Passages

Published August 1, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This year has been marked by the deaths of several men I have loved, including my father.  The discovery of how much I loved each one came the instant I heard of their passing, a common experience, I’m sure.  Had these deaths not come in such rapid succession, however, I might have missed a curious phenomenon:  that the person became more present to me, not less.

           

     As these men have ridden around with me as I move through my days, I’ve come to see our time here on earth not as a journey, but as a passage:  a paragraph punctuated with commas and periods, with a beginning and an end.  A ticket on a steamer, a route through the mountains navigated with difficulty or ease, but short term, in fact.  Here and gone, yet not gone without effect.

           

     This past Saturday at the Visalia Friends Meetinghouse we memorialized one of this region’s most adorable and pugnacious Quakers, Bill Lovett.  The stories of fights he entered on behalf of the common good were as numerous as the people who came to tell them.  One of my favorites was of Bill and his wife Beth and four other people standing off Tulare Irrigation District’s bulldozers over the canal concretization project.  Eventually they were joined by local farmers and others who realized the impact on the groundwater table would have been horrible, but had felt helpless to do anything until that standoff.  Eventually TID became a positive force in recharging the aquifer, which might not have happened but for that standoff.

           

     I know that story was somehow responsible for my own conversion, if you will, to the Friends.  So was the place they built there just off Highway 198 adjacent to Kaweah Oaks Preserve: a meetinghouse handcrafted of wood and stone tucked into a wooded glade, garnished with a Christmas Tree farm that served to bring people into that beauty once a year.  But the story I offered to the gathering Saturday about Bill’s impact on me was more modest, a small example of a big effect.

           

     We were renovating the billboard along the highway.  That old billboard had also been responsible for my eventual move to the Visalia Friends, announcing as it did their very existence and some smidgeon of what they stood for.  New poles were sunk into the ground, new panels created to hold the message, and our job one November Saturday was to raise those panels from the ground and connect them to the posts.  As much planning as possible was done in advance, but you know what they say about plans.  Late in the afternoon, we had those panels suspended by ropes tied to the bumpers of pickups, but somehow the linking mechanism fell through and a new one had to be devised.  Bill gave orders for retrieving certain items from his now infamous scrap pile, and then scaled the tallest ladder to the top of the poles and hammered the essential link into place.  “He was only in his eighties then,” I said with only a little irony, but it was his lifelong ability to know what needed to be done and then do it that made me a follower.

           

     And it seems to me that what Bill’s passing has done for me is allow me to accept his passage through my life with new joy and gratitude.  To arrange his contributions with the others’ on the deck of this ship, and plough forward.  Some are longer than others, but all our passages are limited.  Make them count.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a grateful carpenter’s daughter who writes.  You can send your stories of passage to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

"All of Me"

Published July 25, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     On a hot Friday afternoon I straggled into the Lindsay Public Library to look for a few movies to check out for the weekend.  I’ve already borrowed some of the flicks on their “new releases” shelf, and some of the juicier, older ones in their drawers, so it seemed unlikely I’d find something tantalizing enough to override the heat.

           

     But there it was:  a DVD called “All of Me,”* with a Mexican peasant woman on the cover, smiling and holding out something as a train passed by.  With only a few moments before closing, I handed it to the librarian, who added it to my stack of books on hold.  I left wondering what all I had in this bag of delectable offerings.

           

     The title, of course, had set up my brain for singing the song “All of Me” for the rest of the night.  My favorite version is Willie Nelson’s, but I’ve had that song in my head since I was little, probably from hearing Frank Sinatra sing it in the 1950’s.  “All of me,” the singer pleads, “why not take all of me?  Can’t you see I’m no good without you….”  My feet mentally do a little soft-shoe dance as I mouth the words in my mind.

           

     But the words’ meaning in this magnificent, true film is really about giving all of oneself rather than hoping to be wholly received.  It is a documentary, beautifully produced, about some women in a southern Mexican village who call themselves “Las Patronas.”  What they do with their lives, and have been doing since 1995, is prepare food and water for the people (mostly men) riding the train (as hitchhikers) to the North.

           

     Day or night, each train that passes through their village is met by a crew of women with boxes full of sack lunches in plastic bags and bottles of water tied together like bolos, which are flung into the outstretched hands of men dangling between cars of the moving trains.  Life-saving provisions pass to the high-speed hands of strangers on the fly from the outstretched hands of home-bound strangers who, unlike most of us, recognize that we are all One.

           

     And those handing off the bags of food and bottles of water have spent all day cooking the food from raw rice, dried beans, cold tortillas and dried chilis that must be ground by mortar and pestle, supplemented when possible with canned tuna and bottled vegetable oil. The food is then packaged and assembled into something approximating a balanced meal, and bagged for air-born delivery. The water is dipped from the village’s well and poured into used, rinsed-out plastic drink bottles scavenged from the cafeteria of the nearby factory.

           

     The village is poor by most American standards.  It, like so many villages in Mexico, has been drained of a fair share of its men by the hoped-for availability of work in the North.  Mostly it’s the women and children left behind who have undertaken this project, seeing the need.  “We share what we can of God’s abundance to us,” they say, not stopping work to talk.

           

     My mind was blown away by the enormous effort and the real dangers faced by these women.  But what I loved most was their simple recognition and acceptance of being in service to God.  When Jesus said “be like little children,” he didn’t mean we should use the earth as our playground well into adulthood.  He meant this unpretentious, 100% self-giving as adults, serving the needs of the broader community beyond self.

           

     All of me in service to all of Us.  It’s a powerful witness.

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

* Spanish language video with English subtitles, published and cataloged as "Llevate mis amores All of Me". 
Trudy Wischemann is a tentative giver who writes.  You can send her your 100% stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Me vs. Us

Published July 18th, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Victor Davis Hanson, a right-wing historian and former Selma raisin grower, had a column in The Bee recently where he described the country’s current acidic division as a bad case of sour grapes on the part of the liberals, who just can’t seem to grow up and take their turn at not being in power. 

           

     Sitting on the left side of the chasm myself, of course I think it’s much more than that.  I think it’s what the folks on the other side of the chasm are doing with their power.   I think our collectively-left dismay, bordering on despair, comes from watching the progressive quilt we were patching together unravel, even dissolve, under the hands of the deregulatory wrecking ball.  It appears regressive to us, a turning backward fueled by the pain of those who lost power when the wheels of justice were required to turn, moving us forward as a country that promises social equality, and needs to become more economically sustainable.

           

     I think there’s another great sadness among many on both sides of the canyon: the devolution of our citizenship into Us and Them.  Actually, of course, we have been living with internal divisions for a very long time.  We small town rural people have resentments, often unspoken, toward the urban centers for their magnetic power of jobs and baubles that draw away our children and tax dollars.  Skin color and ethnic identities have long been used to identify whether we belong to Us or Them, even when we’re neighbors.  Efforts by those of us placed in the Them camp to remind the powerful Us that we, too, are Us have often been met with hostility and repression, even death.  So we’re actually quite used to the Us vs. Them equation, even if we’re not accustomed to feeling this much hatred (read “fear”) for being Blue or Red.

           

     But there’s a greater danger I think we all feel in our guts, whether we can put words to it or not.  It’s that somehow the national conversation is constantly being driven into an unhealthier set of categories:  Me vs. Us.

           

     It was something our head honcho said in Europe last week that triggered this thought.  He said “I have a very great relationship with Angela,” meaning Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, thought to be the most powerful leader currently in Europe.  And in that moment I saw the truth of a more general complaint about the current president of the United States.  He thinks it’s all about him, not us.  Not us, much less them.  Him.

           

     And what he’s encouraging, at least among his base, is a similar reversion to the notion that the individual is all that matters.  It’s a mythic notion our history writers have maximized –  you know, this country was built by brave, industrious, clever, ingenious (whatever) individuals, usually white men – leaving out the wives and children who also plowed the prairie, the phalanxes of slaves who planted and harvested the cotton, the immigrants who slaved in the fields for crusts of bread so that we might drink orange juice (or whatever) any time of the year.  You know, those guys.  I did this with my own hands, worked 20 hours a day….

           

     The problem this myth creates for the whole concept of community is beyond the scope of this column or even a 6,000-word piece for Vanity Fair.  But the biggest problem with “Me vs. Us” is what it does to the individual.  The word “us” includes “me,” so when we cut ourselves off from “us,” we’re slicing off part of ourselves.  It’s like having two hands, but no thumbs.  Sure, you’ve still got 80% of your fingers, but that missing 20% makes all the difference in the world.

           

     I’m not saying it’s simple, but let’s not let ourselves become divided along these lines.  We need to work for us, not just me.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a community researcher who writes.  You can send her your “me vs. us” dilemmas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Want Not

Published July 11, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Waste not, want not,” is an old, old saying dating back to the 1700’s and before.  It is an essentially conserving concept:  if you are careful not to waste things, you’ll have greater abundance in this world.

       

     Last week a representative from Mid-Valley Waste gave a presentation to the Lindsay City Council about the measures that company is undertaking to reduce our city’s waste levels and decrease contamination of the recyclable portion.  Some of those measures include increased surveillance of our garbage cans, with increased penalties for improperly sorted garbage, recycleables, and green waste.  Some are more educational, like the kiosk at city hall for pamphlets describing the proper place for these items we want or need to throw away.

           

     There appears to be a change coming, however, in what can be recycled thanks to the imbalance of U.S. trade with China.  One of the things we export to China is our recyclable garbage, which only slightly offsets the huge amount of things we import from them.  In retaliation for the tariffs recently imposed by our country on theirs, China has stopped buying our recyclable garbage.

           

     Because of this, suddenly the only plastic items we can throw in our blue cans are those marked with the number “2” on the bottom.  “We can’t take 3 through 7 anymore,” the Mid-Valley Waste representative said.  I wondered silently when they were going to tell us and how.  I wonder how many people check the number anyway, or remember that only certain numbers qualify, since I know that I myself have become lax in that.

           

     It’s been less than a week since I heard the presentation, but my garbage sorting habits changed instantly.  Now, aware that a $50 fine could result, I find myself returning to the safer side, saving only the most obvious recyclable items like newspapers, empty cat food cans and milk jugs for the blue can.  I toss everything else in the brown can.  What the trade imbalance with China will mean for our local landfill problems is suddenly vivid, and most certainly was not anticipated by anyone in Washington, D.C.

           

     As I sorted, I also realized how much of the garbage we toss is packaging material that comes wrapped around the articles we buy from China.  That this waste material was twice traversing the Pacific Ocean was mind boggling itself, a total violation of the whole idea behind recycling, which is increased sustainability.  There’s nothing sustainable about using fossil fuels to ship garbage back and forth across the world’s largest ocean.  Of course, there’s nothing truly sustainable about buying widgets and toasters and a billion other little interlocking consumerist parts from that far away, either.

           

     I think there may be better ways to encourage our residents to learn to sort garbage into salvageable, compostable, hazardous and buriable portions than what is currently being done.  But one way we might want to try is the “reduce” approach: to buy less trash in the first place. In fact, it might be time to reverse the old maxim: “Want not, waste not.”  For us, the leading consumers of the world, it might be a useful phrase.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a long-time recycler who also writes.  You can send your thoughts on garbage and its economic roots to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Unafraid

Published June 27, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This past Sunday, Mark Smith, the Methodist pastor who has served both Exeter and Lindsay congregations, preached his last sermon.  He called it “Unafraid,” and used texts from both the Old and New Testaments to bring home the primary message of the Bible:  that God is in charge and we, the people, should fear not.

           

     His message was more than comforting.  It was, and is, also a challenge, because we use fear to keep us comfortable.  “I can’t do that,” we tell ourselves, whatever “that” is, “because ____,” and then fill in the blank with some reason or excuse to cover the fact that, in truth, it’s because we fear the possible consequences.

           

     Of course, we in the pews as well as behind the pulpit have had reasons for little bouts of fear since we all heard the Methodist Conference’s decision to transfer Mark to two churches in Amador County.  Moving a family and facing new congregations teamed up with finding a new pastor who will preach messages we can hear (and who knows what else?) have made people on both sides of the aisle uncertain.  Our new minister and his family are from the tiny South Pacific island of Tonga, where things are very different than here.  But God’s in charge.  We move forward and be grateful.

           

     As I listened to Mark’s sermon (twice, needing a double dose,) I wished we could apply this message to our current national conundrums around immigration, international trade, the budget, even the elections.  Stirring up fear has been this administration’s primary tool for generating votes and legislation, not to mention executive orders.  The fears being stirred are in us, however.  We are responsible for having become a fearful people.

           

     “Oh, I’m not afraid,” I hear you protest in my mind.  Yes, we have things we use to protect ourselves:  laws and regulations, firearms and fences, locks and alarms, police and the military (and of course there’s always location, location, location.)  If we’re not afraid, then what is the uproar over illegal immigration, or school shootings, or the trade deficit with China?  Or North Korea’s challenge to our nuclear military capability?  Or even the possible elimination of Medicare and Social Security?  It’s fear, folks:  fear that our comforts, our support systems, our way(s) of life will be changed or disappear, replaced with something different, less, or eliminated completely.  It’s no small thing.  Even the small things.

           

     “When did we vote for this?” a friend’s friend is reported to have said when the Lindsay Public Golf Course began to be dismantled.  I could tell him it’s when we voted (or didn’t) for the current city council members; I could tell him it’s when they voted at a city council meeting which he had the right (unexercised) to attend and to speak against the proposal.  But when I have invited people to join me in the council chambers, most often they look away, check their schedules, mention how inconvenient it would be to come.  Sometimes they confess they wouldn’t want to say anything for fear of looking foolish, or out of step with people they admire (or fear), or possibly for generating consequences that might make their lives more difficult.

           

     It occurs to me that perhaps we have become a fearful people because we’re afraid, mostly, of fear.  It’s uncomfortable:  easier to hide from it than meet it head-on.  Perhaps that’s where God works first: in removing the fear of fear, releasing us from being frozen in the headlights to meeting the sources of possible danger face to face.  It’s an interesting proposition we might explore – as a people.

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

Trudy Wischemann is an unmethodical person who writes regularly anyway.  You can send her your thoughts on fear c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Separation Anxiety

Published in somewhat edited form June 20, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I have just watched online a CNN  interview with John Moore, the Getty photographer who took the photograph that went viral over the weekend of a wailing two-year-old on the ground near the border.  She's a little Honduran girl in hot pink shirt and shoes, black pants; her mother had just put her down,  obeying the orders of a border patrol guard who was about to begin a body search.

           

     Moore said the mother, who’d just spent a month crossing Mexico, did not know what was coming.  She did not know what was going to happen to her, much less that her daughter, who she’d carried the whole trip, would be taken from her person.  She had no idea that her daughter would be taken to some unknown place where she would not be able to protect her child, much less know if she was safe.  But the photographer knew, and the separation anxiety he witnessed in the little girl set off separation anxiety in him and magnified it 100 times.

           

     Although the tears he captured on film were a normal two-year-old’s reaction to uncertainty, I think they represent what we all are feeling after learning what we’re doing at the border.  “The families there had no idea they were about to be separated from their children,” he said.  “I could tell they weren’t up on the recent news, they’ve been traveling in difficult conditions.  But I knew what was going to happen next.  And for me to take these pictures, scenes that I’d seen before but with the knowledge that these parents and their children would soon be in separate detention facilities – made it hard for me personally as a journalist, as a human being, and especially as a father.”  Then he added, just as the interview ended, “on Father’s Day.”

           

     That tail-end comment brought me close to understanding something my father always said about never losing your concern for your children.  John Moore, the photographer, is silver-haired; his children are likely out of the nest at least and safely on their own journey.  But for many people, the desire to protect and provide never leaves.  Those feelings of responsibility are extended when the events of childhood and child-raising leave scars on one or both sides of the equation.

     Many professionals, like Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Association of Pediatrics, have expressed concern for the long-term impacts on the children from this separation from their parents.  But I have tremendous fear also for the parents, and not only what they’re feeling now, but will feel about themselves in the future.  Some of these families will get through this, roughed up but intact.  Some of them won’t.

           

     Do any of you remember the film “Sophie’s Choice?”  In it, the Nazis forced Meryl Streep’s character to decide which child to keep with her, her son or her daughter, with the unchosen child to be taken away by the tyrants.  The scene has never left my body; I can still see her standing in line, paralyzed, traumatized.  My mind has blocked out which child she chose, but not her only recourse for  having made the decision, which was suicide.  The “choice” forced upon her was deliberately inhuman.   I think what we're doing to these families is, too. 

           

     This administration’s action is not a question of enforcing the laws.  It’s trying to force the country’s already-divided politicians into a frenetic free-for-all, while Donald Trump stands aside, watching gleefully at the mayhem he’s created.  The immigrant families are merely hostages of yet another malevolent scheme to make DT look effective.  But now we’re hostages, too, those of us brought to tears by the stories of family separations.  I think what we’re grieving is the breaking of the parent-child bond.  Let us use our empathetic grief to change this policy.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send your thoughts to her at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Be sure to read "When ICE Comes" as well  from two weeks ago.

 

The Missing Trees

Published June 13, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” was running through my head as I sat down to write this column.  I think it was being broadcast telepathically from the Lindsay Olive Bowl, our historic sports complex that hosted adult baseball teams in the past as well as youths’, and high school football games as well.  The olive-shaped scoreboard, donated by Lindsay High School Students and Lindsay Ripe Olive Company, still has places to record the downs and quarters as well as the runs and innings.  Going there, even when it is empty of people, provides an experience of continuity, being part of Lindsay’s past better days as well as the better ones we hope will come.

           

     But if you’ve been following the plans for Lindsay with even a half-open eye, you’ll know they’re not coming soon.  We have at least two strikes against us, if not three:  the half-baked plans put forward by staff and the lack of critical questioning and oversight of those plans by the council.  The third strike is we, the people, who do not believe we can influence this process and just stay out of it.

           

     I think the reason the Olive Bowl was singing to me is the memory of the missing trees at the Lindsay Public Golf Course, which was closed in February to prepare for its renovation into soccer fields.  The grant money that had been secured to renovate the Olive Bowl was moved from that purpose to the purpose of demolishing the golf course in order to build five new soccer fields (at the proposal of staff, the approval of Council, and the excitement of the youth soccer teams who stood to benefit from these new fields.)  The coaches of the baseball teams got the word a little late, and so were not able to muster their youthful players to be at the council meeting where this approval occurred.

           

     The reason given for this money-shifting was that the Olive Bowl’s renovation plans had been stymied by the death of the engineer in charge, and with the non-extendable deadline of June 30 for the expenditure of these funds, the money would be rescued from potential loss by diverting them to this more easily completed project.

           

     Since February I have been watching the golf course with an anxious eye, hoping for a reprieve.  Even as the grass grew long this spring, golfers were going out and hitting balls in the rough, so to speak.  The leaves on the trees returned, and the landscape moved from being a well-trimmed park to a sortof nature preserve, still lovely, green-treed open space.

           

     Then the grass turned yellow, and sometime in late May while I was travelling, they cut the trees.  They didn’t cut them down, mind you:  they just beheaded them, cut off all their limbs, and left 10’ tall stumps standing bare-naked in the sun.  It looks brutal to me.

           

     And now there are less than three weeks to go before that money has to be spent to make soccer fields for all those excited youth.  When the kids thought of having soccer fields there, did they imagine the trees remaining to provide shade for the parents on the sidelines?  Did the coaches realize the city intended to turn a simple paradise into yet another shadeless desert in summer?  Did any of us?

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

Trudy Wischemann is a pained tree-hugger who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.