing Frank Sinatra sing it in the 1950’s.  “All of me,” the singer pleads, “why not take all of me?  Can’t you see I’m no good without you….”  My feet mentally do a little soft-shoe dance as I mouth the words in my mind.

           

     But the words’ meaning in this magnificent, true film is really about giving all of oneself rather than hoping to be wholly received.  It is a documentary, beautifully produced, about some women in a southern Mexican village who call themselves “Las Patronas.”  What they do with their lives, and have been doing since 1995, is prepare food and water for the people (mostly men) riding the train (as hitchhikers) to the North.

           

     Day or night, each train that passes through their village is met by a crew of women with boxes full of sack lunches in plastic bags and bottles of water tied together like bolos, which are flung into the outstretched hands of men dangling between cars of the moving trains.  Life-saving provisions pass to the high-speed hands of strangers on the fly from the outstretched hands of home-bound strangers who, unlike most of us, recognize that we are all One.

           

     And those handing off the bags of food and bottles of water have spent all day cooking the food from raw rice, dried beans, cold tortillas and dried chilis that must be ground by mortar and pestle, supplemented when possible with canned tuna and bottled vegetable oil. The food is then packaged and assembled into something approximating a balanced meal, and bagged for air-born delivery. The water is dipped from the village’s well and poured into used, rinsed-out plastic drink bottles scavenged from the cafeteria of the nearby factory.

           

     The village is poor by most American standards.  It, like so many villages in Mexico, has been drained of a fair share of its men by the hoped-for availability of work in the North.  Mostly it’s the women and children left behind who have undertaken this project, seeing the need.  “We share what we can of God’s abundance to us,” they say, not stopping work to talk.

           

     My mind was blown away by the enormous effort and the real dangers faced by these women.  But what I loved most was their simple recognition and acceptance of being in service to God.  When Jesus said “be like little children,” he didn’t mean we should use the earth as our playground well into adulthood.  He meant this unpretentious, 100% self-giving as adults, serving the needs of the broader community beyond self.

           

     All of me in service to all of Us.  It’s a powerful witness.

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* Spanish language video with English subtitles, published and cataloged as "Llevate mis amores All of Me". 
Trudy Wischemann is a tentative giver who writes.  You can send her your 100% stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Me vs. Us

Published July 18th, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Victor Davis Hanson, a right-wing historian and former Selma raisin grower, had a column in The Bee recently where he described the country’s current acidic division as a bad case of sour grapes on the part of the liberals, who just can’t seem to grow up and take their turn at not being in power. 

           

     Sitting on the left side of the chasm myself, of course I think it’s much more than that.  I think it’s what the folks on the other side of the chasm are doing with their power.   I think our collectively-left dismay, bordering on despair, comes from watching the progressive quilt we were patching together unravel, even dissolve, under the hands of the deregulatory wrecking ball.  It appears regressive to us, a turning backward fueled by the pain of those who lost power when the wheels of justice were required to turn, moving us forward as a country that promises social equality, and needs to become more economically sustainable.

           

     I think there’s another great sadness among many on both sides of the canyon: the devolution of our citizenship into Us and Them.  Actually, of course, we have been living with internal divisions for a very long time.  We small town rural people have resentments, often unspoken, toward the urban centers for their magnetic power of jobs and baubles that draw away our children and tax dollars.  Skin color and ethnic identities have long been used to identify whether we belong to Us or Them, even when we’re neighbors.  Efforts by those of us placed in the Them camp to remind the powerful Us that we, too, are Us have often been met with hostility and repression, even death.  So we’re actually quite used to the Us vs. Them equation, even if we’re not accustomed to feeling this much hatred (read “fear”) for being Blue or Red.

           

     But there’s a greater danger I think we all feel in our guts, whether we can put words to it or not.  It’s that somehow the national conversation is constantly being driven into an unhealthier set of categories:  Me vs. Us.

           

     It was something our head honcho said in Europe last week that triggered this thought.  He said “I have a very great relationship with Angela,” meaning Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, thought to be the most powerful leader currently in Europe.  And in that moment I saw the truth of a more general complaint about the current president of the United States.  He thinks it’s all about him, not us.  Not us, much less them.  Him.

           

     And what he’s encouraging, at least among his base, is a similar reversion to the notion that the individual is all that matters.  It’s a mythic notion our history writers have maximized –  you know, this country was built by brave, industrious, clever, ingenious (whatever) individuals, usually white men – leaving out the wives and children who also plowed the prairie, the phalanxes of slaves who planted and harvested the cotton, the immigrants who slaved in the fields for crusts of bread so that we might drink orange juice (or whatever) any time of the year.  You know, those guys.  I did this with my own hands, worked 20 hours a day….

           

     The problem this myth creates for the whole concept of community is beyond the scope of this column or even a 6,000-word piece for Vanity Fair.  But the biggest problem with “Me vs. Us” is what it does to the individual.  The word “us” includes “me,” so when we cut ourselves off from “us,” we’re slicing off part of ourselves.  It’s like having two hands, but no thumbs.  Sure, you’ve still got 80% of your fingers, but that missing 20% makes all the difference in the world.

           

     I’m not saying it’s simple, but let’s not let ourselves become divided along these lines.  We need to work for us, not just me.

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Trudy Wischemann is a community researcher who writes.  You can send her your “me vs. us” dilemmas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Want Not

Published July 11, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Waste not, want not,” is an old, old saying dating back to the 1700’s and before.  It is an essentially conserving concept:  if you are careful not to waste things, you’ll have greater abundance in this world.

       

     Last week a representative from Mid-Valley Waste gave a presentation to the Lindsay City Council about the measures that company is undertaking to reduce our city’s waste levels and decrease contamination of the recyclable portion.  Some of those measures include increased surveillance of our garbage cans, with increased penalties for improperly sorted garbage, recycleables, and green waste.  Some are more educational, like the kiosk at city hall for pamphlets describing the proper place for these items we want or need to throw away.

           

     There appears to be a change coming, however, in what can be recycled thanks to the imbalance of U.S. trade with China.  One of the things we export to China is our recyclable garbage, which only slightly offsets the huge amount of things we import from them.  In retaliation for the tariffs recently imposed by our country on theirs, China has stopped buying our recyclable garbage.

           

     Because of this, suddenly the only plastic items we can throw in our blue cans are those marked with the number “2” on the bottom.  “We can’t take 3 through 7 anymore,” the Mid-Valley Waste representative said.  I wondered silently when they were going to tell us and how.  I wonder how many people check the number anyway, or remember that only certain numbers qualify, since I know that I myself have become lax in that.

           

     It’s been less than a week since I heard the presentation, but my garbage sorting habits changed instantly.  Now, aware that a $50 fine could result, I find myself returning to the safer side, saving only the most obvious recyclable items like newspapers, empty cat food cans and milk jugs for the blue can.  I toss everything else in the brown can.  What the trade imbalance with China will mean for our local landfill problems is suddenly vivid, and most certainly was not anticipated by anyone in Washington, D.C.

           

     As I sorted, I also realized how much of the garbage we toss is packaging material that comes wrapped around the articles we buy from China.  That this waste material was twice traversing the Pacific Ocean was mind boggling itself, a total violation of the whole idea behind recycling, which is increased sustainability.  There’s nothing sustainable about using fossil fuels to ship garbage back and forth across the world’s largest ocean.  Of course, there’s nothing truly sustainable about buying widgets and toasters and a billion other little interlocking consumerist parts from that far away, either.

           

     I think there may be better ways to encourage our residents to learn to sort garbage into salvageable, compostable, hazardous and buriable portions than what is currently being done.  But one way we might want to try is the “reduce” approach: to buy less trash in the first place. In fact, it might be time to reverse the old maxim: “Want not, waste not.”  For us, the leading consumers of the world, it might be a useful phrase.

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Trudy Wischemann is a long-time recycler who also writes.  You can send your thoughts on garbage and its economic roots to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.