A Foreign Language

At the end of this summer, as an antidote to the books I read on children and war, I read Living in a Foreign Language:  A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy (2007).  It was written by Michael Tucker, an actor who starred on “LA Law” with his wife Jill Eikenberry, who together bought a small, rustic villa in the mountains of Italy. Their love for the place grew as they became intimate with the local food and the people who make it.  Finally deciding to become fully resident, they began to learn the language and speak it with their neighbors.
It’s a wonderful story about finding and making Home by two people who know real love.  “To have the partner of a lifetime - for a lifetime - is rare stuff....What extraordinary freedom it is not to care about up or down, rich or poor, East Coast, West Coast, as long as we’re in the taxi together,” Tucker concludes at his happy ending.
But a sentence in his story about attending Italian Language School found its mark in me.  “I must admit our language skills improved remarkably - even though my head felt like the inside of a golf ball, with all those tight little rubber bands wound around each other under four thousand pounds of pressure,” he noted humorously.  Unfortunately, that is often what my head feels like working at RN Market.
You might think “Yes, being immersed in all that Spanish,” but what you might not notice on your brief shopping trips there is that a great deal of Chinese is also spoken, with just as much enthusiasm but even less vowel and consonant recognizability.
I am happy for both language groups that they have a place to speak and hear their native tongues, but the inside of a golf ball is what my head often feels like. I had thought that re-opening my slim bag of Spanish words and phrases would help, and generally it has.  Unfortunately, it has also raised the expectations of Spanish speakers that I comprehend what they say in response, and those are the moments when I feel like an airborne golf ball on its way to the first hole.  Also unfortunately, when I find myself needing to communicate with some Asian speaker, sometimes Spanish comes out of my mouth, confounding us both.
Sometimes I look at these non-English-speakers and wonder what the insides of their heads feel like.  What it feels like to be standing there handing over hundred dollar bills they’ve earned picking grapes and olives for food they used to grow and harvest or butcher themselves.  What it feels like to have their little ones learn the word “quarter” before they learn sentences, wanting coins for the vending machines by the door.  To have their teenagers blindly texting, oblivious to the packages that need carrying to the car.
Many of us English speakers feel like we’re living involuntarily in a foreign language, and resent the people who’ve brought it here.  But it seems to me that we are all surrounded by foreign tongues and foreign ways.  This land will feel like a foreign country until we get inside each others’ heads and start to unwind those little rubber bands.
- Trudy Wischemann is an English-speaking writer who never learned her grandmothers’ mother tongues. Write to her - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.

On Warfare

“Lindsay will probably be very quiet tonight,” the mother said to her son Friday afternoon as they stood at my checkstand.  I’d heard scraps of their muted conversation as I scanned their groceries, catching few words between the register’s beeps and clanging carts.  But I’d heard enough to ask why.
 “They killed a young boy today, over on Sycamore,” she said, starting to tell the facts she’d just heard from her son.  At that moment, the facts were still being gathered by the police; the “breaking news” was hours away.  But from her story it sounded like gang warfare.
This summer I spent some time reading about warfare, particularly the effects on children.  I wanted to see if there was a difference between fighting and war, where (and why) things escalate from one to the other.  Friday’s news sent me back to Roger Rosenblatt’s Children of War (1983) in which he explored children’s lives in the war zones of Belfast, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, Cambodia and Viet Nam.
In general, he found the younger children loving and gentle, many waiting for peace and hoping to work for it when they grew up.  But as they got older, especially in places like Palestine where some became teenage soldiers, they’d become politicized, fighting for “the cause.”  The causes were (and still are) large and real: who has a right to live where. To call some place home. To eat. To exist.
When I found this paragraph, however, I saw shades of the reasons given for teens joining gangs.  Rosenblatt writes:  “I noticed in myself a general tendency to treat these children (soldiers) with respect....because I saw they had committed themselves to the most dangerous game in the world and were visibly dignified by that commitment.
“So is it valuable, then,” he asks, “this heightening, ennobling tradition that teaches the children of Rashidieh to leap over bonfires with guns in their arms, makes them more alert to each other’s welfare, gives them pride and a sense of importance?”
 “No,” he answers.  “For one thing, a state of war takes away the freedom of thought and opinion.  It provides an ideology, all right, but only one, and individual disagreement is called treason or sedition.” He adds thoughts about moral complexity and shades of gray, then concludes “War may be hell, but intellectually and spiritually war is also easy.  That may be why it is resorted to so readily, why in fact children can do it so well.
 “(T)he overriding reason that war can never be deemed useful, whatever benefits are evident or concocted, is that...the context of war is death.  For all its elaborate emphases on order and discipline, the final purpose of war is to create chaos and ruin.”
I don’t know who the Grand Marshals of our children’s armies are or what they hope to win from this violence.  But I  do know that almost all of us need to learn the harder way to live together.  Maybe we should start.
-Trudy Wischemann is a sometimes scrappy, sometimes remorseful writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your peace stories - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.

The Art of Irrigating

For the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of moving water for a small farmer who was called away to a fire.  He balances his good and bad years in farming with the income he makes from CDF fighting range and forest fires, and so far that strategy has worked.  I balance my low income from part-time work in the food retail business with what he shares with me from the fires, as well as my other sources of self-employment.  So far I’m still here, too.ss
But mostly I do it for the joy.  For those of you who don’t farm, “moving water” is simply turning valves on and off  so that one batch of trees (called “blocks”) is irrigated every day, followed by the next batch.  After the water is running on the new blocks, I check the sprinklers to make sure they’re all working and no geysers have developed in the lines, then go home and take off my muddy boots.  Sounds simple, possibly even boring.
The joy is in the details.  Part of the joy is physical:  sun and wind on body, feet moving surely through the rows, hands employed.  Part of it is aesthetic: the sounds of water running, crows calling, doves suddenly fleeing in a whirr; the sights of cloud shadows moving over the landscape, the smell of wet earth.
Part of it is intellectual.  Irrigating puts me right into the heart of growing food and what it means to be someone who does it for a living.  Every micro-decision - whether to replace that old sprinkler head (“fan jet” in this case) with a new one or let it limp along, to patch or splice the hose or let it leak - enters me in the contest between man and land, the challenge of getting land to produce something for the market in such a way that it will keep producing in the future.  Our great society is dependent on winning that contest, though few seem to realize it.
For some, irrigating is a science.  Calculations of how much water a tree needs and how to deliver that water more economically given evapotranspiration rates and climatic conditions, soil qualities and slope, water pH, etc., are studied and discussed not only in the ag departments and journals of our universities, but also in the coffee shops and irrigation parts stores.  Fan jets come with different sized orifices that emit different amounts of water; farmers chose what size based on calculations of water pressure, age of trees, amounts of shade (dependent on their pruning and weed control strategies,) and other factors too numerous to mention.  That choice is a small part of developing an irrigation strategy that will work on their land with their crops.
Not involved in those choices, I simply practice irrigating as an art.  Part dance, part song, I move through the trees quietly so as not to disturb the wildlife any more than necessary.  I make sure each tree is getting a drink while observing the weeds’ growth patterns and examining what comes out of the plugged-up fan jets when I insert my trusty safety pin through the hole.  I marvel at the diversity of plant and animal life in each block of orange trees, what certainly would be considered monoculture.  And when I’m finished, I hear the trees quietly clapping for my performance, breathing sighs of appreciation as they move into theirs:  uptake H2O; transpire, converting CO2 to O2, turning carbon into oranges swelling with each irrigation.
Part song, part dance, the earth’s role far overshadows ours.  My biggest reward is remembering that and sensing myself as its tiny handmaiden.
-Trudy Wischemann is a writer with dirt under her fingernails.  You can share your irrigating stories with her - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.

Jesse James....

 “We will burn your train to cinders,” is running through my head this morning, a line from the chorus of “A Train Robbery,” a song written by Paul Kemmerly about Jesse James’ life.  

My singing partner Jesse McCuin and I just performed that song and six others from Kemmerly’s  album Jesse James, where the characters in the story were sung by Levon Helm, Johnny Cash, Emmy Lou Harris and other fine country singers.  The album is unique, wonderful, and available through the San Joaquin Valley Library System.

Hearing “A Train Robbery” on Levon Helm’s album Dirt Farmer (also available through the SJVLS) started us down this path.  It wasn’t my favorite, but Jesse was captivated and that led us to Kemmerly’s album and several books written about the famous bank/train robber’s life.  As a Northerner, my only image of Jesse James and his gang was a bunch of bandits on horseback.  Jesse McCuin, with roots in Oklahoma and Arkansas, had been raised with a more favorable image:  a rebel hero.  But until we started reading, neither of us realized how the other Jesse’s story was rooted in the Civil War and the fight over slavery. 

And that fight, we discovered, was actually about the way land would be farmed in America.  In essence, slavery was an industrial form of agricultural production that pre-dated mechanization.  It was an economic answer to the industrialization of cloth manufacturing in the urban centers of the U.S. and England with huge human consequences for both people of color and small farmers.  Jesse James was born in a place and time where those consequences were being battered out between the people on the next-lowest rungs of the agricultural ladder:  small farmers caught up in the interstate war between Missouri and Kansas during the 1850’s, before the Civil War began.

Politicians set the stage through a series of compacts and agreements about where slavery could and couldn’t be used to raise crops.  Kansas was “free,” but Missouri was allowed to decide for itself.  As a result, it was mixed, and farms ranged in size from small, family operated units to 2- to 3,000 acres, operated with hundreds of slaves.  The people of Kansas, seeing the competitive disadvantage slavery created for them as producers, began an out-and-out attack on small slave owners in neighboring Missouri, including the James family.  

The James family fought back, first Frank, then Jesse.  Cole Younger and his brothers, who eventually joined gangs with the James brothers, were from a larger Missouri farm family with many slaves.
The violence in the story astounded me, and at first put me off.  But it shouldn’t have:  any time we’re fighting over land - who will control it, use it, make a living on (or a killing off) it - there’s likely to be violence.  Witness South Africa, and what it took to break apartheid and make it possible for the natives of that land to be allowed to live freely on it.

As a Northerner and a small farm advocate, I’m glad Jesse’s side lost.  I regret to say, however, that we have not stemmed the industrialization of our farming system and our food supply.  What it will take for that next, needed revolution - to get people back on our lands growing our food - will be more than violence.  It will take a whole lot of love.

Born A Girl...

“She can’t do it, 
she can’t change it -
It’s been going on for 
ten thousand years....”
-- adapted from 
“The Great Mandala” 
by Peter Yarrow 

She was born a girl. At 3, she couldn’t have had many other faults than that. But that’s what got Exeter’s little Sophia Acosta killed, a fact that’s churned through my mind since reading the fine article in this paper two weeks ago on the legal proceedings against her accused murderer.

Did you read the article?” I asked several friends.  “No,” was the most common, embarrassed reply. I didn’t want to either, for fear of nightmares.  But when I saw both Reggie’s and Mo’s names in the byline, I was moved to read what they wrote. By reporting the Exeter PD’s officers’ testimonies, they unpacked a very human story of the discovery of a monstrous event, a meltdown of human values so clear even a dog would recognize it. “I’ve gained a lot of respect for the officers,” Mo told me later.  “for what they have to face.”

Mo was born a girl. When I complimented her on the article, she said quietly “I was there the whole day.  I heard all the testimonies, saw all the photos.  He (meaning the accused) was sitting right there in the courtroom.” I offered my sympathy. “I had to tell myself  ‘Just breathe. This is my job.  Write it down.’”
Reggie is the father of two small children, one a little girl.  It couldn’t have been easy for him either.  But this is a community’s story, not just a family’s. In publishing the story’s elements as they unfurl, they offer us a chance to see where we may have failed this child, which may instruct us how to help the next.

Sophia’s great-grandmother was also born a girl. One morning this May she unfurled her story of trying to get CPS and other agencies to intervene, knowing something was horribly wrong. She also bemoaned CPS’s decision to give custody of the remaining daughter to her blood father, who never wanted her in the first place. That fact gave me, also born a girl, cold chills.

A simple majority of the world’s population is born girls. I don’t know whether that makes us more expendable or more valuable, but I do know that few of us become women without experiencing some kind of male tyranny.  Unfortunately, we are not alone: male tyranny is also exerted against males, with just as devastating consequences.  And I’ve witnessed enough female tyranny to know it isn’t carried on the Y chromosome alone.

What are we to feel, much less do, about this young man who tortured a 3-year-old with his manhood? “Sometimes you gotta thin the herd,” a friend replied to my question, a soft way of saying what I was feeling. My own tyranny was in full bloom: off with his head. Then I remembered I’m a Quaker. Quakers have been against capital punishment for centuries.  Then there’s “due process.”

I think the important thing is that we embrace this story, not run from it. The Bible, which many of us use to guide ourselves on a moral path, contains stories of just such horrors as well as proscriptions against them. It’s in our genes to treat others as worthless; we can’t keep it from cropping up. But maybe we can learn to protect or comfort each other better when it does.

A New Leaf....

“He can’t do it, 
he can’t change it -It’s been going on for ten thousand years....”-- from “The Great Mandala” by Peter Yarrow 

“How’s the campaign going?” a friend asked this weekend.  “Which campaign?” I asked back, wondering why he’d think I’d know.  Earlier I’d confessed to thinking like a political animal - he must have thought I’d become one.

Actually, I’m still celebrating the fact that we’re going to have an election.  This is the first year in almost a decade that city council seats will be on the ballot, thanks to the fact that we actually have candidates running against the incumbents. Que milagro!

My friend, who’s participated in many campaigns over the years, had several ideas about how to get new faces on Lindsay’s city council, hospital and school districts.  They all sounded foreign to me, being politically reclusive myself regarding elections.  But it raised a very important question:  what’s the right way to campaign in a town like Lindsay?
Bumper stickers and yard signs?  “Walking,” as the politicos call it, going door to door? Canvassing the big flea markets, having a booth at events? Holding a forum for candidates, a night out on the town where we can hear what they think? Space in this newspaper, interviews on KTIP Radio?

I sense that many people in this community are a little more like me than I’d like:  private, want to keep their political choices close to their chests, not demonstrate what “side” they’re on, just mark their ballots and wait for the results. This town’s reputation as “friendly” and “nice” was built by Lindsay Ripe’s sales pitch (“A nice town, a great olive”) and I think the urge to live up to that reputation is still with us even though Lindsay Ripe is not. Elections so seldom are nice that I think we shy away from participating even when our interests really are at stake.

Another reason we tend to keep to ourselves is that we have become demoralized about our ability to participate in the ordinary details of this city’s life. I’d blame it on the former city manager, who took demoralization to new heights, but it continues under the current administration with the full blessing of the council.  And then there’s the dirty little fact that no one can remember when it was different. “It’s always been like this - you can’t change it” is something I’ve heard since I moved here 19 years ago.

That demoralization is the most important thing at stake in this election, more important than getting the streets paved and the budget balanced. I don’t believe it’s always been this way, and I don’t believe it can’t be changed. It’s going to take some people willing to be candidates (THANK YOU, ALL!) and then to campaign and work for change if they’re elected. That’s going to require that we, the electorate, move out of our protective “nice” shells and start  participating in the process.

So, fellow Lindsayites, let’s turn over a new leaf and welcome this election, with all its potential for saving our American souls as well as our city.

Nine Seats....

“Take your place on the great Mandala

as it moves through your brief moment of time...”

                                                            Noel Paul Stookey

There are nine seats open for election in Lindsay’s city government, and only three require that you live within the city limits.  Six require that you live within the boundaries of the Lindsay Local Hospital District or Lindsay Unified School District, which broadens considerably the range of people who can participate in this community’s future.

Before I began trying to understand what was going on in our town, before the big splash Scot Townsend made with his exit, I didn’t understand how intertwined this city’s government had become with the community’s hospital and school districts.  No one did except the players themselves, because hardly anyone ever attended the public meetings of the three bodies.  Partly that’s because when they did, no one could understand what they were talking about.  But we, the public in both city and countryside, are at least half-way responsible for what has happened here because we were lame as citizens.

Now we’re 100% responsible for reform.

I called the county elections office to find out what’s required (624-7300.)  First, you go to there and fill out some forms for them to verify your voter registration, address and economic interests.  You can also get copies of the candidates guide there or online at their website: www.tularecoelections.org.  The candidates guide describes the qualifications and requirements of candidacy, and is a very valuable tool.

The three city council seats require 20-30 nomination signatures that must be gathered before the filing deadline of 5 p.m. Aug. 10.  Like we learned in the recall effort, those signatures must be verified as qualified registered voters within the city limits, so the county recommends getting 30 to insure the required number of 20 valid signatures.  The hospital and school district seats do not require nomination signatures.

There are no filing fees, but there is a cost for publishing the candidates statement in the County’s sample ballot.  This statement is optional and costs around $350, which must be paid in advance at the time of filing.  If you choose not to submit a statement, there’s no cost for filing.

There may be other costs, however, depending on how you want to promote yourself as a candidate, such as yard signs and flyers.  But the Dolores Huerta Foundation has offered to hold a candidates forum, which would be a wonderful way to get your message out free of charge.  This paper will also be reporting on the elections process, and I will be glad to make public any person’s position on city matters with this column, including the incumbents’.

When no one runs, there’s no elections.  That’s also what I didn’t understand before the big splash.  Let’s get some candidates on the ballot and see what we can do in our brief moment of time.