Three to Two

Published in slightly edited form Feb. 18, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
 
- - for Ruby and Serafin
 
    The people of Lindsay scored a large win at last week’s City Council meeting.  It was a playoff between Rich Wilkinson’s pocket and the Council’s growing sense of fiscal responsibility to the residents.  After a hard-fought ninth inning, the Council voted 3:2 to reject Wilkinson’s bid, and the people moved into first place for the first time in decades.
 
    The next morning, before the sun turned the clouds crimson and the sky aquamarine, I dreamed I was telling Ruby about the meeting.  You remember Ruby.   For decades she served this community behind Checkstand 2 at RN Market, always warm and gracious with a gentle laugh. A redhead, she also had a decent fire in her, a sense of right and wrong that really wasn’t negotiable.  When she was revealing that fire, her eyes would glisten.
  
   In my dream, her eyes were glistening.  Before she moved to live with her daughter, she read this paper.  Even after she retired she’d tell me how she appreciated what we were doing, trying to get this city back on its democratic feet.   I always felt blessed by her appreciation.  In many ways, Ruby kept me going.
  
   I saw Serafin twice during the day of the meeting.  You remember Serafin – Mr. Rivera.  He’s the one who stood before the City Council in that crowded high school gymnasium on a mid-October evening in 2010, when the people rallied for the first time in decades to cry out in rage at the salaries that were being paid to our small town officials.  He’s the one who said, first in impeccable Spanish, then in impeccable English, “I don’t think you know what it’s like to lie awake nights not knowing how you’re going to pay your water bill.” 

      Unfortunately the Council missed his point completely, and went on to explain how the water bill has to be that high because it’s what it costs the city to provide those services.  Only later, after the first decent audit in decades, was it discovered that some of the high salaries had been paid for out of the water fund.  Mr. Rivera also reads this paper, and his appreciation for what we are doing, trying to get this city back on its democratic feet, has also kept me going.  Seraphim marched with Cesar.  I feel blessed just seeing him.  Pray he gets over the last remnants of this winter’s flu.

      Some on the Council are not missing his point any more.  At the meeting, when Wilkinson’s contract came up on the agenda, Councilman Mecum led off, staking a claim to our turf.  “The people elected me to represent their interests, and there is nothing in this contract that serves the residents.  It’s off the table as far as I’m concerned.”  Shortly thereafter, Councilwoman Kimball moved to approve the contract. 

      Mayor Padilla then said she had more questions, and opened a discussion about many of the contract’s provisions.  Councilwoman Sanchez also had questions, which were interrupted by Councilman Salinas seconding Kimball’s motion to approve, essentially calling the motion to a vote.  He was surprised when it was defeated 3:2.  After further discussion, Mayor Padilla kindly explained her position to Rich and the rest of the room:  “No disrespect intended, but you’re just too expensive for us.”

     There also was much discussion about Wilkinson’s “succession plan,” which was conceived to explain the need for his new contract.  “I’m not your man,” he said strongly, referring to his unwillingness to serve as finance director in the event one is not in place when Tamara Laken retires sometime this year.

     We know, Rich.  That’s why you don’t get the big bucks.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who is grateful to be able to serve the people of Lindsay.  You can send her your democracy-restoring ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Still Here

Published in edited form Feb. 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Juni Fisher will be in town this weekend, singing her heart out to us on Valentine’s Day at the Lindsay Community Theater.  I’m grateful I’m still here to hear her, and grateful she’s still willing to come home and share her gift with her people.


     She makes my heart sing with her songs about people and horses, about intimacy between these two species that has few words, but a huge vocabulary in body language.  I suspect that we humans would all communicate better if we comprehended the importance of touch and gestures.


     But last year she brought us a different song folded in between the horse-people songs like a foxtail woven into a saddle blanket or a slicker tied on behind the seat.  It’s on her album Listen … to the horse (2013), titled “Still There.”  It’s all about Western attitudes to land and how they affect our behavior toward each other.


     Here’s how the song got born.  Waddie Mitchell, the cowboy poet from Nevada, called Juni one day to read her a poem he’d just written.  “When he finished, I had to sit down.  It was that stunning,” she wrote in the liner notes.  “The melody came easily, because he had written the words in such a perfectly lyrical way.  I love when that happens.”  I love that it happened, and think the Great Spirit had a hand in its birth.  This song is telling us about some adjustments we need to make in our lives here and now.

            “The Iroquois and Blackfoot, the Seminole and Crow/

            Were there as we discounted where they live and what they know,” the song

opens, then continues: 

           “Staked claim to plain and mountain range/

            Spread weeds of ways to suit and change /

            The pallet and the pantry full of all we would not share /

           We did not care / That they’d been there."

     We know this story, this black shadow of our history in this place.  The song reminds us that we keep it in the shadows, where it does its black work.   Rising to the light on the back of a song helps.  Let us say Amen to that history, and begin to work with its meaning.

     But the bridge of the song brings us to the present. 

        “They’re still there / And for all the selfish choices that we made /

         They paid a debt they never should have paid” it starts boldly, then ends

       “Who are we to think that we could have their souls? /

        They’re in the places where the grass grows through their bones /

       Their spirits ride the air / And they’re still there.”

     I was telling our new pastor, Mark Smith, about this song.  Mark serves both the Lindsay and Exeter Methodist Churches, which is wonderful because he grew up in Tulare County amidst our land-people relations.  He’d just mentioned that one of his grandfathers was part Yaqui, and that the family still knows the story of his land loss as the Americans took over California.  It struck me that the grass may be growing through his grandfather’s bones, but the part of Mark that is part Yaqui is still here, like the parts in his parents, siblings and all their children.  Still here.

     And while we are sitting in the theater Saturday night having our hearts challenged and mended all at the same time, another experiment in being still here will be going on at Quaker Oaks Farm just north of Farmersville.  Darlene and Lalo Franco, with other members of the Wukchumni tribe who have been meeting on that land for almost 3 decades, will be helping to host a camp-out for youth (of all ages.)  They hope to share the meaning of that land with the newcomers, to pass on what it means to be attached, to know yourself as part of a place.  Still here.

     They’re still here.  We’re still here.  Maybe we can learn more about what that means.  Thank you, Juni, for delivering the message so beautifully, and for still being part of this place.  Thank you, Darlene and Lalo, for telling your story.  May we all have major heart breakouts this weekend.

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Trudy Wischemann is a land advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your family land stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

leftovers

Published Feb. 4, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I woke up with popcorn hulls stuck between my teeth one morning this week, leftovers from my bedtime snack the night before.  I hadn’t gotten up to brush or floss, I just crashed and left them there for tomorrow. 


     “What a perfect metaphor for the City of Lindsay,”  I thought to myself.  Watching their posturing, hearing their words, reading their statements leaves the same feeling in the pit of my stomach as the hulls leave on my gums.


     In a recent article in this paper, Mayor Padilla was quoted as saying “We hope to reach out to those who are discontent or have been discontent with the city before.  We hope to bring those people in and maybe draw some attention to the fact that we are working really hard to heal those relationships.” (Jan. 7, 2015.)   I don’t know if she was thinking of me, but last week’s double city council meetings did little to reduce my ongoing discontent.


     Monday, Jan. 26th, they held a special meeting that started at 4 p.m. in a conference room, not the regular council chambers.  The agenda was 1) the presentation of a succession plan for the pending retirement of finance director Tamara Laken and the return to one hat for Rich Wilkinson as Director of Public Safety; 2) long range financial planning and mid-year budget update; 3) 2015/2016 goals and objectives of the city council; 4) discussion of submitting an RFP for an update of the city’s general plan; and last, but not least, 5) the approval of a city representative on the “One-Voice” trip to Washington, D.C. by TCAG.  There were no supporting materials on the website, and the Councilmembers received none before the meeting.  As a member of the public, if you read only the agenda, you would not have known the scope or content of this meeting.


     The agenda for the following day’s regularly scheduled council meeting was paltry by comparison.  It contained a normal consent calendar (including approval of a cost overrun on a street project, which shouldn’t be normal but is;) the closing of a public hearing on a conditional use permit that wasn’t ready to go; a public hearing on a variance of a lot line set-back on one property, and council reports.  In terms of the public’s interest, the material discussed at Monday’s special meeting was far greater than Tuesday’s, which easily could have been handled by a planning commission if we had one.  Farmersville has one.  (Farmersville also paid $16K to find a professional city manager.  It seems like we could do as well.)


     I can hear them now, saying “We’ve always had these special meetings starting at 4 pm in January - that’s the only way we can get this important work done.”  What they mean is that this work is too important to risk having public scrutiny, much less public input.  One kudo goes to the Council for requiring the staff to repeat this important information at a regularly scheduled meeting.  Until we have rules that allow for real public participation, however, the chance that the public will attend is small.


     Three years ago this month, current city manager Rich Wilkinson removed language from the agenda packet describing the rules for public participation in these meetings.  He did so at the request of then-Mayor Murray, without Council discussion or approval.  Two years ago this month I asked Mayor Padilla to restore this language and begin to take other steps to encourage our real participation in these meetings.  One year ago this month I repeated that request.  We are still waiting, reasonably discontent.


     In order for relationships to heal, changes must be made.  As long as we have staff in charge who do not want public input, and a council willing to comply with their behavior, this city will continue to fester.  It’s time to do some serious flossing.
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Trudy Wischemann is a negligent tooth-brusher who writes.  You can send her your clean-up stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Remains

Published in edited form January 21, 2015 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     My pile-sorting project at home was interrupted last week by three blessed days of work.  Those three days away, however, helped me see my piles in a new way.


     I’m the relief person for a mini-storage in Exeter, where I’m appreciated for my attention to detail despite the fact that I’m frequently late.  I keep track of my tardy minutes and try to compensate for them, including staying past quitting time if a customer needs me.  Saturday one did.


     It was twenty minutes before closing.  I was ready to go home and start facing my piles again when a woman flew through the door asking was I closed?  "No,” I said, hoping she only wanted to make a payment.  No, she wanted to rent a unit.  “No,” involuntarily erupted from my mouth, then I asked what size she needed.  “Do you have pictures of them, can I see one?” she asked back, semi-frantic as the story of her need began to pour out.  “We can go look at some,” I told her, knowing this was going to take longer than twenty minutes.  I silently said goodbye to my going home plans, silently acknowledged that I recognized her confusion, her state of disrepair, that I’d been there before myself.  Determinedly I said “I can help you.”


     Her story is not mine to tell, but it’s one we hear often in the mini-storage business.  A person feels their life beginning to unravel, relationships turning to melted wax.  Sometimes it’s divorce or the loss of a home; sometimes it’s death itself.  The stuff of our existence, the things we’ve collected to make life good or bearable or creative are suddenly at risk.  We need a safe place to put what remains of that life until this storm blows over.  We rent a unit, buy a lock, and begin to sort what needs saving from what can go.  Renting a unit can feel like finding a little eddy in a tidal wave of despair.


     Sometimes taking a rental feels just right.  A young couple came through the door Saturday morning wanting a place to store things they were collecting for their new house in Exeter.  Our buy-one, get-one-free special served them perfectly, since escrow is supposed to close this week.  They plan to paint walls and install new flooring, making the house theirs before they move in.  I rejoiced in their stable lives and organization, their partnership in the decision-making.


     A lot of the time, however, renting a unit to someone feels like triage.  I can’t keep the bank from taking the house, can’t cure the cancer, can’t mend the marriage, can’t even promise their stuff will be totally safe while they work on the problem, however long that takes.  All I can do is find the right-sized unit to fit their needs, walk them through the paperwork and obligations entailed, say a prayer, and say goodbye, good luck moving in.  It leaves me feeling pretty helpless sometimes.


     Mid-day a couple about my age came into the office looking tired.  They had just finished cleaning out her mother’s unit, a 10x30, after her death in November.  They had been working on it six weekends, had three yard sales, and paid someone to come take what was left.  I congratulated them, knowing how painful it was, as well as exhausting.  We’re just glad it’s done, they said.


     After they left, I finished the paperwork and discovered that I had rented the unit to her mother a year before.  I tried to remember the occasion, her face or story, what the weather was like, but it was all a blank.  I went to clean the unit and found a few shards of her life left on the floor amidst the dust.


     The scraps said she was a craftswoman, a person who loved to make things, uniting her spirit with the materials of this world.  It’s a love I share, although I don’t give myself that pleasure much anymore.  In a plastic bag I bundled up a few ceramic tiles, a window-shade pull, a piece of nylon webbing and a funeral program she’d saved since 1998, and tucked them in the back seat of my car, a salute to our shared humanity.  Then I swept away the last of her mini-storage remains, making room for the next customer.


     My piles look a little different now.  I see that what’s in most of them are the remains of former lives, mine and others’:  spirit-infused material goods whose time in our lives has expired.  I can’t bring back my field work days any more than I can my once-sharp eyesight, though in remembering who I was back then I might find a compass for restoring my path.  In that hope, I’m digging back in.  See you later.

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Trudy Wischemann is a fiber craftswoman who writes.  You can send her your thoughts about stuff c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Data Crunching

Published Jan. 14, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last week’s warm, spring-like weather had me crunching some raw data I mentioned in my previous column.  “Data crunching” is just academic slang for processing facts in some way that shows relationships between categories of things.


     My processing began in the form of laundry.  I washed piles of clothes from my past, looking for clues to my true identity as a child of God despite the clear evidence of massive strokes of sin.  A flannel shirt from my field work days, for instance, helped offset some guilty-looking underwear.  A pair of jeans I’ll never squeeze back into reminded me I once thought size 12 was large.  Examining one’s conscience through the lens of previous wardrobes can be a growth experience in humility, one trait of the saintly.  But hanging wet stuff on the clothesline, letting it dry in full view, preparing for its new life as a rag or thrift shop donation - man, that’s cathartic.


     I keep wondering how Val is doing with his data crunching.  His job is a little different from mine:  he’s got to organize his raw data well enough to contradict the data provided by his clerk.  His data need to provide a different picture of relationships than the one her data paints.  His data have to convince a panel of people not from his home town or county that he’s a child of God qualified enough to keep serving up justice here at home despite the clouds on his apparent character.  All I have to do is convince my internal judge and jury that I qualify to keep breathing.


     When I crunch the data in the judicial committee’s report, the relationship I see is one of invidious paternalism.  He was trying to take over her life.  With the anonymous letter accusing her of having an affair with another court employee, supposedly sent to her husband’s workplace and cc’d to Judge Val, he was inserting himself between her and her husband as well as the other employee with whom she was still on a friendly basis.  By instructing her to tell no one about the letter, he was also inserting himself between her and her other friends.  He then began depositing cash into her bank accounts and providing other luxuries, from AAA coverage to a BMW.  As benign as he tried to make these look, they are steps toward a predatory relationship, how paternalism goes ugly.  Ask any daughter of incest.


     I probably wouldn’t mention this again except for the possibility that Judge Val has been using his power in other inappropriate ways, particularly within our community.  The most blatant example I know was his signing the LPD’s search and arrest warrants over a 3-day weekend in the unwarranted arrest of Councilman Mecum last year.  The Saucedo’s home is three doors down from Lindsay’s police station, which made it convenient, I’m sure.  But his past history on the city council and multiple terms as mayor leave too strong a connection to City Hall to guarantee impartiality in evaluating the validity of those warrants.  Most judges refuse to sign warrants in the communities in which they live simply to avoid the appearance of potential conflict of interest.


     The other was his attendance at Lindsay City Council meetings during the LARGo lawsuit on CEQA violations and neglect of historic preservation provisions in Lindsay’s outdated general plan.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that may have been a violation of the judicial ethics code.  At the time, however, I felt it was some kind of betrayal of the community, his appearance and comments meant to sway the Council back toward the staff’s direction at a time when they were beginning to move away.


     I hope the community will come to understand that the loss of this “local hero” may in fact be a gain for our efforts to build real democratic process.  Maybe it’s time Val did some laundry.
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Trudy Wischemann is writer who loves to get her hands into soapy water and make things clean.  You can send her your data crunching stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

           

 

 

 

           

Raw Data

Published Jan. 7, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A friend visited me from the coast over New Year’s, a dear friend.  For the most part our time together was a blessing, a re-visitation of our shared interests and beliefs after many years apart.  When he saw the way I live now, however, he interpreted the state of disrepair and chaos in my home as major moral backsliding, a dangerous degree of failure on the brink of collapse.  His solution would be to bring in the biggest dumpster available and wipe it all away, give me a fresh start.  He left without implementing his plan, thank God.


     Afterward I wondered why I wouldn’t appreciate his help.  I came to the conclusion that it’s because I see these piles of stuff and badly mingled projects as raw data, possibly containing important information about my state of being and how I got here.  It’s because I have hope that I’ll learn more about myself as I unmingle and sort, then deliberately remove that which does not belong here anymore, keeping what does.  I have hope that would be the real fresh start.


     Raw data is all we have at the moment about Judge Valeriano Saucedo, our local Lindsay boy known familiarly as “Val” by classmates and teachers, family and friends.  His list of successes and contributions, including mayor of this town, is a source of pride to many in the community, Anglos and Latinos alike.  The story that hit the front pages of several papers last week about the investigation and pending hearing before the Committee on Judicial Ethics was a blow not only to his reputation, but also to us.


     Thanks to a link in the first Fresno Bee article, I found the Committee’s report and printed it off to read carefully.  The picture that emerged on first reading was raw, a story of smooth but persistent entrapment like a spider’s web.  The words in the text messages quoted made me queasy, not just for the woman, his courtroom clerk, but also for Val.  I began wondering if he was having a bout of temporary insanity, the kind that comes with falling in love.


     On second reading I realized this story is partial.  Although the report does not state where the information came from, it must be supposed that it is the clerk’s story and that the documents (including electronic messages) were delivered to the Committee by her.  Until Val’s story is told, we will have only her half of the raw data to process.   And even then, we will never know the ephemeral raw data:  things spoken between them, and all the forms of non-verbal communication exchanged between humans like glances and touch, postures and movements.


     As I read her story, however, I couldn’t help but wonder what possesses men to make such power plays on women.  I could identify with the situation entirely, unfortunately from the woman’s place.  It took me far too many years to understand men’s power plays for what they are, and not real advances of affection.  From the picture presented in the report, I could imagine that even the man may not have realized his motivation for making such improper moves until he was called on it by her.  Maybe not even then.


     This is why we have rules about ethical behavior and laws about sexual harassment.   It’s all too common for this kind of thing to destroy families, make work environments intolerable, erode people’s mental health.  If the clerk’s allegations are true, where Val made his real mistake is in not following the rules, abusing his power.

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Trudy Wischemann is a non-native Lindsayite who writes.  You can send her your thoughts and stories c/o P.O. Box 1374 or leave a comment below.

Here, Now

Published Dec. 31, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Here we stand, 10 days into the new solar year, 7 days past the miracle in a manger, now ready to turn the page on December, close the calendar on 2014.  It’s a threshold, a movement away from honoring continuity with the past with gifts and traditions, through a doorway toward self-conscious resolutions and hoped-for newness.  What lessons of Christmas will we take into the new year?


     We live in a Post-Manger world.  Pastors in some of our churches will continue with the Jesus story: the warnings in dreams, the trip to Egypt as a refuge from homeland insecurity, the massacre of all Jewish male children between the ages of 1 and 3 ordered by their king.  The dark night in Israel that forced God’s hand to deliver his Son through the womb of a teenage peasant girl, the lowliest of the low, continued for another 30 years while the boy grew into a man, a lifetime for some people.  Indeed, the darkness continued after his death three years later and continues to this day.


     We are not there in Judea, some of you might say, that flash-point, hot-bed Middle East.  We are here in the Tulare Lake Basin, in the central, holy portion, neither on the forested upland slopes with thin soils in the headwaters, nor in the swampy end-point full of tules and cattails.  Especially here in the Kaweah’s drainage, we’re in the fertile section of the sweetest, most productive watershed in California.


     And it’s not then, you might say, when Caesar and Herod rode roughshod over everything and everyone.  It’s now, when we have law and order and a democratic system to keep things functioning properly, an economy that produces the good life for many.  It’s not there and then, it’s here and now.  What lessons apply?


     Water is one.  When Caesar built an aqueduct to serve his new city of Caesarea on the coast of Israel, it deprived lands of water in the surrounding countryside and impoverished the peasants who depended on that water for survival.  The inability of Tulare County’s Board of Supervisors to come to the aid of those whose wells were drained by the CEMEX mining operation demonstrates that our democratic law and order needs some fine tuning.  Citizen participation is needed in 2015.


     Land is another.  Near the end of his ministry, Jesus warned the daughters of Jerusalem that their good life was coming to an end, that they would be moaning before it was over.  The complicity of the Jewish kings and priests with the Romans, forgetting their compact with God and impoverishing their own people, would bring an end to that urban religious fortress.  The impetus for the good life that deprives others of life whatsoever won’t be tolerated, Jesus was warning.  Inequitable relations between people and land, people and natural resources, people and the good life, result inevitably in destruction.


     If that babe in a manger means anything, it is that we must seek judicious distribution of the earth’s resources, must find ways to share the wealth.  Here, now in the Tulare Lake Basin and in the entire state, we are ‘way overdue in addressing imbalances of power over water and land, and facing more enormous challenges than ever before.  In 2015, let us resolve to take this birth more seriously and bear upon our administrators and representatives the crux of its message.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Methodist Quaker who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your interpretations of the Christmas/New Years threshold c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.