The week my neighborhood built a playground and my government went further into debt

In less time than it took my wisdom teeth to heal, my neighborhood built a playground. I know this because I was hoping to go help them, only I was collapsed on my couch with otter pops pressed against my cheeks. I also know because every time I drove past the park there was something going on within the gate surrounding the new jungle gym: a band playing; a fire truck; hammering and climbing and people moving about; and finally, a tent and rows of folding white chairs, presumably for some kind of closing (opening?) ceremony. The beautiful, old playground, made entirely of wood, was, I read in the East Sacramento newspaper, burned down by an arsonist several weeks ago. And because it is no longer legal to build playgrounds out of wood in the state of California (As an aside, it is also illegal 

This is real...captured by Mom!

to sell Mylar balloons without a balloon weight in the state of California. Some people wonder why the state is bankrupt and why our youth are growing up into soft, complaining idiots, but I think you need only look at a California law book to figure out the reasons), the new playground is not. If I didn’t know better, I would suspect that the entire thing was a conspiracy by WIC or some other public health organization determined to save our poor, troubled children from the traumatic horrors of an occasional splinter, but it was probably just some asshole smoking pot under the swing set. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that the loss of a warped, worn, well-built, even better-loved wooden playground is a tragedy. But even I have to admit that the new playground is pretty magnificent to behold. To begin with, it is huge, sprawling fantastically across a much larger area than the humble old one was allowed. And although I am usually morally opposed to faux wood, given the spirit behind this particular venture, I appreciate that it’s built to look paneled. It looks like a fairytale cottage, with a muted colors on the roofs and ins and outs, twists and turns that leave me longing for the days when I was smaller and younger. Even now, old and clumsy as I am, my imagination takes hold when I see that playground and I yearn to play on it. But these are not the main reasons that the new playground is so splendid. The playground is splendid because it puts an exclamation mark at the end of a story that has been played out over and over in East Sacramento even just in the short time since Jason moved here three years ago. It is the story of a neighborhood taking over where a government failed. It is the story of individuals united under a common interest making change where the wealth of one of the most expensive states in the country fell embarrassingly short. It is the story of the way things should be in a country that is falling apart at the seams while it waits for its government to do work that it is neither capable of, nor supposed to do.

            

McKinley Park, according to whispered, careless rumor that moves on the wind and comes from no one knows where, is a perfect square mile, and resides (this is not rumor, but fact) just down the street from my house. A dirt path runs around its perimeter for the enthusiastic runners of Sacramento (which may be why the whole mile squared thing seems so imperative). It also includes tennis courts; a rose garden; a soccer field; a baseball diamond; a pond inhabited by innumerable ducks, geese (yikes!), turtles, red-winged blackbirds, hosts of dragonflies, and other beasts of earth and water; a couple of maintenance buildings; and an old two-story brick building called the Clunie Community Center. Inside the Clunie Center is McKinley Library, run by the county; a teeny, tiny Sacramento picture museum that is too small to be called a museum; and some modest event rooms (newly remodeled…more on that later). And behind the Clunie Center is an old swimming pool with a small fountain beautifully built circa the 1940s that is open during the late summer for two dollars a pop for lap swimming and wading.  I love the Clunie Center because it is brick and beautiful with a cool, dark front hallway that whispers of history and because of the library which has a loft where I like to sit between the rows of sweetly dust-scented books and look out the narrow windows and remember all the reasons it’s lucky to be alive. I also love the Clunie Center because it is the beginning, for me, of the story.

            

A lot of what I know about East Sacramento comes from the neighborhood’s newspaper, Inside East Sacramento. Like any small neighborhood newspaper, it often includes some pretty atrocious editorials and some utterly worthless articles that make you wonder if it’s worth the ink its printed with. Still, for what it is, it is the best of its kind I’ve seen. The people who write about the local news and goings-on seem to have done some research and know a thing or two and for the most part, the editors are aware of basic grammar and spelling. Also, East Sacramento happens to be a community with some good old fashioned common sense, so the paper is usually a fairly interesting and informative read. When Jason first moved to Sacramento, the city was in the process of closing down – or at least thinking of closing down – several library branches. McKinley library was (unsurprisingly) on the list of potentials. Not only is McKinley Library decidedly puny, it is also inside the Clunie Community Center, an establishment which, in and of itself, the city is constantly considering shutting down. The truth of the matter is that libraries in Sacramento (and probably much of the state and country), including McKinley, just don’t earn their keep anymore. Neither do old community centers. But East Sacramento rallied. Unwilling to see the library or the community center defunct, its citizens opted to keep them both open and managed to come up with the money or persuasiveness (or both) to make it happen. This same event has happened at least two more times that I know about, in the past two years. McKinley Library remains open five days a week. The swimming pool is still open two months out of the year at a pretty ridiculously low rate. Not only that, but with the extra money the community pulled together, the inside of Clunie Community Center got a mild face-lift. All cleaned up and replenished, it now stands ready with three different rooms dedicated to events (which, if they can get them going, can really help build future funds for the center). I know this in particular is true because last time Jason and I went to take a run at the park, we decided to peek in to see what had been done. The proud purveyor of the place, who happened to be on her way out and saw us snooping around outside locked doors, gave us an enthusiastic tour and a new flyer, encouraging us to plan our next event there.

            

About a year ago, I read in the paper about the dire straits of the McKinley Park Rose Garden. Now, you know how comfortable small towners can get, a little bit melodramatic about everything traditional and established. But even I could notice that the garden was becoming a little peaked, slightly overrun with weeds, some of the rose plants mildly blighted. I never saw anyone of authority moving about the rose garden’s office building, rarely saw gardening taking place there. Out came the East Sactonians with their garden spades and donations and the rose garden was refurbished. A fence  was put up around it for a couple of months and then, new bushes planted, new pathways put in. The rose garden is back. 

            

And now the neighborhood has built a playground. Not just any playground, mind you. A colossal, beautiful, envious playground. A community build over which, for a mere five days, folks straight out of the neighborhood, the ones whose children and grandchildren will actually be playing there, labored with a commitment and passion that a state-commissioned contractor could never have completely possessed.

            

Within the past few years, the state of California has begun collecting taxes on online purchases and legal medical marijuana (both the selling and the buying of). We have the highest minimum sales tax in the nation – further increased during our “budget crisis” in ’08 and ’09 – and the highest income tax in the nation. Due to (among other things) our nauseatingly high taxes, California has been rated for the past eight years as the worst state in the country for business. Thanks to Prop 30 in 2012 (which I fully acknowledge was voted in by our intellectually questionable citizens), we are now saddled with $6 billion dollars in new taxes, annually. And yet, somehow, someway, our fearless leaders cannot seem to muster up enough money to maintain a few public libraries. Now I personally am one of those (few and far between) people who is overly excited about the discussion over the necessity of the entire publicly-funded library system to begin with. In our current state of immeasurably colossal government dependence and overarching societal pursuit of education and literacy, I would generally argue that the public library system no longer necessarily has a place as part of the local government’s duty  and should perhaps be doled out appropriately to the private industry. But mine is not a popular opinion and with all the fuss the government makes about it, you would think they could pull enough pocket change out of their inept pockets to keep the library system eking along. So why can’t they? Because they don’t care? Because they really are that incapable of managing money? Because they’re trying to get a rise out of the public to convince us to pass another Prop 30? (Good luck with that because, thanks to another one of the government’s inept programs, Education, running the way it is, there aren’t a whole lot of people left who really care about the library system anyway). It could be a combination of all of these reasons – and others. I no longer care why. Because regardless of the reason, here’s the truth: the harder the government crashes and burns, the more people (not “The People,” but the actual Individuals that comprise “The People) will invest themselves in the things they actually care about and let the rest fall apart. Which is exactly the way it should be. If the East Sacramento community isn’t renting enough books to keep a library running, should the local government keep it open anyway? Certainly not! But East Sacramento did want its library. And so it put its own effort into keeping it.

            

Naysayers will say that East Sacramento’s success is only on a small scale, as though that were a bad thing. But that’s exactly the point. Thing’s don’t get done on a large scale, they get lost. What is a small, 45,000 volume library to a treasurer in a state-issued cubicle? Not a damn thing. Nor should it be. California has other things to worry about (actually finding prison space for violent criminals may be a good start, but that’s my bias). But what is a small, 45,000 volume library to a child who lives down the street? To a hobbyist? To a dreamer? To a teacher? To a student? It is an Everest, a treasure, a fairytale-come-to-life, the sweetly dust-scented reminder of why life is so lucky, a reason to love thy neighbor, to build castles in the air, and a way to put the foundations beneath them. It is a future of intellect, of world-changing. It is the happiness of a Summer day, the growing of solid roots, the development of wings. What is it not? That should be the question. Small things are largely important to ordinary people. And that is as it should be. For all our talk of massive group thinking and change, of collaboration, of safety in numbers, we do not tell our children, small and starry-eyed and learning the ways of the world, that they should find a group and cling to it; that they should write their names on a list and wait for the list to change the world; that they should listen for popular opinion and then jump on the bandwagon. We tell them to forge their own paths, to trail blaze, to march to their own drummers, to fight for what they feel passionately about. And though they are small, we believe great things can come from them. Because they can. Why then, do we think that the bigger our government is, the more anonymous and distant and unrecognizable it becomes, the more it should be able to accomplish? Signs on the backs of those monstrous eighteen wheelers driving down the highway read: “If you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you.” I cannot see my government’s mirrors. And it cannot see me. But I can see my neighbor. He is right over the gate, there. I can see his chickens, and his children. I can smell his barbeque. I can hear him raking leaves. Sometimes, his cat crosses my front porch. I like him – or I don’t. But either way, he is real to me. And so, if we have a common cause, we can build it together. We do it every day, in fact, in small ways (smaller, even, than building a playground). I don’t throw trash on his lawn, for example, because I believe in the Golden Rule, and because I believe in keeping things clean and tidy and not burdening the world with unnecessary wear and tear, and because I believe in karma. He also does not throw trash on my lawn, for the same or different reasons. And this is an unspoken understanding that we have. That we wish to be decent neighbors and decent citizens of the world. We did not need our government to pass a law about it. We did not ask that our government hire a trash collector to pick up the trash in our yards so that we can toss our litter out the window with reckless abandon, on any whim. It is something we care about enough to take care of ourselves. Why then, do we not use these same principals to build our communities, educate our children, grow our businesses?

            

Naysayers will also say that only communities with some affluence, like East Sacramento, can do such things. That other communities, where the residents have neither extra money nor leisure time need the city government to hold communities together. But after all, it is not enough to put an open library on the street corner. People who have not been raised to care about reading will not enter simply because it is there. If I did not know this before, this last year of teaching has taught me this sad truth. The fact of the matter is that you need both effort and money to achieve improvement. And, although you cannot grow dollar bills in your backyard, literally, you can care enough about something to invest creativity and good old-fashioned elbow grease. And you can teach your children to do the same. And money comes with creativity and elbow grease. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, the government does not possess the necessary qualities to do the same thing. We question whether plants and animals think, feel, react. Why do we not question whether government does? It does not. It is not an organic mechanism. It has (unfortunately) all the money it needs and (even more unfortunately) none of the passion born of a true purpose, a purpose based on necessity and goodness and righteousness and worth, and meaning; none of the judgment that can tell a smart idea from a dumb one, a waste of time and money from a strong investment. People do that. Not establishments. Just as it is not a leaf, moving mechanically across the sidewalk on its own, but the focused herd of tiny ants marching along beneath it that carry it forward, that affect movement, change. Why do we find such inspiration in underdog stories, in stories of people coming from nothing and making something of themselves, in stories of people like Michael Oher, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Jesus? Why do we have such faith in those people in an abstract sense, but no real faith that those types of miracles can actually happen in our own worlds, and so thinking, do not enact that faith in real life, instead passing things off  to the government which neither can nor should achieve them? These are the questions I asked myself as my wisdom teeth healed, as my neighborhood built by hand a playground for its children, quite literally out of the ashes, as my government grew and failed, grew and failed, grew and failed again before my very eyes. I have no answers to these questions, only a certainty that my government, huge organizations, mass cults of people, do not hold the solutions. That solutions come from much lower and smaller down.  If you want society to be healthier, build a community garden; if you want people to be smarter, read books to random children; if you want your world to be stronger, better, purer, safer, pet your neighbor’s cat and build a playground.

-R.E.A.

Relish

What exactly is it about people who see treasure in humble beginnings that is so uplifting, so divine, so profound and magnificent? I came to the realization today that I have always viewed these types of people with awestruck gratitude, as though the beauty of their faith was a particular gift to me. I know that, indeed, the beauty of their faith is, intentionally or not, a true gift to the entire world, but it always somehow feels humblingly personal. I have been lucky enough to know many of these people in my life. My mom and my sister are, to me, the first models of this rare trait, and to be around them is to be unendingly inspired by their ability to find and recognize the worth in that which has been cast off, the greatness in the overlooked, the secret in the seemingly transparent, the glimmer in a sea of dullness, excitement in the mundane, magical in the ordinary, the potential in things – and people – as yet untapped. There are many others, more and less well-known than these two beautiful women, people like Shel Silverstein, Saint Jude, Henry David Thoreau, folks who find their pets at animal shelters, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, farmers, Emily Dickinson, L.M. Montgomery, John Steinbeck,…and, as I joyously learned today, Ray Bradbury. I am coming to believe, in my ponderings on this characteristic, that it is in fact this, in a nutshell, that propels me to read ceaselessly, to seek out loveable literature. And furthermore, perhaps to want to be a teacher.

            

Today I went to the coffee shop to finish the last several pages of my book Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Not three minutes after I sat down, I was in tears. This novel has spoken to my soul ever since the introduction, when I learned that Bradbury wrote it in an attempt to capture his childhood in North-western Illinois. In so doing, he managed, at least at the beginning, to capture pieces of my own. But the novel is not a story about me, that much was clear to me midway through. The novel is, however, a story about (among other things, of course) a piece of my soul. And, like those people who see treasure in humble beginnings, it feels to me, somehow, like a personal gift. Don’t get me wrong, I think Fahrenheit 451 is a phenomenal book. But if I had known that Ray Bradbury had this book in him, I would have worked, by hook or by crook, to see him at the L.A. Book Fair before he died. Before I go on, let me make it perfectly clear that this is not a recommendation – from me to you – that you read this book. The meandering, near-plotlessness of the story had a strange and lovely effect on my being, and I don’t claim to know anyone else’s being well enough to know if it will do the same to you. You may read it and wish to throw it aside as abstract hogwash, and if you do, and if you do, I hope that you will not tell me either one, although I am sure, somewhere deep inside me, I will feel a prick nevertheless. In describing his grandma’s cooking, at one point in the story, the main character, Doug, says, “The food was self-explanatory, wasn’t it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasn’t it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense?” This is precisely how I feel about the novel as a whole and, basking in its moment of ritual and rare incense is all I am doing here, and very little more.

            

My copy of the book is from some used store somewhere, the best place (some will tell you) for finding diamonds in dust. It is an old, but well-kept paperback edition with slightly yellowed edges and not a single tear. Also not a single indication that anyone else had ever read this copy had I, until I neared the end and turned to page 222, somewhere in the last twenty pages. There, in spidery, pretty handwriting, in blue ink, were two notes from a reader of bygone days. The first note, somewhat spookily - for someone who has not read the book - reads, “I must die.” The spookiness of this remark is slightly diminished for those who have read the book because it relates to an earlier chapter. The strange part about it, though, is that it comes at one of the most uplifting moments in the entire story, a moment held long in anticipation, a moment soon after, in fact, I dissolved into tears in the middle of the coffee shop. And by this point those words, “I must die,” are no longer relevant. They are no longer profound to the story. I wonder why they are here, instead of somewhere else, earlier, when they may have done some good. The next note is slightly longer, short commentary on two of the characters. And though I read this note both before and after I read the chapter it belongs to, and perhaps a dozen times over, I still cannot gather exactly what the reader’s thoughts were in writing it, why they are important, why they needed to be written there. And it concerns me, not in a disruptive way, but in a curious way, because that is it, the only other note she leaves and I wish, I wish I knew what she meant by it. Because you see, she might have been a seeker of treasures herself. Or even a master of finding them. And if so, there is a message in those words that could, too, be treasure to me.

            

Of all the beloved, unparalleled characters in this modest novel – Colonel Freighleigh, Helen Loomis, Mr. Tridden, Mr. Auffmann, Tom, Doug’s Great Grandma, his dad, Lavinia – Mr. Jonas is inexorably my favorite. He is a seeker of treasures. And he is what brought me to tears. Mr. Jonas is a collector of junk and he carries it around in his Conestoga wagon, drawn by his horse named Ned and he sings as he travels along in his corduroy clothes and hat, covered with old presidential campaign buttons, so that children can hear him a mile away. And, like Hector the Collector, he sings songs like this:

“Junk! Junk!

No, sir, not Junk!

Junk! Junk!

No, ma’am, not Junk!

Bricabracs, brickbats!

Knitting needles, knick-knacks!

Kickshaws! Curios!

Camisoles! Cameos!

But…Junk!

Junk!

No, sir, not…Junk!”

And he is right, because one of his pieces of junk, a bottle full of fresh air, saves an entire life. Mr. Jonas doesn’t sell his junk. His is a cycle of collecting and giving away. Tiring of his life as a businessman in Chicago, Mr. Jonas “set out to spend the rest of his life seeing to it that one part of town had a chance to pick over what the other part of town had cast off. He looked upon himself as a kind of process, like osmosis, that made various cultures within the city limits available to one another.” And it seems to me that, somewhere in those words, perhaps, are written the secret to peace among men. I wish to be Mr. Jonas, both literally and figuratively. But I, like Doug, must settle on the next best thing, to pay it forward. Because, after all, it seems to me, that looking for goodness, and worthiness, and hope, and success in all the cubbyholes of the plodding, patient world, is both the intended journey and the end goal spun into one. And I love those people the most!

It all makes me wonder about happiness. It sounds stale to speak of happiness being the secret to prolonging life. Not happiness in a grandiose or demonstrative way. Not winning lots of awards, with the adoring eyes of people you love and respect waving you on, or going to a million concerts where you get the thrill of all the pounding, glorious music down into your soul over and over again, or zip-lining across a tropical rain forest with your mouth open wide in a cry of breathless excitement, though these things help. Doug’s great grandma, who always took it upon herself to re-shingle the roof each year, tells him, just before she dies, “Douglas, don’t ever let anyone do the shingles unless it’s fun for them.” For her, shingling is a joy because she can see the whole town, the whole countryside, spread out around her from up there on top of the house. She tells him to look for the person whose eyes light up when he mentions shingling the roof and then he’ll know who really wants to do it. See, she’s got the right idea: finding richness in the mundane, happiness in a chore. It’s a simpler way of looking at things. Roald Dahl, another master of treasure-hunting said, “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” And this is what I wonder – about happiness, I mean – perhaps we overlook the seeming fact that happiness can prologue life because it is too difficult to hear. Because happiness is too much in our control. Calvinists seek comfort in knowing that their outcome, their final peace (or piece) is pre-ordained. But who seeks comfort in knowing, instead, that is it entirely in our own power? Now I, personally, fall somewhere in between the Calvinists and the idea that it’s all in my hands. And so, I suspect, do most of us. Still, it’s easy to shy away from the responsibility of taking life as completely into your own control as you possibly can. Choosing neither others’ decisions, nor the path of least resistance as your own, but picking, instead, happiness, however it looks in that moment, for as long as it looks that way, to you. It’s impossible, even, for some of us, to separate one of these choices out from the others. And as chaotic and relentless as this world sometimes seems, such thoughts are not always comforting. Looking through his grandma’s spice jars and cooking ingredients, Doug finds one marked RELISH: “And he was glad he had decided to live. RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have trompted the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH!” Words to live by found pasted to the side of a condiment. An epiphany from the mundane.

            

There is so much left to say and so much Summer left before me that I feel somehow that the two are appropriately, inexplicably intertwined. I put Dandelion Wine on the shelf next to my Anne books, because I think Ms. Montgomery would have appreciated it. Relished it. The story – the characters, really – linger now, on my mind like the fading strains of a symphony more innate and universal even than sound, than the taste of sweet tea on a hot, humid Virginia night. And, putting the book down, I looked up, immediately, the recipe for dandelion wine, a reminder, in the story, of each momentous moment of a bittersweet summer. Refreshment, vibrancy, beauty, happiness created out of a tiny, yellow weed. Treasure.

-R.E.A.