Cherries Garcia

Published in slightly edited form August 27, 2014 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This past Saturday we communally celebrated the life and mourned the loss of our friend Jim Chlebda in Springville, where he lived and worked during his days editing Southland Magazine and publishing South Valley Arts. His Springville “peeps” (as he called his friends) set up the memorial at River Ridge Ranch, a wonderful environmentally-run cattle ranch with full conservation easements lightly developed for open air events.  A cool morning breeze skittered cottonwood leaves around our feet and rustled them in the air.  The smells of dry grass and fall coming centered us in the moment.
    
     Patti Torrey, Springville’s remarkable, warm-hearted singer, emceed and sang; Kathy Everett and a host of friends spread tables of food and drink.  Jim’s favorite Grateful Dead recordings accompanied our conversations while we ate.  His beautiful sister Karen and brother Rob came up from Down South, as did his best friends Adam and CindyLou with their two incredible children.  The only thing that could have made the day better would have been to have him there.
    
     I had my first encounter with Karen and Rob, as well as many other members of Jim’s family, at his funeral the Monday before, held at Mission San Fernando del Rey.  The clear love and dedication of this family to each other and the world helped me understand where Jim came from, that it’s possible to live on earth as it is in heaven (or at least worth trying.)  The mass in that ancient church, given by a Franciscan priest, ended with the singing of the hymn “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” from the prayer of St. Francis.  The burial of his ashes in the cemetery there, in the same grave as his father, whose birthday he shared, and his sister who died at 20 of cystic fibrosis and who would have turned 50 that day - all of it brought the Divine Presence into the very air we breathed.
    
     The air had a different quality there at River’s Ridge: more natural, less personal, freer and to me, at least, more frighteningly real. By celebrating what we had when he lived among us here, I think we sensed our loss more acutely, the days past truly gone. As the mid-day temps rose, we began to pack up and disperse early.  A few of us re-grouped where Karen and Kathy were staying to say goodbye.
    
     That’s where we got to hear the Cherries Garcia story.  Karen’s husband Bob had told part of it to me at the cemetery, so I asked Karen to repeat it for the others.  On Jim’s last night, Bob had to pick up his son Dan at the airport. Before he left, he asked Jim if he’d like something, and Cherries Garcia ice cream was the answer.  So Bob and Dan scoured late-night stores until they found some.  When Jim heard their voices in the hospital hallway, he came awake.  They put on some Grateful Dead and danced while Jim woofed down his ice cream.  Late, they finally turned out the lights.
    
     Sometime in the early morning hours, Jim took off his oxygen mask, his lifeline.  Karen said they protested, but then she saw that the mask was not going back on.  A couple of hours later, he was gone.
    
     I have written that he was heroic in the way he lived.  Now I’m adding that he was just as heroic in the way he died.  He had lots of help and support for both, which is an important part of the story.  But I have been surprised to find that heroism has brought me to tears over and over.  Though it’s been a month since his death, I’m surprised to find that I’m still crying.
    
     The Quaker poet Ellen Sophia Bosanquet, wrote this beautiful poem about the work of grief: 

 “Since you have vanished from my eyes,

Since I have lost your blessed touch,
I own continual surprise
To find, in spite of loss, how much
Of all I cherished still remains:
Your thoughts that set my mind on fire,
And ever flowing in my veins
The urge to do what you require.          
Is it that death has more to give
Than love-companioned life can show?
And only as we learn to grieve we learn to know?”

     With 20/20 hindsight, what I’ve learned firsthand from Jim’s life, and now second-hand from the story of his death, is that he was a conscious channel of the Spirit.  He knew the Light within and made use of it.  What I’m learning from my grief, however, is that I want to grow in that direction.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives just one watershed west of Jim’s.  You can send her your channeling stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  The Bosanquet poem is quoted in Catherine Whitmire’s Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity, Sorin Books, 2001. Visit www.river-ridge.net to view their offerings and see a video of Patti Torrey singing “He Don’t Like Love Songs,” which she wrote for her husband Jared, another one of Jim’s closest friends.

Oh Captain, My Captain

To be published August 20, 2014 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     She came into the market Monday looking troubled.  A tough-looking woman whose appearance is meant to assure you she could kick your ass with one hand tied behind her back was on the verge of tears.  “Robin Williams died today around noon. Suicide.  He’d been depressed...” she said as she picked up her bag of groceries and wheeled to go through the door before she broke down.  


     “Not Robin Williams,” I heard myself say.  “My Robin Williams?”  Then a silent “Oh, no.”  Then my heart wailed “Couldn’t somebody have just held his hand or something until he got through it?” as my own tears began to build.


     As the facts trickled in over the next few days, and the commentators worked to define his life, explain his death, I worked to understand why this loss is so painful to me.  The heroism of his characters in three specific movies kept rising to the surface:  Good Morning Viet Nam, What Dreams May Come, and Dead Poets Society, the one I know best.  In each one, he’s in an impossible situation but throws himself into bringing light, joy, truth, beauty into some very dark spaces.  In each one he contributes these to the lives of his fellow human beings for awhile - and changes a few - before the darkness takes back its throne. But even as the light withdraws, we see the darkness for what it is.


     His loss is painful because he’s one of the humans I have identified with.  His characters have befriended me on my own journey.  I have quoted one segment of his lines in Dead Poets Society many times, not the “Carpe Diem” segment that took on a life of its own for years, but one just before or after that scene.  After noting that engineering, law, medicine are all very noble careers and worthy of investment, he says “But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.”  And I believe Robin Williams knew that in his core, not just his character.  I believe depression was robbing him of his access to those things.


     Depression can do that.  The Quaker writer Parker J. Palmer chronicled three major bouts of depression in his book Let Your Life Speak (2000).  One moment I remember best from his story was that a friend would come several times a week and wash his feet, not talking, simply caring.  He wrote that was the only time he could feel anything.


     I have thought for a long time that those who struggle with addiction are simply struggling to stay alive against the death of depression. That addictions strike artists in particularly high percentages isn’t really a surprise:  the job of keeping truth, beauty, romance and love alive in this world, despite and even because of the darkness, can seem so futile, so unrewarded.  So dangerous, even.  Robin Williams lost his job, after all,  for doing just that in both Good Morning and Dead Poets.  In What Dreams May Come, loving his clinically depressed wife almost takes him to hell.


     But then there’s the final scene in Dead Poets, which I’ve just remembered, which has just driven me to write this all down.  He’s in his classroom, gathering up his things to leave after the suicide of one of his students, for which he is silently being blamed.  And despite the overlord standing there, commandeering Robin Williams’ departure, the youngest, most timid student, the roommate of the boy who died - this beautiful young soul gets up and stands on his desk, quoting the opening line of a poem his teacher taught them.  “Oh, Captain, my Captain,” he says, the tears and snot running down his face.  And then the rest of the boys follow suit, despite the presence of darkness.


     Think of me as up there with them, saying good bye to a great fellow traveler.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on Robin Williams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Fire & Rain

Published Aug. 9, 2014 in my Fresno Bee column "Letters from Lewis Creek"

Mr. James Chlebda, Heaven

July 29, 2014

Dear Jim,

        There’s a pink tinge to this morning’s sunrise in the remnant of yesterday’s clouds hanging onto your mountains.  Maybe some of that’s smoke – I haven’t checked the news for fires, preoccupied with getting these things into words.

        It’s been a week since you took your last breath.  The news triggered James Taylor’s "Fire and Rain" in my head, that devastating first line “Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone.”  It was only hours in my case - your sister Karen texted Betty Blanks, who found the message on her phone during a break from court in Kings County.  She was crying when she called me.  I didn’t cry until we hung up.  Even though we knew it was coming, your death hit hard.  I’ll love her forever for getting up to Stanford to see you the weekend before.  Her reports from that trip have consoled me over and over.

        When I emailed John Dofflemyer, he wrote back and called you “a force in many people’s lives.”  That cowboy poet and fellow publisher who knows his ropes also said now you can operate with a freer hand.  I’ve been gratified to find that’s true.  I don’t know what you’ve been doing with the others, but your presence here with me has been a blessing.

        When I emailed Jeremy Hogan, he began sending YouTube clips of the Grateful Dead and Creedence, John Lennon’s "Mind Games."  I didn’t know 'til later that when he got my email, he left his office, went out to his car and cried for 45 minutes.  Then he began an outpouring of words about how you saved his life, how you were the pivot point between being lost and becoming a photojournalist.  I hope you’re enjoying the force of his flood of love and gratitude.

        Other people have said now you’re with Wilma.  I don’t know about that, but give her a hug for me if you see her.  I think you’re back at Back 40, communing with your brother floras and sister faunas, the granite and gneiss, unconstrained by property lines and deeds, not worried about the drought.  That’s where I feel your heart beating, anyway. 

        Sunday morning I found a crow’s feather on the ground on my way out to the car.  I stuck it in my hair and took you to church with me, where I read the Scriptures aloud, five parables from Matthew about the Kingdom of Heaven – what it is, what it’ll be like.  I still don’t know about all that, but I know better now than I’ve ever known before that when you walked this planet, the kingdom of heaven was near.  You brought it with you, sowed seeds of kindness and appreciation, love and respect everywhere you went.  Some of those seeds are on their way to being trees, nest sites for all those birds you love. The pearls of great price you found on every nature walk, in every poet’s corner, every encounter with the unconformed and wandering souls who became your friends – those pearls are shining now, right here on earth.

        It was hard, imagining what you were facing up there at Stanford: the antibiotics no longer keeping the pseudomonas at bay, the prospect of surgery to swap out those lungs you did your damndest to protect these past fifty-seven years, the need to take on a whole new and unknown medical regime to fool your body into keeping the replacement breathing apparatus someone else didn’t need anymore.  It was hard, but I imagined you daily.  When the Bee carried that great story about the young Clovis woman climbing Half Dome with her new lungs, we sent it right off, hoping the vision of being back in your mountains would help you cross that high desert of fear.  But that afternoon the doctors took you off the lung transplant list.

        I still don’t know all the reasons – do you?  Betty said… Kay said… Karen said… but I don’t know.  Last time we got to talk, you said “I guess now I have to go through this other window.”  I got to wail “We’re all grieving that you have to do that,” probably the most real thing I’ve said in a long time.  And you said, with your characteristic love, “And I’ve been grieving that I haven’t been able to talk with you when you’ve called, Trudy-bud.”  You took my breath away.  You get the last word on this.

        So, yes.  My heart’s still singing “Oh, I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen rain.  I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.  I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend.  But I always thought that I’d see you again.”  Despite my initial fear of that dead loss, that, in my life, you would go blank, here you are.  Thanks for sticking around all these years, and these last few days especially. Thanks for leading the way now.

Love,

Trudy

 

Editor’s Note:  Jim Chlebda was editor of Southland Magazine, then publisher when it became South Valley Arts serving Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern Counties between 1990 and 2000.  He published Valley poets with his Back 40 Publishing, most notably the Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel and Modesto poet Lillian Vallee (see www.back40publishing.com.)  He was a grateful recipient of excellent health care at Valley Children’s Hospital until he moved to Sonoma County and shifted medical service to Stanford.  He will be missed by many.

Big Jim

Published August 6, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     My friend Jim Chlebda took his last breath a couple of weeks ago.  Once he was taken off the list for a double lung transplant at Stanford, there was little time.  He got his papers in order, gathered up his family and friends for one last good day, and three days later he was gone.

     At least from this form of existence.  After  I heard the news of his passing, I was surprised how my days filled with the sight of him and the sound of his voice, how his normal way of saying goodbye – “hey, now,” became a greeting.  How his motivations and purposes suddenly seemed completely coherent, an integrity that was not only admirable but something to follow in my own life.  So I might say that Jim’s transformation from living to eternal is having a transformative effect in me.

     The Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, who Jim loved and supported with his publishing efforts as well as bringing bursts of new life into that old woman’s days, called him “Little Jim.”  He was no taller than I am and weighed significantly less, all muscle and bone with a beautiful skin covering topped by curly hair the ladies had trouble keeping their hands off of.  But there was nothing little about him.  It always rankled me that she could so casually mark him with what most men would receive as a slight.  I mean, even the Pygmy Bushmen of Africa greet each other with a sentence that goes something like “Hey, now, you’re so tall I saw you coming from a long way!”  But Jim just laughed it off.

     As he did most people’s foibles.  What was really big about him is that he did not let others’ faults impinge on his character.  He accepted people for who they were, but (for the most part) he did not let that subtract – or add – to who he was.  It has been easy for me to think that living his entire 57 years with a terminal disease – cystic fibrosis, which took his sister at 21 - was what shaped him into the purposeful, life-embracing, life-giving human I knew him to be.  But as his breathing days came to an end I saw there was more.

     Jim lived with the spirit of Christ, the heart of God, in him.  He wore no external sign of that affiliation, spoke few words of devotion out loud (at least with me).  His ceremonies celebrated the beauty and wonder of the world, particularly the natural world; his publishing efforts supported artists of all kinds.  The gifts he shared were natural shards from the land, like hawk feathers and sprigs of native plants, his photographs of those wonders, or music and books, the works of artists.  His publications were art, from the covers and insides of Southland Magazine and South Valley Arts, to the chapbooks of poets up and down the valley.  On one of Wilma’s little books of prose, Cooking with Eli, he even used spiral binding, like a church cookbook of recipes.  You know, you might want to lay it flat to read while whipping up a batch of pancakes.

     John Dofflemyer, the cowboy poet and fellow publisher who lives along Dry Creek, wrote that Jim was “a force in many people’s lives.”  He was, but not forcibly: it was the force of love.  John also added that “now he can operate with a freer hand.”  I loved that recognition of another realm from this other man of the land, this rancher who copes with the mysteries of life and death on a daily basis.

     But what I finally saw about Jim’s life after his death was that he walked softly and carried no stick at all.  To me, that’s an enormous life accomplishment.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in the Lewis Creek watershed, just west of Jim’s beloved home Back 40 in North Fork Tule River country.  Visit www.back40publishing.com to view Jim’s publishing accomplishments; visit www.drycrikjournal.com to see John & Robbin Dofflemyers'.

 

Goodbye, Stranger

Published May 7, 2014 in slightly edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     "Hello, Stranger," he'd say to me as he wheeled his cart through the market door, coming for groceries.  But I didn't know how much that meant until Sunday when I heard the news that Henry Servin left us early that morning.  Whether he went voluntarily (and by that I mean that he was in some way ready,) or the Lord just came and took him, I don't know.  All I know is that his beaming spirit will be missed among those of us he befriended regularly, constantly.


     "He was my only hope," one checker commented as we closed that night.  When I asked what she meant, she said something about decent customers.  We have many decent customers, so I contemplated what he brought that was so special, and it was that he reached out to each of us as unique, equal individuals.


     He had different names for each of us.  I thought he called everyone "Stranger," but discovered that may have been saved for me.  One of the newer checkers he simply called "Mija," while he used the real names of those who'd worked there longer. I may have been the lone Stranger.  I felt somehow properly identified.


     Elise Boulding, one of the great Quaker peace activists from the last century, wrote a beautiful passage about the word.  "I would like to suggest a new word to replace enemy.  It is "stranger."  It's a very old word, and a good one.  We have no more enemies, but we have strangers.  Sometimes we are estranged from ourselves and God.  When we meet a person we call a stranger, that person has to be listened to... There is no tribal group to my knowledge that does not have a tradition for dealing with the stranger."


     And maybe that was Henry's gift:  listening.  He was always full of words, and they came out fast, like a man on a mission.  But when he asked how we were, he was looking us in the eyes and really wondering.  He noticed.  And he brought life into the store every time he came.


     I was missing in action the night before he died, at least from the market.  We held our concert celebrating Lindsay's recovery community at the Methodist Church, and I took the night off from work in order to hand out programs, emcee, sing a couple of songs and clean up.  It was a glorious night.  Spirit Driven, the band that performed, knocked the socks off of everyone who came to sit in the pews.  The people who run the two 12-Step programs that meet in the church were there to speak of their hopes for the community.  One longstanding participant in 12-Step programs bore witness to the spiritual training inherent in those Steps.  Most important, we built a sense of community: that those who suffer from addiction and those who help them are not alone.  Anonymous, yes.  Alone, no.


     The truth is we are members of each other, to borrow from Wendell Berry's Wild Birds:  "All of us.  Everything. The difference ain't in who's a member and who's not, but in who knows it and who don't."  Henry knew himself to be a member of this community and recognized the rest of us as members also.  As we feel his loss, may we keep that spirit alive.


     Goodbye, Stranger.  See you later.
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Trudy Wischemann is a cashier at RN Market who writes.  You can send your stories of Henry and other strangers to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Passages

Published April 16, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Things change fast in Spring.  Last Wednesday, here in Lindsay, Orange Blossom Festival was in full swing. By the time you read this, it will be gone and we will be making that arduous passage between Palm Sunday and the Cross, the empty tomb.  Truth is, things change continuously, but in Spring they seem to whiz.


     I spent last week mourning the unexpected deaths of three men I barely knew.  The news of Bill Bream's passing arrived first.  As stories quietly unfolded about the lives he had touched, the relationships he tended, his deep, reliable integrity, it was clear he was one of Lindsay's unsung heroes.  I wished I'd known him.


     Then came news of Pat Maloy's death, followed one day later by his brother Jim.  Pat was the chemist for Pent-A-Vate, the soil amendment business owned and run by Bill and Treva Leigh on Palm.  Pat once interviewed me for a job there I should have taken, and chided me years afterward for not coming to work for him.  But more importantly, he was the best friend of one of my best friends, Robert Bastady.  They were friends all through school and roommates at Fresno State 40+ years ago.  They still watched sports together many Sunday afternoons, "yelling at the TV."  Robert said quietly "I'd have gone to see him Sunday if I hadn't been at Fiddler on the Roof," knowing by then he was already gone.


     I really knew Pat through Robert's stories.  After a stroke forced him to retire from Pent-A-Vate in his early fifties, Pat's love of gardening and food preservation turned him into a sustainable homesteader and connoisseur.  He sowed and reaped, cleaned and shucked, hulled and canned as if he'd been raised self-sufficient.  He mended and repaired, kept his place in order despite his handicaps, accidentally shaming us in our lethargy.  The last time I saw him he was repairing a sprinkler head at his folks' place just up the street from mine, while his sister Louise mowed the lawn.  For a moment I saw their parents in each of them, Bob and Marion making a brief return visit to Homassel, and remembered this is why I moved to a small town:  to know people well enough to be bereaved when they pass.


     Then I heard from my friend Bob Puls that one of his best friends, Tom Daly, had passed away suddenly while working calves for a friend.  Tom was from a family of Yokohl Valley pioneers who still ranch there.  I think I only laid eyes on him once, the afternoon he stopped by to check on Bob at the end of pushing his mother's grove, a long passage Bob had to take after Iris's death.  I was photographing the bulldozer's final passes and watched from a distance as the two men shared that moment of loss, then moving on the way men do.


     But like Pat, I knew Tom through Bob's stories.  Working cows on horseback, living in those hills, was his lifeblood, but he was also a huge part of the county Cattlemen's Association, our Resource Conservation District and getting the county's Fire Safe Council started.  He was adamantly against Yokohl Ranch.  Tom's passing leaves an enormous hole in the lives of those who are trying to hold on to the rural quality of Tulare County.


     Many of us who knew these men will not have the opportunity to join with others in their memorial services.  But I hope that as we privately remember and honor their passages here on earth, we'll also honor their concerns while here.  Perhaps some of us will even take up their batons.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who has "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" going through her head.  You can send her your memories of these men and others c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.