Stand Still

Published Oct. 15 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Friday night, in Porterville, I had one of those moments of a lifetime, the kind where you know you’re home no matter where you are.  Writing about it now, I also know I’m home.
    
     I was singing with the Standlees, Tommy and Diane, with my regular singing partner, Jesse McCuin, playing standup bass fiddle.  We were singing “Stand Still,” a song recorded by The Isaacs in 2001.  Diane, with her beautifully clear, strong voice, was on lead; Tommy was playing his wonderful guitar and carrying the first harmony part on the choruses.  My job was to find the middle harmony note, to fill in the triad of the chords on the chorus, and then accompany Diane on the second verse with a kind of ooo-ing descant.
    
      As I moved to the microphone to join in on the first chorus, all I could do was pray the right note would come out of my mouth.  When it did, there was a release of energy I can still feel these three days later.  It was like finding the right word in a sentence, the word that makes the sentence sing instead of puzzle or conflict with the meaning lodged in your heart trying to get out onto the page.
    
     But it wasn’t finding the right note that gave me the thrill.  It was getting to be part of the music, part of the medium carrying the message.  I’d never heard the song before Tommy and Diane asked us to join them for the gig they’d gotten at Porterville’s Main Street Friday night “Concerts in the Park.”  I’d never even heard them sing before, much less the music they perform, which could be called an eclectic mix of old and new Southern Country Gospel.  It’s wonderful music, and they bring it to our ears simply and beautifully with trueness of heart that just shines.
    
     But “Stand Still” hit me right where I’m living, and opened a large window I’d had covered with curtains.  “Stand still - and let God move,” the chorus opens.  I have had so many instances recently when I felt completely confused about what to do, and felt conflicted about my confusion, only to be relieved of both conflict and confusion by going still and waiting until I felt the nudge.  The song reminded me that when I do that, I’m being led.
    
     Quakers have a saying:  “Proceed as Way opens,” and sometimes that happens by doors being shut.  But other times it’s as if someone turned on a light in a hallway you didn’t see before.  That’s what singing with the Standlees was like.
    
     Like so many artists in rural regions, we all make our livings doing something else.  Tommy works for Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District; Diane has her own dog grooming shop on Valencia; Jesse manages the mini-storage here in town, and I scan groceries.  But we sing to have a life, and we make music to help others enjoy or appreciate or understand their own.  So if you see Tommy or Diane or Jesse around, let them know you’ve heard they’ve got music in them.  And if you can think of a place where that music would do some good, let one of us know.
    
     But most of all, if you’ve got confusion and confliction, don’t know where to turn, where to go, or what to do, here’s my suggestion:  stand still.  Let yourself utter the two-word “Oh, help” prayer, and then just let God move.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a flute-playing low alto who writes.  You can send her your favorite lyrics c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

A Little Drought Music

Published in edited form October 1, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.
    
     Sunday morning, when I woke to a sunrise dampened by orange-edged clouds and robins singing for rain, I felt blessed to have such beauty in my life.  Then the first drops sounded on the patio roof, and I ran outside to the clothesline where I’d hung my cotton quilt to dry the night before.  In my bedroom I unfolded the heavy wooden clothes rack my aunt had used many winters in Washington and spread the quilt on it to continue drying, proud that I’d tricked Coyote into releasing some moisture from those clouds.  I was making a pot of tea when the drops increased to a shower, and went back outside to drag a few more things under cover.  Then I poured a steaming cup and sat inside reveling in this music so familiar to my Pacific Northwestern ears.
    
     Saturday I’d spent time working on an answer to Mas Masumoto’s call for some “art of the drought” in last Sunday’s Fresno Bee (9/22/14.)  He used the example of Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” and its impact on public opinion during the Okie/Arkie migration from the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.  I know the photo well, and many of her others:  I worked with the photographer’s husband, Paul Taylor, near the end of his life during my early days at Berkeley.  He knew the power of her art, and when they combined it with his facts and knowledge, they created a document of that drought’s causes and effects - An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion - that was never surpassed. 
    
     This drought is different, at least the one here in California that politicians are trying to fix with legislation and taxpayer monies.  There were no irrigation projects then in the midwestern half of the country when farmers (mostly small independent, tenant and sharecrop families) were dried up and blown off the land.  After awhile, politicians tried to fix things with legislation and taxpayer monies, but ended up benefiting mostly the larger farmers who turned their tenants and sharecroppers out, replacing them with tractors purchased with the government funds.  This, in turn, enabled them to buy out (for pennies on the dollar) their drought-stricken small-farm neighbors still plowing with mules.
    
     About two-thirds down in Mas’s column there’s an uncharacteristically political suggestion that voters should approve the water bond in the upcoming November election.  The point of the piece is that artists should find ways to the voters hearts to help make that happen, although he never comes right out and says so, or explains why they should.  That would be fine with me if I were sure the bond would be used to provide more water where it’s needed, which I think is on the smaller, independently owned farms the irrigation projects were built to support in the first place, but I’d have to be brain dead to be convinced of that.  In California water always flows uphill to the pinnacles of power, and we’re hardly even embarrassed anymore to admit that yes, the big boys and girls will get their share first, and we get to share what’s left.  I think the hope is simply that if there’s more supply, the shortage will have more acre-feet in it and go around a little further.  Maybe this drought’s not so different after all.
    
     Knowing Mas’s good heart, however, I think what he was really calling for was art that would call on us as a people to share the shortage, bond together and lean into the wind, to work on fixing the problems together that this drought has revealed.  Like “Come on, people now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try and love one another right now,”  that line from the Youngbloods’ song from our era, Mas’s and mine, our beautifully idealistic generation so crassly labeled “Boomers.”  To put our money, our water, our efforts and our faith where our mouths are.  That, of course, would require us to rise up united and take the power back from those who are using the drought to advance their family fortunes, like the Resnick’s and the Westlands’ Fortune 600’s.  Like John Vidovich’s Sandridge Partners, who Judge Harry N. Papadakis “just said no” to a couple of months back.  It would require us - even the educated “us” - to get educated about water in California, and from some entity other than the California Water Foundation, which serves as a mouthpiece for the big boys, teaching us the proper propaganda to make us good citizens of their empires.
    
     After Sunday morning’s blessed rainfall, when God let those raindrops blow where and when He willed, I have a song to suggest we learn to sing in these days of anxious anticipation of the coming water year.  It’s a song by John Pitney, that dairy kid turned Methodist minister from Oregon, titled “I Will Sing,” pure Judeo-Christian tradition straight out of the Book of Habakkuk.  It’s about being thankful for what we have and trusting God will provide, even in times of drought or other hardship.  Here’s the first verse:


When the fig tree’s barren in the field,
I will sing, I will sing.
And the produce of the olive fails,
I will sing, I will sing.
When the fields are yielding up no food,
And the flock be cut off from the fold,
And there be no cattle in the stalls,
I will sing, I will sing.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a Pitney disciple who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your drought music ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

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.

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

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.

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.

largo

Published June 25, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


largo adj., adv. Music: a slow and stately tempo; a direction to the performer.  Also a movement or passage at that tempo.

     When I was a young woman studying the flute, I relished the largo movements in the baroque concertos I learned.  Composers like to use flutes for the bright, happy, skipping, flighty, racy sounds in orchestral music, but speedy technique was never my forte.  What I love about my instrument is its breathiness, its sound, that it comes from my core going through its core.  Even in grade school while I was first learning to play, what people admired was my tone.

     Largo movements allow a performer to focus on tone, but the tempo is human in another way:  at 45-50 beats per minute, they move at the pace of a heartbeat at rest.  They’re reflective, thoughtful, peaceful movements, but deliberate.  They’re going somewhere the way a meditation is going somewhere even though the meditator may be sitting in place.  They arrive at the end without strenuous activity; they arrive at the end regardless.  Like we all do. 
     I was pleased to find harmonious definitions in my Spanish dictionary.  “Largo,” the masculine form, means long, free, or liberal;  “a lo largo de” means alongside of, or along.  “!Largo de aqui!” means Get out! (presumably “of here.”)  “Larga,” the feminine form, is used as a noun to refer to the longest billiard cue, but as an adjective or adverb, it means the same as the masculine form:  long, free, liberal.  “A la larga” means “in the long run.”
     It was from a gut-level understanding of the underlying meanings of the musical term largo that I chose it as the acronym for Lindsay Advocates for Responsive Government Organization (or if you prefer, larga, Lindsay Advocates for Responsive Government Association.)  Through the lawsuit we brought against the Dollar General II proposal, LARG(o) represented all those people who stood to be damaged by the City’s unwillingness to consider anyone but the developer’s and the landowners’ interests. 
     In attempting to focus on the process by which such decisions are made, LARG(o)’s lawsuit pinpointed areas where the City’s lack of responsiveness made them vulnerable to legal action.  It was a turning point, even if only a pinpoint, against the widely held sentiment that “It’s always been this way - you’re not going to change anything.”   Meaning, they’ll do what they want, regardless.
     Heads up:  things here in Lindsay are changing, even if at glacial speed.  With the help of more involvement from people in the community, those changes will better reflect the needs and wants of the people who live here.  This is a largo movement, slow and stately, steady, unstopping, moving at the pace of a heartbeat at rest.  In the long run, responsive government is what we will have.  You can bet your sweet, sonorous quarter notes on that.

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

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

 

If I Had A Hammer

Published in edited form May 14, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette 

If I had a hammer

I'd hammer in the morning

I'd hammer in the evening

All over this land

I'd hammer out danger

I'd hammer out a warning

I'd hammer out love between

My brothers and my sisters

All over this land. 

            When I told my mother I was going to write a piece under this title, I heard her suck in her breath over the phone.  Pausing, she said cautiously “They might think...” 

            Both of my parents were raised in small towns and vowed after they left they’d never go back.  Born in different towns on different sides of the tracks, they both were still massively concerned with what people might think.  To find freedom from that, they made our homes in unincorporated settlements, rural fringes, and subdivisions of larger towns.  But they never got free of their fears about the opinions of other people.  Early childhood learning, I think. 

            I actually do have a hammer, in fact, three claw hammers (tack, medium and large) and a woman-sized sledge, if I knew where it was.  I know how to use them for hanging pictures and outside Christmas lights, re-nailing a board coming loose or pounding a stake into the ground.  With my brother’s fiberglass-handled carpenter’s hammer, I can pry nails out of boards, straighten them on a rock, and nail things back together with the best of them.  My father’s a carpenter: more early childhood learning, learning by doing. 

            His father was a blacksmith, and he hammered metal into beautiful wrought iron fences and gates; he also repaired plowshares and other farm equipment.  Both men saw their hammers as extensions of their creative, productive, useful selves.  However, both men were quick to pound their opinions down the throats of other people, so I know the hammer as both useful and dangerous.  Dad stopped throwing his hammer after it went through a stack of windows he’d saved and he had to eat a piece of humble pie.  He's only recently stopped hurling his words. 

            This beautiful song from the early folk movement started pounding through my head when I read the letter to the editor authored by Councilmembers Pam Kimball and Danny Salinas several weeks ago.  It wasn’t what the letter said about me that was so disturbing: it was their attack on the truth.  They’re not only in denial about the possibility of wrongdoing in the Lindsay PD's arrest of Councilman Mecum, but in denial about their own wrongdoing in making Rich Wilkinson joint City Manager and Director of Public Safety under a contract irresponsibly difficult and expensive to break.  They’re in denial about the staff’s role in generating the lawsuit we filed and their own role in running up their attorney's fees defending against it.  They’re in denial about their role in excluding the public from real participation in city council meetings, the detrimental CalTrans re-realignment of Highway 65, the non-promotion of voluntary water conservation measures in this city, and other leadership challenges too numerous to mention. 

          The song, written by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, has been recorded by hundreds of people and sung at thousands of gatherings over the last 60 years.  I hear Peter Paul & Mary’s version in my head now as I type; according to Wikipedia, singing the Spanish version may have gotten Chilean activist Victor Lara assassinated after the military coup of Salvador Allende in 1973.  It's a song for The Struggle, no matter what country or miniscule jurisdiction you find yourself called to enter it.  Sing the last verse with me in your head. 

Well I’ve got a hammer and I’ve got a bell;

I’ve got a song to sing all over this land.

It’s the hammer of justice, it’s the bell of freedom

It’s the song about the love between my brothers and my sisters

All over this land. 

          Gather up your hammers, bells and songs, friends - we have work to do.

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

Trudy Wischemann is an old folky who writes.  You can send your songs of love and freedom (not to mention justice) c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

           

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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

The Driving Spirit

Published as "In Recovery" in significantly different form Wed. April 30 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     On Saturday, May 3rd, the Lindsay United Methodist Church will be hosting a concert to "Celebrate Lindsay's Recovery Community."  The concert will feature Spirit Driven Band, a duo of Jesse McCuin of Lindsay and Dennis Harrison of Tulare.  The concert will run from 7:00-8:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.


     To some, the idea of a "recovery community" will seem odd; to others, improbable that one exists in Lindsay.  But from the moment I arrived here two decades ago, I encountered people who were or had been in recovery.  Many told me how Lindsay's AA meeting, which has been located in the Methodist Church for more than 40 years, had helped restore them and/or their family members to life.  Some became life-long participants, helping others.


     What struck me in these people was their quiet honesty about themselves and their commitment to life.  And they were people from every level of society.  One town leader who often grieved me had earned their respect for the way he cared for his addicted brother.  One of my favorite mechanics had reclaimed his life through another AA meeting.  What struck me about all of them, however, was they seemed to have real spiritual depth and they actively, purposefully cared for others, including me.


     The benefits of recovery programs have been felt throughout the community, most often invisibly:  families and friends, employers and organizations, schools and churches all have been helped by those who have participated in recovery programs, even people who've never been afflicted by addictions themselves.  The driving spirit in most recovery programs, particularly AA, is the critical need to re-size one's self to our real place in the universe, to re-place one's body and mind run amok under the guidance of heart and soul, reconnecting with whatever "higher power" a person has experienced.


     Saturday night's concert will be specifically Christian, however.  Most of the songs are rock songs spanning the decades from the 1960's to the mid-1990's, with creatively re-written lyrics.  The music of Spirit Driven is Christ's message of redemption to people who suffer from various addictions, and they take this message to Teen Challenges, rescue missions and prisons across the state.


     The program for Saturday night includes music from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge" and Green Day's "When I Come Around."  It also includes a few original songs written by the pair, and will open with Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Comin' Down."


     So that's what we'll be celebrating Saturday night, May 3rd.  If you've ever been able to thank God for the restoration of a friend or relative - or yourself - we hope you'll join us in this joyous event.  The Methodist Church is located on the corner of Honolulu and Gale Hill, due east of City Hall.  To find out more about AA meetings, call the Tulare Co. Central office at 592-6999 or visit www.aa-tulareco.org.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a writer who loves music.  You can send her your recovery stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.