pink glasses

Published in slightly edited form July 19, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There’s a commercial on television these days that I find particularly offensive.  It’s from the world of big-box optometry, and features an aggressive man dressed in a pink leotard and tutu mocking a ballerina, who lands in the middle of a middle-class living room and proceeds to ridicule a woman for wearing pink glasses. 
           
     In the living room, some women are discussing a book they are reading.  The condemned woman is trying to share her views on the book when she is rudely interrupted by the intrusive man (unfortunately not an unusual event in women’s lives.)

           

     He claims these other women can’t possibly take her ideas seriously because she’s wearing these pink glasses that SCREAM ---- and he doesn’t even have to explain why or what the glasses scream.  He simply has to claim that they do – and everything stops.

           

     Forget that the man looks ridiculous, and clearly has no room to point fingers.  What lacerates me is the reminder of the double-bind of femininity:  damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  But there’s a class message here, too, and that one brings me out to bat.

           

     The commercial is really aimed at those of us who think buying cheap reading glasses is an adequate solution to the problem of increasing fuzziness on the page.  They’re trying to convince us that we don’t have to take this embarrassing route.  For only $69 we, too, can have real glasses that SPEAK of economic well-being equivalent to people with health plans that include eye care, not scream our insurance-less bargain-basement survival strategies.

           

     Of course, if you’re paying good money for glasses, you’re not going to choose pink frames.  You’ll choose the standard silver or gold metal, or faux horn-rimmed, all of which imply a certain class or intellectual capability.  Those rims certainly will not distract anyone from anything.  They’ll make you fit right in.

           

     I remember when I bought my first pink glasses from Dollar Tree.  I already had several pairs of cheap readers in standard colors and shapes, the kind you’d wear in the presence of other people.  Then I found a pair of colorful paint-splattered white ones.  I wore them when I worked at RN Market, and people complimented them all the time.  When those broke, I replaced them with a plum-colored pair from Rite-Aid, since I had a little cash and they were on sale.  The compliments stopped, but I wore them anyway because they stayed on my head.

           

     But when I found the pink pair, and put them on my face, I felt just a little bit more feminine.  That’s a difficult place for me to stand some days because of cultural sentiments like the one in this commercial, but the glasses helped.

           

     I now have several pair.  Mostly I’ve worn them at home, but those days are over.  From now on you’ll see me in public with pink glasses perched on the top of my head if not on my face.  Take that, you wolf in women’s clothing.

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Trudy Wischemann is an aging reader who writes in Lindsay.  You can send your views on rim colors to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 92347 or visit leave a comment below.

 

Summertime

Published July 12, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


    Summertime has arrived.  From now until Labor Day, we plow through the worst of our midday heat and the best of our mornings and evenings.  Everything grows abundantly with water and shrivels when water is withdrawn, including our children.  Our old people.  Our souls.

           

     I don’t hear that word without turning on the record player in my mind and hearing Bess sing “Summertime, when the living is easy.”  I’ve sung it myself a few times, mostly over the kitchen sink but once or twice before an audience.  I always find myself reaching for the meaning between the notes. 

           

     People not familiar with the musical “Porgy and Bess,” especially people right here in California’s sweltering breadbasket, might snort and say “Easy? Yeah, if you’re not a farmworker.”  But Bess is black, singing to an orphaned black infant cradled in her barren arms.  The chorus behind her and the community they represent, too, are black, poor, and obtain every scrap of food they eat by the labor of their hands.  They live tightly conscripted lives under white rule.  Nothing is easy.  Summertime is just easier: “Catfish are jumping, and the cotton is high….”

           

     Then Bess croons some fabrications to the baby, which puts the “easy living” idea in context.  “Oh, your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good lookin’,” she lies, comforting herself more than this tiny soul who has yet to speak its first word.  The truth is, Bess’s soul is rising to the occasion of this unplanned motherhood, expressing perhaps her first words of protective parental instinct.  “So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.”

           

     Then parental hope arrives.  “One of these mornings,” she projects, “you’re gonna rise up singing. You’re gonna spread your wings, and take to the sky.”  In one rendition I heard when I was growing up, this prospect brings Bess not only hope, but also a kind of terror that we hear in the singer’s voice.  What mother hasn’t freaked at the thought of her chicks fledging the nest?  And when the world outside Bess’s community is so incredibly hostile to people of her class and color, the natural fear is tinged with terror.

           

     These things come to mind, I think, because summertime for so many people is tinged with terror.  This summer could be worse than previous ones, not just due to climate change, but because we’ve become short-tempered with each other and politically hamstrung, and because some people in power think the way to deal with fear is to increase it.

           

     I’m glad I live here and not in New York or New Orleans, Chicago or Cleveland.  Grateful, last weekend we took a joy ride up to Three Rivers at sunset.  As we zig-zagged up the western slope of Rocky Hill, the Friant-Kern zig-zagged below, glimmering fluorescent orange against the dark groves, reflecting the polluted horizon.  This year, with its abundant water supply, summertime living is easy – for some.  Let us not forget the others.

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Trudy Wischemann is an unromantic Western writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your sunny thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

 

Liberty & Justice

Published June 28, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Familiar words, “liberty and justice.”  Three of the last five words of the Pledge of Allegiance, spoken as we salute our flag, they ring true as national standards.  They are words worth fighting for, and fighting over.           

    

     As we move into the Fourth of July, we might think about these three words.  With red, white and blue flags billowing, fireworks replicating “bombs bursting in air,” and beer flowing like blood on the battlefields where our liberty, if not justice, was won, surely we can take a few minutes to ponder the reason for celebrating.

           

     Of these three words, I think we like “liberty” best.  It’s the one we defend most often when we send our boys (and now girls) off to war, their liberties seriously reduced the moment they don uniforms, where “liberty” means getting the weekend off.

    
     "Justice” is the word we have to fight to defend at home most of the time.  I think the question of justice is really what divides us as a country right now.  Injustices to people on both sides, long unaddressed, are what fuel the fires of dissension – and the belief that those on the other side have no interest in healing the wounds.  The concept of justice underlies our current health care battles, which seem to me like writhing snakes fighting to their deaths.

     But really, the most interesting word of the three is the conjunction “and.”  It’s not “or.” It’s not ambiguous.  “Liberty” and “justice” are conjoined; they belong together.  We can’t choose between them:  we need both.  One without the other is less than half; the promise of America is lost without holding the two together, no matter how difficult that holding may be.

  

     I’ve come to that understanding from the Quaker concept of truth and love.  Quakers believe that you have to hold those two things, “truth” and “love”, together or the promise of the faith is compromised. As one Friend, Muriel Bishop, has written “Truth without love is violence. And love without truth is sentimentality.  We do need both.”

           

     Freedom without justice means that some people are not free.  I can’t even imagine what justice without freedom might be, perhaps because I was born into a free country, luckier than most of the world’s population.  Most of us would defend to the death each person’s right to become a millionaire, but we balk when it comes to challenging some inordinately wealthy people on their unfair business practices or their abuses of labor.  We take that lying down, until the trampling mortifies our consciences.  Then the struggle begins.    

     Independence is worth celebrating, but liberty and justice take work.  On this 241^st birthday of our nation, let’s commit to making it a better year ahead.

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Trudy Wischemann is a verbal freedom fighter who writes from her home in Lindsay.  You can send her your justice war stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beyond Dreaming

Published in abbreviated form June 21, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This morning I woke with a dream that was more like a backward vision.  I was in the old Lindsay Gazette office on Honolulu St. awaiting the bad news (for me) from Reggie Ellis (who was still the editor) that I was being laid off, even though in the dream (as in real life) I was not an employee.  The paper simply no longer could afford to give me these column inches, he said, because “no one reads anymore.”  The paper’s fate was looking grim.

           

     I know the dream was in the past not only because the Gazette had not yet merged with the Exeter Sun, but because the town still had two hardware stores.  I had just written about one of them, a beautiful piece (I thought) about how the community gathered not only its goods there, but also a sense of well-being and purpose, as well as a portion of its local news (sometimes known as gossip.)  A good hardware store is even better than the grocery for reinforcing our domestic claim to this place and each other, since there we tend our homes and not just our stomachs.  Pipe fittings and curtain rods, nails, nuts and bolts; seedlings in spring, lawn rakes and leaf bags in fall; tools for the garden and garage, picture hangars and furnace filters, flags to fly on the Fourth of July – a good hardware store is really the hub of town.           

     Lindsay had two hardware stores when I moved here in 1993.  Then Western Auto closed, followed a couple of years later by Race and Landers’ True Value.  For several years we had no hardware store at all, until Art Serna re-opened the True Value across the street from the Race and Landers building, which remains empty to this day.  In my dream this reality was just a trajectory, the future foreseen but yet to be fulfilled.

           

     For someone in my research area, small towns are like canaries in the mine.  When they start to die off, it’s a sign that something toxic is in the air, figuratively speaking.  It’s easy to blame our small towns’ disintegration on the growth of Visalia, Tulare and Porterville, with their medical facilities, big-box stores and other worldly attractions.  But what’s really crumbling is the ground beneath our feet:  the smaller, resident, owner-operated farm system built by the agricultural cooperatives of Sunkist and Lindsay Olive, sustained locally by the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District distributing the waters from the federal Friant-Kern Canal.

           

     Remnants of that system remain, but giant chunks have been replaced by urban investors and the fruits of industrial agriculture.  This does not bode well for the town, much less the remaining hardware store - or the newspaper, for that matter.  Yet these towns we live in – Lindsay, Exeter, Farmersville, Woodlake, even unincorporated Ivanhoe and Strathmore – are critical to the well-being of our region and nation.  They are the incubators of citizenship and the seedbeds of our humanity.

           

     There is much we can do to conserve this social resource.  We can protect the remnants, and use them to generate the new, sustainable agricultural system we need.  We can learn from them how to build churches and civic organizations, support the schools, and generate new businesses with the wisdom from their experience.  We can “buy local” and grow our own rather than put our money where the ravenous corporate mouth is.  We can rebuild sustainable towns by rebuilding sustainable farms that raise families who know where food comes from and communities connected to their source of livelihood.

           

     “Impossible,” you say? Not according to my Methodist songwriter-friend John Pitney, who has spent his entire ministry singing and preaching that reality back to life in rural places across the country.  John’s work has brought to life the theology of land in the Judeo-Christian tradition in places like Idaho, the Great Plains, Washington and Oregon.  He even planted a mustard seed of hope here in Fresno in 1992.   It’s not impossible, John says, because we’re being called to that work by our Creator.  In the last verse of one of his songs, “If You Want Your Neighbor’s Land,” he writes:

 

 “Now it may be beyond our dreaming

when we see the land divided

and re-familied by the neighbors

who can keep the world from fear. 

 

But you should know it’s not our cleverness

that keeps the land reforming,

but that Wisdom beyond dreaming

that returns our children here.”

 

           

     And all the people say “Amen.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a once-nomadic researcher who came home to write. You can send her your land & kitchen reform ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Not-O.K. Corral

Published in edited form June 14, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I grew up hearing the phrase “Meanwhile, back at the O.K. Corral, ...”  It meant that the real stuff was happening just around the corner while we were looking somewhere else.  That phrase returned to me last week when I learned about the passage of Lindsay’s Measure O.

           

     The O.K. Corral was a livery stable in Tombstone, Arizona where the most famous shootout in the Wild West occurred in 1881.  Wikipedia says it lasted 30 seconds, used 30 bullets, killed 3 out of 5 bad guys and wounded 3 out of 4 good guys.  U.S. Marshall Wyatt Earp was the good guy who walked away unscathed.

           

     It was an era when outlaws outnumbered lawmen in the western part of the U.S.   This time, however, the lawmen won, forecasting the future.  The West would eventually be safe for settling in towns, homes, farms and ranches.

           

     It’s hard to see the connection between that event and the City of Lindsay’s victory at the ballot box.  But there are some similarities, primarily that “the good guys” appear to have won, saving Lindsay from pending financial disaster.  At least, that’s the hope.

           

     Although I voted against it privately, I didn’t oppose Measure O publicly for several reasons.  First, I don’t know that it won’t help.  I have my doubts that it will help and fears that it will hurt, but I don’t know.  Second, I was chicken.  With all the perfect Vote Yes signs on the lawns of upstanding people in the community, a hand-painted Vote No sign on my lawn would have been politically incorrect.  Third, at least we had the opportunity to vote for or against this tax increase (thanks to state law,) unlike the property tax increases we experienced due to Townsend’s projects, which we had no say in whatsoever.

           

     But the fourth reason was political.  The current City administration thinks this column causes a lot of their problems.  I wanted to see if they are right.

           

    Looking at the results, it’s hard to call this a victory for democracy.  Of an estimated 8,000 voting-age residents, Lindsay has 2,789 registered voters.  As of June 12, only 561 people had cast ballots:  380 for, 181 against.  Less than 14% of Lindsay’s registered voters (and less than half of one percent of the voting age residents) raised our sales tax to the highest rate in the county.  Six percent of registered voters resisted that increase, without any campaign, any lawn signs or bumper stickers, or any prompting from this column.  A handful of people decided the future of Lindsay’s retail merchants serving 12,000 city residents and thousands more residing outside the city limits.  That’s not a victory for the town even if it is for the City.

           

     Things aren’t O.K. down at the corral.  Two weeks ago in this paper, editor Paul Myer advised vigilance on the part of community members to ensure that the hoped-for additional revenues will be spent as projected.  Unfortunately, thanks to this city’s uncivic practices, citizen participation is marginal at best.   I think we might need some new good guys to ride into town and give us a hand.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher who writes. You can send her your thoughts about our 8.5 % sales tax c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Joy and Wonder

Written for Memorial Day, 2017


     Saturday morning, as we entered the Memorial Day weekend, a passage from a book of Quaker wisdom caught my eye.  It was about joy and wonder, and it helped me prepare for the ceremonies ahead.

           

     Memorial Day is not my favorite holiday.  Like so many others, its conversion to a celebration of American consumption patterns, away from its true purpose, irks me.  But its true purpose is also a challenge. I have yet to learn to honor my war dead, which includes the brother born 17 months behind me, the curly redhead second child, the first son.  The twenty-one years he spent on this planet made my life both complicated and complete.  His departure ended all grievances I might have held against him, but, more than I knew at the time, it left me alone.

           

     His death was the result of some poor choices he made, including getting his girlfriend pregnant.  But the daughter that was born to him and the girlfriend who’d become his wife, made him a proud father for more than a year.  The sight of that baby tucked into his arm like a prize is one I’ll never forget.           

    

     His death in Viet Nam was like a hand grenade thrown into the family’s center.  I had already left for college and marriage, starting my adult life.  He’d left for basic training and the opportunity to fly in helicopters. We two older ones left behind a younger brother, sister, and two parents whose marriage was wearing thin.  Less than two years after he died that household had split in two, the younger kids dangling separately from the edges.  You might think the passage of 45 years would erase or soften that memory, but it has not.

           

     Despite his premature death, my brother is the only one of us to carry the family into the future.  That baby, my niece, has gone on to make two babies of her own; her firstborn daughter has made my niece a grandmother twice.  It’s a story many families have, but it’s one I’ve somehow ignored until recently when my niece began actively introducing her beautiful family into the ragged remnants of her father’s tribe.

           
     It was my amazing niece who came to mind when I read this passage from Plain Living:  A Quaker Path to Simplicity (2001), a book I still read daily: 

     “Something seen, something heard, something felt, flashes upon one with a bright freshness, and the heart, tired or sick or sad or merely indifferent, stirs and lifts in answer.  Different things do it for different people, but the result is the same:  that fleeting instant when we lose ourselves in joy and wonder.  It is minor because it is slight and so soon gone; it is an ecstasy because there is an impersonal quality in the vivid thrust of happiness we feel, and because the stir lingers in the memory.”  Elizabeth Gray Vining, 1942

           

     Joy and wonder.  I had that those fleeting instants while watching my niece weave the two halves of her family together.  I saw that her way of being in the world, which is so like my brother’s and yet is her own, is the one intimate experience I have of the eternal, and of grace.

    

     I offer this story in case anyone else suffers on Memorial Day.  Press on.

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Trudy Wischemann is a not-so-gifted writer who has much to be grateful for.  You can send your Memorial Day thoughts to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.  Thanks to Joe Mohnike for his war stories this week, and for coming back alive.

Dead Snakes

Published in edited form May 24, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “The only good snake is a dead snake,” my aunt used to say, followed by a predictable shudder.  She admitted they had their purpose, that they were good for the world – what I would later be taught in environmental studies was their niche in the ecology of a particular place. “I just don’t want to see them,” she’d explain.

           

     My aunt was the closest thing to a naturalist I would encounter until my late 20’s when I returned to college.  She taught me the names of flowers and mosses in her woods, fish and insects in her creek, birds in her orchard.  From her I learned respect and love for the wild things, even when they came up on the porch.  I never saw her kill a snake: she just jumped away.

           

     This past weekend I saw two dead snakes along the road.  Both appeared to have been run over, although I didn’t stop to examine their carcasses.  Both glistened, as snakes do when they’ve just shed their skins, reminding me of a time I nearly stepped on one sleeping in the grass.  “Good thing you didn’t,” said a naturalist friend who knows.  “They’re can’t see as well  when they’ve just shed, and their vulnerability makes them quicker to bite.”  The snake was golden, beautiful even though frightening.  I’m still grateful I saw it.

           

     My fear of snakes, which is natural, was heightened by growing up on 1950’s western movies, where snakes and Indians were the villains who made the cowboys look heroic.  I had rattlesnake nightmares throughout my youth and still remember one vividly when I was 6.  It was about a Christmas tree “decorated” with them, which I did not discover until I reached for a present below its boughs.  I woke up screaming, standing in the middle of my bed.  In my late 20’s I worked hard to unlearn that accentuated fear, but it wasn’t until I moved here, where rattlers are part of daily life in the foothills, that I adjusted.

           

     So when I saw those two dead snakes last week, I hurt.  Most likely they were just gopher snakes, since I was west of the Friant-Kern Canal.  Regardless of species, snakes are natural predators of ground squirrels, which plague our groves and growers.  Each snake death eliminates a harvester we need for balance, which is a form of beauty as well as necessary for our long-term survival.

           

     Were their deaths accidental, or the result of some driver’s intention?  I asked myself that question without realizing its importance until a friend spoke the same question when I told him about my sightings.  He then told me about stopping to herd a snake off the road himself, reminding me of other friends with the same proclivity.  I’ve stopped to herd stray cattle off the road, but when I watched a friend move a tarantula from the path of cars, I was humbled.

     Snakes are better alive than dead, friends.  They don’t threaten our existence until we threaten theirs, so when we can avoid killing them, let’s do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a fearful eco-freak who lives west of the canal for a reason.  You can send her your snake stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.