Chevy coupe

“Jesus Christ!”  I blurted out---emphasis on the first syllable, “Je-sus.”  I had tumbled off the bench seat of our old Chevy coupe when my mother slammed the brakes. My head grazed the dashboard as I toppled to the floorboard below. The brown and red threads of the tan plaid upholstery prickled my bare legs as I clambered back on the seat. 

It was 1951 and I was six years old.

The car---I’ve confirmed from photos online---was a 1940 Chevy 2-door business coupe, and about this color. The model was a Master 85, and in the brochure artwork it looks professional but sporty.  

The coupe had its own story and I learned it decades later.

That day we were headed into the city---to San Francisco, 40 minutes by car from our small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  I watched my mother grip the gearshift with its milky bakelite-tipped handle as she pressed in the clutch in one smooth, deft motion. She was a good driver.  

In the 1950s medical and dental appointments in San Francisco were expeditions that entailed coat, hat and gloves.  Deckled-edged Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat with a matching tam that my mother had sewed. I wore white gloves in little kid sizes that now seem unimaginable---clothes for city sidewalks, not the gravel roads in the county where we lived.

Our destination was 450 Sutter Street, a professional building a few blocks uphill from Union Square and one of the tallest buildings in the city at the time.  A 26-storey art deco tower, its front doors were recessed beneath a gold fan-shaped portico.  I thought my family dentist lived in a temple on the 16^th floor.  When we waited for the elevator in the black marble hallway, I craned my neck to look up at the bronze and silver ceiling. Its dimly lit zig zag shapes made me dizzy. Only recently did I learn they were Mayan revival motif designs. 

For several years my mother regaled friends and relatives with the story about my startling expletive.  As the only child of parents who had---and now it puzzles me---mostly childless friends, I often listened to adult conversation.  Grown-ups told stories about other people, but they also seemed willing, even eager, to tell stories on themselves. Adults seemed to have an invisible protective skin, and they could become a character and be made fun of, be the butt of a good joke. It was something we kids never did.

Grown-ups telling stories---when not at my expense---brought relief from well-behaved boredom. I watched as the launch of some tale snagged the scattered conversations in the room, reeling in the attention of highball-clutching adults. I listened to half-understood words and events that seemed to stretch out as if along a tightrope of telling. The tension clutched my stomach.  Back and forth my eyes darted, from teller to listeners, anxious for some weave or wobble in the story, a gasp of surprise, a sigh of let-down, or a hoot of laughter at the end.

The work of what I later learned to call literary devices seeped unnamed into my brain.   

Sixty years after I banged into the Chevy dashboard, my mother came to live with me in  Michigan.  Unable to manage in an apartment on her own, at age 81 she pulled up stakes on the west coast and moved east to share a house with me and my son. 

And of all places, in Flint.

Family recollections surfaced during the six years we lived together in Flint, and one was the back story to the 1940 Chevy coupe.  We both remembered its faded beige finish and the red pin stripe still visible along its sides the year I grazed its dashboard. According to my mother, she and her older brother had bought the car new in their hometown, Portland, Oregon.  In the course of the purchase, the dealer off-handedly mentioned that delivery charges could be saved if the car were picked up at the factory in Michigan.

Brother and kid sister set out east by train. Grand Northern’s Empire Builder ran daily from Portland to Chicago’s Union Station where they could pick up Grand Trunk Western mainline and get off at Flint.  My mother recalled being told to wait on a Saginaw Street corner for a man who would take them out to the factory---which must have been Chevy-in-the Hole. 

To save money on the return road trip to Oregon brother and sister shared a motel room and my mother remembered sleeping on a trundle bed.  At remote stops along U.S. 30 and the way home, my uncle---a jazz lover---searched out obscure recordings.  Heavy 78s in brown paper sleeves, some of them ended up in our house, gifts from my uncle to teach my mother about jazz.

Four years later, in 1944, my mother got engaged and planned to move to San Francisco where she would be married. Her brother let her take the car---he was headed to Washington, D.C., to work in the Office of Strategic Services or OSS that had been established by Roosevelt in 1942. Off to a glamorous career in the capital, my uncle readily signed over the title and threw in some jazz records. The Chevy coupe became my parents’ first car. 

By 1955, my grandparents lived with us and a more practical family vehicle was needed. One summer evening my dad pulled into the driveway in a 1950 4-door Ford custom six “executive sedan.”  A deep forest green, in the center of its grill a “bullet” jutted out that only underscored the car’s roomy boredom. 

My dad bought it used. We never again had a brand-new car like that sporty Chevy coupe.

I’m still in Flint.  My mother died here in 2008. I drive Saginaw Street and imagine her waiting on one of its gusty corners in 1940, twenty-three years old and never dreaming that she would return to this city where her first car was made. 

Growing up, I’d had to suppress a flinch whenever my mother plunged into the anecdote about my “Jesus” outburst. Now the story seems less attached to me than to places and people that I have loved. The protagonists depart, social conventions change, and places are transformed beyond recognizing. The story remains and now I can do the telling---I did learn to be one of those grown-ups who can tell stories on themselves.

A year in blight

On Father’s Day, Sunday June 19, 2016, NBC 25 aired a local news segment that showed a group of Mott Park residents as they cleared brush, cut dangling branches, boarded up windows, and mowed overgrown grass at a vacant house in the neighborhood.  Six volunteers, including an eager three-year-old helper named Jack, worked fast in the bright, increasingly hot, sunlight because one Mott Park resident, Bobbi Wray, put out a call to friends asking for help to clean up a vacant house next to her on Marquette street.

A crew came together organized by Steven Major, Mott Park resident for the last seven years and reserve officer for City of Flint Police. Home Depot and the neighborhood association donated materials and friends loaned tools.  When TV 25 reporter Miranda Parnell asked why, Steve said, “We’ve just had enough.”

The Mott Park’s Blight Squad had burst on the scene.

Bobbi Wray, retired tv5 reporter (and the first female TV reporter in Michigan) recounts a backstory all too common.  Sometime in 2011, her neighbors---a couple in their sixties---got underwater on their mortgage and were unable to take out a second to finance roof repairs.  Finally, in desperation, they left and the house reverted to bank ownership, a warning notice later tacked on its storm door that indicated the property belonged to “M & M Mortgage Services.”

Clean-up of more properties followed the first June action and the group adopted the Blight Squad name for their Facebook page and Steve Major became its director, working closely with the Mott Park Neighborhood Association.  The core Squad members drove the neighborhood, checked properties, reached out to neighborhood residents through the MPNA Facebook page, and gathered leads on addresses showing evidence of squatters.  Donations came---bags and compost from the Genesee County Land Bank “Clean and Green” program and paint from a neighborhood owner of a paint store. Neighbors loaned tools and brought cases of water, leaf bags, and work gloves wherever Facebook announced the crew was working.

During one late August 2016 clean-up a 1945 Chevrolet coupe made in Chevy-in the-Hole Flint was found covered under brush---the paint in fair condition protected by overgrowth.  Online research showed it was a Fleetline AeroSedan, one of Chevrolet’s first vehicles when it returned to civilian carmaking.  Other vehicles have been found, but sadly, less interesting. 

Meantime, the Mott Park Neighborhood Association worked closely with Kettering University and Tom Wyatt, project manager of “Renew the Avenue,” a Department of Justice program whose Byrne Grant reduces crime by engaging the community (currently Stevenson Neighborhood, Mott Park, Sunset Village/Glendale Hills) to decrease blight.  Byrne grant funds helped provide tools, board up materials, and motion-activated LED solar security lights. Kettering University has provided student workers as well.

Toward the end of the 2016 and with a dozen properties cleaned up, the Blight Squad began to decide strategically where to work.  They found a target at the triangle of Perry, Woodbridge, and Joliet streets meet---a small cluster of old commercial buildings whose renovation could have a big impact.

  

Online research showed that the three buildings had once been the Woodbridge Market, a Plumbers’ Union, and a Pure Oil station (including building plans). Steve dubbed the site the Mott Park “Historic Business District.”  The middle structure, the Woodbridge Market, turned out to have an owner who decided to refurbish the building himself.

The buildings on each side of the old market were the Plumbers’ Union (the initials “J.B. CO” embedded in its façade) and the Pure Oil building.

The exterior for Pure Oil was “English Cottage” style, one of the first company attempts at a chain look for gas stations.  At present, with the exterior renovation nearly done, the neighborhood association plans to purchase the Plumbers’ Union building.  The Pure Oil building is slated as studio space for Mott Park resident and artist Ryan Gregory.

After the “Historic Business District” clean up, the Blight Squad did small jobs, often illegal dumping, but with the approach of fall weather a new challenge emerged: squatters.  A gruesome knifing incident occurred in late August in one squatters’ house in a row derelict structures on Chevrolet near the Flushing Road intersection. The squatters were cleared and the houses boarded up in early winter. 

By the end of December 2016, ABC12 and NBC25 had aired four news reports about the Blight Squad’s efforts. Over the winter into 2017, their work changed. The Blight Squad adopted a off-season pattern: assess now and then secure, install security lighting, and decide how to maintain.  Tom Wyatt’s “Renew the Avenue” at Kettering University supplied wood for board ups, four cordless drills and the loan of a generator---essential where power has been cut.  The Blight Squad could obtain security lighting, purchased in bulk and tax-free. Winter work was a combination of networking with local groups and organizations and board ups.

In early January 2017 a group of sixteen people, Blight Squad members and others, met at Kettering University to plan for the coming summer season.  Now at the close of March, their plans for the first large-scale spring project are underway. The target?  Joliet street which runs from Kettering University at Dupont to Blair St. deep into the interior of Mott Park.  Sunday, March 26, a Blight Squad crew began the clean-up of one burned out property on Joliet.  Wall remnants were knocked down, concrete blocks heaved into the basement, and charred wood and debris loaded into a 20-foot dumpster.  NBC 25 and ABC 12 stopped by to film the day’s crew that included Eric Bumbalough, Steve Major and son Kenny, Tony Coleman, Bo Cummins, Greg Harmon, Bobbi Wray, Chad Schlosser, Joe Shingledecker, Tony Coleman, and Rashonda Magee from Flint Urban Safety Corps. Rain cut the work day short; a squatters’ house next door to the burned site will be cleaned out and boarded up later. 

Posted on Facebook, full-scale plans for Joliet St. announce work dates for April 15 and May 13 when the Blight Squad will lead teams comprised of Bahá’í youth volunteers, Kettering students, new Flint Police Reserve Officers, Flint Urban Safety Corps, and Joliet Street residents.  Teams will work the full length of the street according to task---clear brush, clear trash, mow, and board-up.  An equipment and materials station will be positioned at the at the center of the long street. The last squatter home will be boarded up.  Steve Major expects 50 to 100 volunteers.  

The good news for summer of 2017 is that a program of AmeriCorps, the Flint Urban Safety Corps, (a partnership between Genesee County United Way and UM-Flint)), will be in Mott Park working on clean-up and board-up. In Flint on a three-year program, the Urban Safety Corps works in a residential swath extending from University Avenue to McLaren hospital.  Their clean-up of the Stevenson Neighborhood  has just ended and according to Tom Wyatt, “Renew the Avenue” Project Manager (headquartered at Kettering) “the results are positive---a 25% reduction in violent crime and a 51% reduction in property crime.[i]  

Steve Major explains that the Urban Safety Corps will help recruit Blight Squad members, seek donations of perennial plants for roadway medians, especially Chevrolet Avenue, patrol the streets picking up trash, and seek funding for increased lighting and camera systems in the park and recreation area.  A long, ambitious list, but the Corps will allow the Blight Squad shift gears and concentrate on ridding the area of graffiti and maintaining cleaned properties.

And the maintenance challenge is substantial.  About 60 vacant properties need solar security lighting installed; their front yards will be seeded with “alternative lawns” (ground cover like a white clover perennial used by the Land Bank) that reduces mowing and watering.  Rototillers can be rented at Flint’s Neighborhood Engagement Hub Tool Shed.

Blight Squad Enforcement is now in effect in Mott Park.  Two uniformed safety officers work with Flint Police to monitor residential code enforcement in the neighborhood.  As Steve puts it, now the Mott Park “ship needs to be tightened.”

As houses have gone derelict, graffiti or tagging has boomed.  The Blight Squad goal is to paint over all tagging as quickly as possible. Alert to the geographical pattern of tagging, the Blight Squad monitors the movement of gang-type activity in Mott Park.  Several Blight Squad participants have formed the Mott Park Public Safety team to patrol the neighborhood during late night hours.  They alert police to break ins, count windows out, and check for squatters.  Summer will bring an uptick in this work---more street activity, more people outside late at night. 

Summertime also brings problem houses, technically termed “nuisance houses.”  Last summer, the Blight Squad and the Mott Park Neighborhood Association worked with Kettering and neighborhood police officers to monitor a property on Frank St.  A record of complaints, police calls, and neighbors’ phone videos led to action with the Neighborhood Association able to notify the owner that the residence has been listed as a nuisance house and civil action will be taken.  What seemed to be a “party house” was in fact an “illegal rave.”  Eventually the renter was arrested.

Deep and pervasive social and economic problems form the bedrock of residential deterioration. According to Realtor.com, the burned-out house on Joliet was built in 1920.  Zillow lists March 2015 as the last date it sold---$3,500.00 Rental companies, many from out of state, buy up such properties. Renters need economical housing, but few are able---for whatever reason---to maintain properties as home owners.   Mott Park, once a middle-class district, today is struggling for its life.   

Is the Blight Squad ready for another year of struggle?  Steve Major says “the work is like household chores.  You dread doing it, but you see that you must.  You work as a team and the camaraderie is great.  After it’s done we feel good, even if we are exhausted.”  

At the March 26^th clean up I asked Blight Squad veteran and seven-year Mott Park resident Bo Cummins how he felt after a year of doing this work.  He says, “This is like a disease on the body---you have to attack it wherever it turns up. Am I discouraged?  No, I love this. When I don’t do anything---that’s discouraging.” 

Steve Major is optimistic too.  “Do I think we can save the neighborhood?  Questions come, sometimes I feel like we are losing the battle.  My wife tells me that’s just because now I know more about what was always there.  Recently, power at the Plumbers’ Union building went out and there was a break in.  We have to go back and re-do the work.  But the City is more responsive to our neighborhood now.  The culture in Mott Park has improved, the Facebook posts are more positive.” 

Today the Blight Squad is part of Mott Park life, maybe even its beating heart. Other organs---the Neighborhood Association and the Mott Park Recreation Area are healthy and functioning.  But the heart is special; residents are enormously proud of the Squad’s work. Each time photos of a newly cleaned up property are posted on Facebook, neighbors pour out their gratitude and admiration. The Blight Squad Facebook banner photo (taken by Steve’s son, Kenny) is a black and white shot that has a “noir” quality about it.  Men with determined expressions and crossed arms as if to say---as Steve said at that first clean up back in June 2016---“We’ve just had enough.”

If readers are interested in donating to the work of the Blight Squad, the Mott Park Neighborhood Association website provides a link where contributions earmarked for the Blight Squad can be made. More information? You can reach the Blight Squad by email mpblightsquad@gmail.com

---

[i] Data from Michigan State Police who capture all Flint Police Department data.  Michigan State Police provides data to CORE Community ComStat, a group of law enforcement agencies and security groups who meet monthly to review area crime statistics. 

For more essays go to East Village Magazine online at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org

Jazz Night

Tuesday night in downtown Flint and that means jazz at Soggy Bottom.  On this cool April evening a gust of wind propels several people through the front door just as the smiling drummer John Hill grabs the mic and announces over his drum set, “We’re going to do some spring songs!” Together with Pat Cronley on the keyboard and Jack McDonald on the bass, John opens the first set.  The sticks go down and John looks radiantly happy.  I think he is the happiest jazz drummer I’ve ever seen.

Jazz Night at Soggy Bottom has been going for nearly three years. It was the brainchild of Andy Sartwell, the Soggy Bottom’s premier bartender.  Andy was good friends with Jack McDonald (a Linden High School grad now studying music at Western).  Good friends, they played indie music around Flint.  Andy pitched the idea for jazz night to Soggy Bottom’s bar manager Ken Laatz and he agreed.  Andy called Pat Cronley and Jack contacted John.  

The Jack McDonald Jazz Trio was a go.    

According to John, the first couple of jazz nights the audience was thin; when he looked over to the raised seating area, he says, rolling his eyes in untypical distress, hardly anyone was there.  But attendance grew.

You’d never know there’d ever been a sparse attendance night now.  

By the second set the bar is packed, clusters of standees clumped behind the stools; newcomers enter, heads pivoting in search of a place to sit.  Sidling along the bar to the back they glance into the backroom pool table.   Barely visible through a glass door is a patio where hardy smokers sit under the umbrella tables, overlooked by a Kevin Burdick mural on the building’s back wall.  Climbing a couple of steps to the raised seating area that overlooks the bar and band area, the newcomers poke their heads round to the side room. Tables with club chairs (and a second pool table)---all full.   

Soggy Bottom is packed.   Some sigh and leave, but mostly they make another standing cluster and eye the bar for departures.   

Various trumpet and sax players join the trio for Tuesday jazz.  Two frequent crowd pleasers are trumpeters Walter White and Dwight Adams.  A surprise one night was Ukrainian trumpeter Yakiv Tsvietinskyi, who had met Jack McDonald in Kalamazoo at  Western Michigan University.  A new foreign music student at Western, Yakiv showed up at the WMU Union jazz jams and met Jack.  Jack invited Yakiv to come to Flint (new to Michigan, Yakiv had no idea how far away Flint was from Kalamazoo).

I talked to Yakiv, a veteran of European jazz fests with his own modern jazz trio, “LLT”.   Between sets we chatted about Ukraine (Yakiv is from Dnipropetrovsk) and his coming marriage to his love, Marianna, an opera singer, who will join him in Kalamazoo.  

Some nights Nick Calandro is on the bass. Nick once took a class from me at UM-Flint (he remembers this better than I do). That’s how Soggy Bottom Jazz Night goes---you never know who you’ll run into. Former Mott Park neighbors who’ve moved to peaceful glades of Flushing or Fenton return to the city for jazz.  
The repertoire varies with the soloist, but “Caravan,” “In a sentimental mood,” “Song for my father” are frequent.  John introduces the musicians and the numbers---“We’re going to do a ballad,” he says. Or we’ll get some education about composers and styles. Or jazz trivia: “This was the only piece Charlie Parker ever wrote in a minor key.  Do we know that?” he implishly queries Pat Cronley.   Pre-break signature is a jazzy version of “The Flintstones” theme song.

Late on a full night, local singers like Gwen Hemphill take to the mic---here Gwen sings "At Last." Later, people take to the floor to dance.

John is a music educator with 23 years experience in public schools. He taught percussion for 6 years at UM-Flint and he’s also taught 10 years at Mott. Now he teaches music at Oxford high school, and all instruments---piano, guitar, theory, jazz.  But not band.  

Maybe that’s why John started the bi-monthly blast known as Big Band night.  The idea for Big Band night grew out of a jam session music teachers do for their students on Honors Band Day. Each year in January under the auspices of the Michigan School Band and Orchestra Association, music educators and their students gather for Honors Band Day.  The tradition began about eight years ago.  The students practice all morning and then the teachers (20 different band directors) get together in the afternoon and play for them.

For Big Band night John turns to his music educator colleagues to serve as section leaders (trumpet, sax, trombone) and the section leaders pull together their players.  John organizes the music and gets it ready.  If John can get another drummer, he’s free to conduct and you’ll hear instructions to the players, something about the measures or the coda.  

Musicians drive in from a twenty-mile radius and form 20-piece band.  It’s all pretty spontaneous after that; ninety percent of the time they have no rehearsals.  Different musicians will take a solo.  

By 5pm the place is packed.  Cars fill the adjacent lots---the Local Grocer and the former Jag the Haberdasher area.  The trio will play a first set, allowing time for all the brass musicians to arrive.  They gather in the side pool room where John has laid out music sheets on the pool table.

It’s all fun for John.  He comes in smiling, even late or rushed, and heaves his drums around chatting with people the whole time.  Music fans cluster at the front end of the bar and friends hang over the railing from the table area to talk.  John radiates optimism, and a good thing too. He has a non-stop schedule with teaching and his family of four kids---one entering college, two teenagers, and a four-year old.  All except the youngest are involved with music.  Along with his three eldest, John played in church at Holy Redeemer on Easter.

Big Band night takes place the last Tuesday every other month. Check the Events list on Soggy Bottom’s Facebook page---other nights and special events are listed there.

Support jazz---celebrate International Jazz Day, Sunday, April 30, with the Soggy Bottom musicians and many others from around Michigan. The music takes place 1 to 5 pm at the Atwood Stadium Parking lot. Hear some of Michigan’s finest musicians and vocalists at this free concert.  More information on this Flint celebration go to  
http://jazzonwheels.org and its background at http://jazzday.com

For more essays go to East Village Magazine online at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org

Indivisible San Pedro

It’s February 16^th and a big rainstorm is predicted for California tonight.  It is also day 27 of the new administration of the 45^th President of the United States. I’ve come out for the first meeting of San Pedro, California, residents interested in a movement to resist the Trump agenda called “Indivisible” (https://www.indivisibleguide.com). I live in nearby Torrance this time of the year, so I’ve turned up too.

Indivisible emerged from the experience of former congressional staffers who saw first-hand the methods of the Tea Party in 2009 that successfully pressured congressional Republicans to block the Obama agenda.  After the Trump election these ex-staffers coordinated to produce a nuts-and-bolts guide to the tactics that they knew from experience worked. 

Ezra Levin (former staffer to Texas Democratic representative Lloyd Doggett) together with some 30 others collaborated on a 26-page document called the "Indivisible Guide" that explains how to organize by Congressional districts and influence senators and representatives.  Initially a Google- doc in mid-December, the Guide went viral in January when it was publicized by Robert Reich and George Takei, and featured in an opinion piece in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/to-stop-trump-democrats-can-learn-from-the-tea-party.html).

 The Guide became a website (https://www.indivisibleguide.com/) that now lists a network of some 7,000 groups across the country organized to resist the Trump agenda. Local groups emphasize actions recommended by the Guide’s authors to influence their members of Congress or MoC.  Citizens show up en masse to Congressional district offices and events, they flood Congressional phone lines, and they write letters.  The goal? Let the members of Congress know that the constituents are watching; challenge elected Republicans about their wrong-headed policies, and support or stiffen the spines of Democrats. 

I’m 10 minutes late for the 7 pm start and the parking lot is full.

The room is full too---it’s one of the former Army barracks atop the bluff of San Pedro that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Constructed in 1941 to house draftees for the anticipated war, it survives---sturdy and serviceable---from the administration of the 32^nd President.  Today part of Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, this barrack, Building H, is a large open space that is used by dance and yoga teachers. Its golden oak floor is still in good condition after 76 years.

I estimate 90 to 100 people are seated, some brought their own chairs, a few sit on tables at the side, or like me, just stand against the walls.  It’s a kick-off meeting; for political old timers, much of the agenda is predictable (the Indivisible Guide Toolkit provides a template).

Meeting organizers announce this group’s name “IndivisibleSP”---“Indivisible San Pedro.”   Introducing themselves, they explain their functions and call for volunteers to assist---an overall coordinator (Mark), a news/media relations contact (Peter), social media/membership (Samantha), film/recording actions (Melanie) and a secretary (Erin).  White sign boards across their chests state their functions and four have names of the four California members of Congress that this Indivisible group will track: California Senators Feinstein and Harris, and Representatives Lieu (33^rd District where I live in Torrance, whose district includes part of San Pedro) and Barragán of the 44^th District which dominates the rest of San Pedro.       

The speakers emphasize the approach recommended by the Indivisible Guide: demystify advocacy, be inclusive, focus on your MoCs or members of Congress. The routine is weekly organizational and planning meetings and some action that members can do, whether from home (write letters, make phone calls) or events to attend like the swearing-in roadshow at San Pedro High School of newly elected Nanette Barragán.  Future “actions” will be held at their district offices and effort will be concerted since over 50 Indivisible groups exist within a 20-mile radius. Congressman Lieu and Senator Harris are active on social media like Twitter and update their followers, but Feinstein is less visible and we need to see more of her---she has four offices in the state and we will show up there. 

Mark (coordinator) urges using https://www.congress.gov/ to follow our representatives, what bills they are working on, and track their schedules for town halls and other events when they return to their districts---return to us.  Shake hands and when appropriate, tell them “You are doing a great job.”   If the member doesn’t take questions, then we shake hands and make a statement---and we all use the same statement.  The goal is a relationship with MoCs and their staffers, to let them know their constituents are watching; photos and filming is welcomed at events to spread the views of these electeds.

Peter (news/media relations) elaborates: “Publicity, releases and video about our actions will go out to news media and be spread directly to the public through social media.  Indivisible relies primarily on defensive tactics that oppose what Trump and Congress is doing, but we will also be undertaking some  offensive gambits that will include pushing for Trump to release his taxes, calling for Congressional investigations into Russian interference and collusion in the election,  as well as pushing Democrats maintain a 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees.”

As the formal part of the meeting winds up, a basket is passed around for contributions to defray the cost of room rental.  Samantha (social media/membership) explains the final part of the meeting routine:  break into small groups to talk and get to know one another. 

Mark reminds us that form letters to Feinstein and Harris urging a vote against Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch are out in the entry way---typed templates with a brief text.  Tablets are there; you can quickly write out a personalized letter with your name and address.

Someone calls out a reminder that the Pruitt vote for EPA is tomorrow, Friday.  Get on the phones!

Tonight’s agenda is done. As people leave, some cluster in the entryway to copy the letter text provided---just tearing off the sheets from ruled tablets and rapidly copying the four-line paragraph, adding their own views or taking a picture with their phone so they can write later from home.  I’m not a California resident so I get a photo of the template too; I can change the header and use it in Michigan. I’m already signed up for Indivisible meeting in my home county, Genesee, in March.

It’s only 7:40---less than an hour has passed. Citizen action proves disarmingly simple.

“This effort will require commitment and it will take place over many months,” says the media coordinator Peter. “But remember: There are more of us than them. We have been going forward for the past decade and Trump wants to take us backwards on voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, the environment, sustainable energy, so many things. We have fought too long and too hard and we don’t intend to stop supporting them.”

An old friend, two mothers, and a march

I haven’t seen Judy for fifty years, but here she is on Facebook, standing next to a sign that reads: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit.” Her face not really familiar to me but it triggers the memory of another face---her mother.  Of course, I might not recognize Judy herself after so many decades and never seeing her as a grown up.  But when we were kids our mothers were in their prime.  I remember their adult faces very well, those female models in our child lives, sometimes adversaries or rivals, subjects of our intense interest about their mysterious world of grown women and their secrets which we were beginning to intuit. And so it was Judy’s mother who jumped out at me from the computer screen, there at the Women’s March in San Francisco on January 21, as if from another world.

I last saw Judy when we were in the fifth grade, she with tousled black hair and the heft of a tomboy who could be rascally, her antics hovering at the fringe of legal elementary school decorum.  We grew up in northern California and lived on the outskirts of our town where our school was nestled at the dead end of a valley. Classes were small, the postwar baby boom having just barely begun to swell the numbers of children. 

When I commented about recalling her mother’s face, Judy (now Judith) responded that when she was six years old her mother took her to a march against nuclear war. The year must have been 1951 or 52, six years after Hiroshima. My mother was not as daring. Judy’s mom was probably the most radical woman my mother knew during my grade school years and I suspect that my mother was awed by her.

So here we are on Facebook, Judith and I, sharing pictures of our respective marches, she in northern California and me near Los Angeles; bolstered by seeing others, we’ve powered through a fortnight of demonstrations. 

For the first one, the Day of Action to Save Health Care, I went downtown to LA General, officially the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center.  Founded in 1878 and one of the largest public hospitals in the US, the old hospital (Mary Pickford laid its cornerstone in 1930) stands on a hilltop in an area called Boyle Heights, once a wild mix of Jewish, east European, Hispanic, Portuguese, and Japanese.  Today it’s Latino east LA. The site reminds me of Hurley hospital in Flint, with its current “old” building up high and new additions grafted onto it below. Around the bus stop at the foot of the hospital hillside several bundles stowed under benches await the homeless who gather at night around the exhaust grates that belch gusts of warm air from the hospital.

Some 800 or 1000 people stand on the steps of the new entrance to the medical center that slopes down to the street. There’s a podium, yellow tape, and a small tent to our right where security men are visible between the flaps. The first speakers are women who tell their stories of severe, chronic conditions, of how they survived without medicine until the ACA came along.  Then white coated staff from the hospital are introduced and the first one stuns me.  He is an African American psychologist in the Emergency Department---LA County is a Level I Trauma Center like Hurley. He announces that he was raised in Grand Blanc, Michigan.   He rises today, he says, to speak about Flint and the suffering there due to lead contamination. People listen in hushed amazement to this horror story from far away. 

Finally, Kamala Harris, California’s new senator, recounts her first 48 hours in the Hart Senate building, as old timers scurried through the halls for the late night “vote-a-rama” marathon that culminated with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (http://www.rollcall.com/news/hoh/vote-rama-watch-young-brings-reporters-snacks).  She tells about her parents who met in Berkeley in the 1960s, in another era of movements and marches, and then closes quoting Coretta Scott King: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.” Do not give up hope, she exhorts us.  

The following Saturday I joined a small "sister" march in the LA area.  Redondo Beach organizers offered an option for families with children, a less than two-mile walk, accessible as the organizers emphasized, for little legs.  For old legs too, I thought. The crowd gathered slowly, women greeting one another with happy surprise, as if slightly amazed that the event was going to come off.  Morning on the SoCal coast and only in the high 50s, the hand-held megaphone no match for the gusty ocean air and women glad for the warmth of a pussy hat.

Discipline from marches past came back to me as we walk: close up the spaces and don’t leave gaps in the march, link arms only if there’s danger, signal politely to drivers who try to exit through the line of marchers. But this is a very relaxed, suburban group---middle aged and younger. What would they know of civil rights or antiwar demonstration drill?  People seem happy to be doing something, conversations are lively.  Word passed through the crowd that the organizers here got a permit for 30 people---half way through the march someone ran by us shouting the count: 1800.  

No chants in laid back beach land or what I miss most, singing---civil rights marches swelled to the lyrics of black church hymns, spirits rose on the resonant African American voice.  Folk song buoyed antiwar marches; Woody Guthrie optimism pierced with the scratchy laments of Bob Dylan, the quaver of Joan Baez, the solo voice as tenuous as the concept of peace.  Anthems will come; it’s early days yet.

Meantime, other work continues. Coming up on the LA January calendar is the annual Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count takes place from January 24 through 26, a mission to count those on the streets and in shelters---in 2016 it was year the largest homeless census in the nation.  For three evenings volunteers in yellow vests will head out with clipboards---a metonymy bequeathed to us in Obama’s Chicago valedictory speech (http://www.theycountwillyou.org/homelesscount). The tallies provide data to support a tax for services to homeless. 

Judy’s mother would be 104 this year, my mother (who finally got political during Adlai Stevenson’s second presidential campaign) would have turned 100. We carry our mothers’ experience and our own, over six decades worth.  Yes, we are still protesting. Believe it.

Read more essays like this one at East Village Magazine online at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org