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  • Trust in the Land

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    76  bar falls 29.85  1mph ESE dew-point 60  Summer, sunny headed toward hot

    Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

    “Over 200 LEED-certified new homes are being built by the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation under the auspices of…Dudley Neighbors Inc., Boston’s two-decade-old community land trust — a burgeoning affordable housing strategy where residents buy the homes but not the land underneath, thus reducing the price.”   This from the Land Institute website yesterday.

    Another memory jogger.   25 years ago I worked in a small University of Minnesota and hospital dominated neighborhood of Minneapolis called Cedar-Riverside.  A grand plan for very dense housing proposed by Keith Heller, a UofM economics professor and Gloria Segal, a Minnesota DFL heavyweight would have buried the community with housing for more than 25,000 people.  That would have meant fitting a city the size of Andover on a plot of land that is a small neighborhood by Minneapolis standards, a plot of land those 25,000 + would have shared with Augsburg College, St. Mary’s Hospital, Fairview Hospital, and the University’s West Bank campus which included the Wilson Library, two towers of classroom space and a performing arts center.

    Citizens of the neighborhood fought back, filed an environmental impact lawsuit, a notion then in its infancy, and won.  The settlement of that lawsuit provided the neighborhood with several million dollars to use in developing the community at a level consistent with the residents wishes.  We pursued several innovative community development strategies in those days.

    Among them was a land-trust.  This was well in advance of the land-trust referred to in the Land Institute quote.  It worked like this.

    We developed different housing options, mostly townhomes, all as co-operatives, that is, resident managed and jointly owned.   These were limited-equity co-ops, meaning you paid a small fee up front to join the co-operative, usually around a $1,000 and when you moved you sold your unit back to the co-op and received your fee back in return.  This idea had two positives from a community development perspective.  First, it allowed low-income people entree to a self-governing living situation (no landlord or they became the landlord).  Second, it discouraged speculation in the individual units which would make the units affordable over time.

    The land-trust was a guard against a problem that had occurred in the 70’s in some cities. Community based developers would build low-income housing units as co-ops, then turn the whole project over to the co-operative.  As time went by and the property values increased, the co-op and its land would become more and more valuable.  Eventually, a for-profit developer would make the co-op and offer they couldn’t refuse and the co-ops would sell out.   This removed the housing from the ranks of affordable housing, defeating the original purpose in its construction.

    The landtrust prevented that in two ways.  First, the land was  held in trust by a third party, usually a land trust corporation controlled by a community development corporation or the community development corporation itself.  This made every transaction for the whole a three party negotiation with the land-trust holding veto rights.  Second, a clause in the contract stipulated that if the land ever was sold, it triggered a penalty which equaled the interest on all the years since the projects completion.

    A secondary aspect of the land-trust was its ability to lower the overall cost of the housing by taking land out of the total development equation.

    No good deed goes unpunished, however, and I imagine the good folks in Boston will find similar problems to those that have developed in Cedar-Riverside.  Turns out everyone wants a piece of the increase in home value pie.  Tenants became incensed when all they got back was their original fee instead of an inflation or value multiplied amount.  Co-ops also vary a good deal in the people who come to share responsibility for them.  Sometimes general management was an issue, too.  Still, in my mind, the land-trust remains a sound tool for developing and maintaing housing affordable to all.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Memories Politics 📎and tagged

  • The Generator Failed

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    60  bar falls 30.16 0mph NW dew-point 36  Beltane, twilight

                  Last Quarter of the Hare Moon 

     This story grabbed me.  See below it to see why.

    “MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said. Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.

    Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working for the iron lung after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said.

    “We did everything we could do but we couldn’t keep her breathing,” said Beyer, who was called to the home shortly after the power failed. “Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn’t have the strength to keep going.”

    Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said emergency crews were called to the scene, but could do little to help.

    Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.”

     I learned a couple of years ago that I spent some time in an iron lung during my episode with bulbar polio.  It was a shock to me.   Paralysis struck my left side and lasted for about a year.  I recall one event in an emergency room or an operating room, lights above my body, people in white working on me.  I saw all this from a spot up near the ceiling.  I know this sounds weird, but the memory has permanent residence in me.  The remarkable part is that no one from the family was in this  room.  Just me.  And the medical team.

    Seeing this story reminds me of all the others, like me, who were victims of the post-war polio epidemic.  Most of us made it through with little physical aftermath, but some died.  Some still wear braces.  Some required breathing support of one kind or another for their entire life.  It all seems so long ago, but this woman was exactly my age. 

    I wrote some today on Superior Wolf, about 1,500 words.  Moving forward.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Writing 📎and tagged

  • There Are Days, Ordinary Days

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    58  bar rises 29.80 2mph W dewpoint 30 Beltane

    New Moon (Hare Moon)

    There are days, ordinary days, days you can recall, when your life took a sharp angle turn, or created a swooping curve, perhaps dipped underground or soared up, up into the sky.

    It seems I remember, though how could I really, the day I got polio.  I don’t know how this memory got shaped or if it got shaped in the way all  memory does, by our selective recollection of snippets of moments, but here it is.

    My mother and I were at the Madison County Fair, held every August on the grounds of Beulah Park.  Mom had wrapped me in a pink blanket and we wandered through the Midway.  There were bright lights strung in parabolic curves and the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs.  I looked out from the blanket, safe on my mother’s shoulder, held in her arms.  And I felt a chill run through me.

    Years later I was with my Dad, early in the morning.  We sat in those plastic cuplike chairs in a pale green room.  My mother came up in an elevator on her way to emergency surgery.  Surgeons would try to relieve pressure on her brain from the hemorrhage she had suffered a week before during a church supper.  I got in the elevator and rode up with her.  Her eyes looked away from me, but saw me anyway.  “Soaohn.” she said.  It was the last time she spoke to me.  I was 17.

    The evening of my first marriage I wandered down a path in Mounds Park where the ceremony had taken place.  I wore a blue ruffled shirt, music of the Rolling Stones carried through the moist July air.  Butterflies landed on my shoulder.

    The night the midnight plane arrived from Calcutta carrying a 4 pound, 4 ounce boy.

    The third week of our honeymoon, a northern journey begun in Rome, found us at our northernmost destination Inverness, Scotland.  We had rooms at the Station Hotel, right next to railroad terminal.  It was a cool foggy night and we took a long walk, following for much it the River Ness, which flows into Loch Ness.  We held hands and looked at this old Scots village, the capital of the Highlands.  A mist rose over a church graveyard on our right.

    And today.  Planting beets and carrots.  Kate taking a phone call.  The news from the lab about Gabe. Now, after this sunny spring day, life will go on, but its trajectory has changed, changed in a profound way, in a way none of us can yet know.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Garden Memories 📎and tagged

  • History Changes the Past

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    35  bar steady 30.04 2mph WSW dewpoint 26 Spring

                  Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds

    History changes the past.  Comic books were bad, bad, bad when I was a kid.  I knew this because my mother told me so.  I could read Tarzan and a couple of others I can’t recall, but never Batman, Superman, or any of the darker comic fare.  Like many kids I hid the Superman and others inside my stacks of Tarzans.  Also, like many in those days, when Marvel comics came out I was a teen-ager and Mom was no longer a taste-maker in my world.  The Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the Silver Surfer and my personal favorite, Dr. Strange became staples in my library alongside War and Peace, Crime and Punishment.

    Only in the past couple of months have I learned why comics were bad.  Fredric Wertham, a German born immigrant and psychiatrist, saw Superman and the superhero ilk as sub rosa evocations of the Übermensch, Nietzsche’s man who transcended morality and who Nazi’s believed justified their crimes. 

    Well, all I can say is, that Fredric must not have read a Superman comic.  Superman fought for Truth, Justice and the American Way.  Any kid who watched the TV program could tell you that.  Batman was too troubled to be an ubermensch or an undermensch. 

    This history has changed my past.  I always thought it was just a pacifist quirk of Mom’s that she restricted my comic reading, after all I learned from her to carry bugs outside in a kleenex and liberate them.  But no, it was another parenting influence, like Dr. Spock, only this one was a psychiatrist who probably believed Freud had it right after all.  It helps me see Mom as a parent, a person searching for advice on how to raise her children, how to keep them from harmful influences. 

    Boy, when I think of the fifties I realize how few really harmful influences seemed available, at least in Alexandria, Indiana.  No  rap.  Few drugs.  They weren’t on our radar.  An STD might have been an additive for gasoline.

    I began watching horror and science fiction movies as soon as I could scrape $.25 together to spend on my own.  I don’t know why Mom never stopped me from seeing those.  Or, maybe I didn’t tell her.  I can’t recall and she died when I was 17 so I never got a chance to ask her.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Memories 📎and tagged

  • An Indiana Farm on Kauai

    Posted on by Charles Comment

                                 9  bar rises 30.24  1mph NNW windchill 5

                                                        New Moon

                                       roosteranddoves300.jpg

    When I was a boy, say 12 and under, each summer I would visit my Uncle Riley and Aunt Virginia for a couple of weeks or so.  They lived on the farm my grandfather had put together.  It was a couple hundred acres of corn, a few cows, a pig or two, harness-racing horses and chickens, Bantams with the Banty roosters and their mile-high attitude and morning curdling cock-a-doodle-doo.  These memories have a particular smell, a mixture of gravel dust, hay and cow manure.  They also have an increasingly antique feel as they recede further and further from the present day.

    Imagine my surprise when these memories came alive all day, every day while we were on Kauai and all because of Hurrican I’niki.  In 1992, just before we first visited Kauai, it was struck by a rare and devastating hurricane.  This hurricane eliminated many resorts, including the famous Coco Palms where Elvis shot his movie, Blue Hawai’i.  Many homes blew away, trees and plants got pushed over and beaches changed their shapes. 

    I’niki also opened up all of the many chicken coops on the island.  Once free, the chickens never again came home to roost, but instead have now made the entire island their home.  They are, like the feral pig, wild animals, freed to roam wherever they like in a paradise of bugs and small worms.

    The result is that often throughout the day the sound of a Banty rooster crowing reverberates whether you’re on the beach, in the forests, up a mountain or near a river.  The chickens come around pic-nic tables and wait patiently for food.  Local children pick up the roosters and carry them like puppies down to the beach.  As a result, Uncle Riley and his farm came to mind day after day on the most isolated islands in the world, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. 

    Now that was unexpected.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • Cisco Kid, Ramar of the Jungle and Sargent Preston of the Yukon

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    22  71%  26%  3mph N bar29.99 falls windchill19 Imbolc

                   Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

     A late night.  Every time I stay up late watching election returns, as I have tonight, I recall the Stevenson/Eisenhower race.  Dad and I sat up until 3 in the morning watching election returns.  It was a magical time for me.  I got to stay up late; Dad stayed up with me.  We shared an interest in the political realm, even though I was only 5 years old.  You may think that’s odd, but at the age of 6 I proved the point.

    Mr. Gross had picked me up at church to drive me to a meeting with some friends.  As we drove out in the country, he asked me, “Charlie, are you a Democrat or a Republican?”  I said, “Democrat.”  He said, “Well, I don’t allow Democrats to ride in my car.” 

    “Stop the car, Mr. Gross,” I said, “I’ll get out and walk.”     

    We had one of the first televisions in our little Indiana town because Bob Feemster, a Wall Street Journal executive who own the Times-Tribune, the paper my Dad edited, thought the newspaper editor needed to keep up with the new technology.

    Most of the time I found the Cisco Kid, Ramar of the Jungle, Captain Midnight and Sargent Preston of the Yukon much more to my taste, but around elections, I watched right along with Dad.  Very soon after that I became a poll watcher, which meant I stationed myself at one of Alexandria’s precincts and when the vote count finished I called in the results to the paper. 

    Tonight I can’t tell what the numbers mean quite yet, though I did hear an amazing number if it’s true.  Hillary Clinton wins voters making 50,000 and below, while Obama wins with voters making more than 50,000.  If these are accurate numbers, it’s an interesting story and one to ponder.

    This is the best election I can remember, ever.  Issues.  Candidates.  Momentous decisions.  Perhaps a turning point in American history.  I hope.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Politics 📎and tagged

  • Bloggin with Palm Trees

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    18  89%  28%  0mph NNE  bar 30.12 steady windchill17  Imbolc

                  Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Opened up my e-mail program today and had 29 messages.  A big morning for me is 5 or 6.  What the hell? 

    Another lesson in the cyber world.  There are bots that crawl the web seeking out certain words or phrases, then link their source to another web page.  In some instances that’s google and can help others find your website if the title words you use resonate.  In most instances and certainly the most annoying instances the links go back to such intriguing locations as Addiction Levitra, Texas Facts Auto Insurance, Mexico Amoxil and HCL Dosing Tramadol.  Each one linked by some $%#@! algorithim to the words I had inadvertently used as the title for a post:  damn it!   A month or so ago I had a post that had the words body and flesh in it.  This was about the earth and her products.  You can imagine the links I got then.  Cyber world folks call these ping backs. 

    I have had three ping backs out of hundreds that I kept, that is didn’t delete as spam.  One came in from a website for the Teaching Company from whom I buy the occasional lecture course, another from the NFL website and a recent one from Paul Douglas, the WCCO weather guy and his Climate Change website.  It’s a good thing wordpress has a straightforward, if not quick, way of eliminating ping backs.

    In case you missed it–like you live in Singapore or Bangkok for instance–today is Super Bowl Sunday.  I tried to find out much beer we consume on Super Bowl Sunday but according to the Beer Institute (I know, but there really is one.) it’s not possible to track single day consumption.  A spokesman did say, “the Super Bowl is a good event in the ‘off season’ (cold months) to drive volume”

    Each year I wonder why I watch football, yet, somehow, I’ve developed an interest and now have enough years watching to have a sense of historical perspective.  That makes it, for me, much more interesting. So, yes, I’ll be there in my seat, though sans beer, sans snacks and sans favorite, though I lean toward the Giants just because they’re the underdogs.

     Allison wondered if I plan to blog while in Hawai’i.  Yep.  Like football I’ve developed an interest in blogging, though this interest predates my football jones by quite a few years.  I have three bookshelves of journals of various types and sizes.  I imagine this habit came with mother’s milk, or should I say father’s ink and lead.  Dad wrote a weekly column for the Alexandria Times-Tribune, Smalltown USA, for many, many years. 

    There is something about being able to read the breadcrumbs of your life, sprinkled out at various ages and stages.  In some instances it’s revelatory, in others it’s “Oh, my god.  What was I thinking?”  I suppose its a similar feeling artists get from paintings and sketches made over many years.  Or photo albums and all those home movies.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • Is It a Time to Advance or Retreat?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    27  66%  18%  1mph ENE bar29.95 falls windchill26  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    A strange, sometimes troubling struggle has broken out in the responsible section of my Self.  The sometimes subtle, sometimes hammer blow obvious skirmishes have me puzzled about what actions to take, if any.  The formal study of Daoism I began a couple of weeks ago has begun to push me in a way that I hope will resolve this matter, or at least give me a way to handle it.

    The struggle is over politics.  As I’ve written elsewhere politics defined my life during my late teens, 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s.  That is to say, by my junior year in high school I was a political animal, a politician and an activist.  President of my high school class for my freshman, junior and senior years, a favorite teacher pushed the Little United Nations Assembly of Indiana to accept me as the presiding officer for the 1965 Little United Nations.  The year before I represented the Republic of Chad.  In the fall of 1965 we protested the CIA recruiters on the campus of Wabash and I never looked back. 

    Draft eligible and permanently active from that point forward I got involved in civil rights, student rights and anti-war politics. I was a student senator for three years at Ball State, then ran an unsuccessful campaign for president of the student body.  I helped organize and lead anti-draft and anti-war rallies, marches and teach-ins. 

    In seminary I pushed the seminary on anti-war politics, became an early feminist and began a ten year involvement with anti-racism training.

    While working at Community Involvement Programs as their janitor and weekend counselor, I lived in the Stevens Square Neighborhood.  There I got involved in neighborhood level politics, leading an effort to push General Mills out of the community and organizing the Stevens Square Neighborhood Association.  Made a lot of friends and few enemies.  It was fun.  This was the 1970’s. 

    In 1978 the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area hired me to work on the West Bank as a community minister.  I got involved in community based economic development, building affordable housing, organizing against unemployment and for broader community involvement in the management of philanthropy. 

    In 1984 I left the West Bank and took over urban missions for the Presbytery which expanded the arena of action.  In various ways I was still at it when I met Kate in 1988. 

    Over all this time I had a very active hand in DFL politics working at the precinct, congressional and state levels.  Then I left the Presbytery in  1991.  Not long after that Kate and I moved to Andover.

    Since then my political work has shrunk to near nothing.  I send the occasional e-mail, make a phone call, show up (sometimes) at the precinct caucus, but I’m part of no ongoing, organized effort to make or change policy.  The whole climate change issue is fraught with political issues of real import, many of them.  I’m interested, especially in water related issues and Lake Superior.   Yet I do almost nothing.

    The 1960’s was a “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” era.  My political superego came into maturity in those times and this notion became a benchmark for my own assessment of responsible behavior. 

    Thus, the struggle.  I wonder, sometimes, where this guy went, this political guy. It’s like he crawled under a rock, but that’s not so.  No, this is a struggle that has moved back and forth in my mind since the move to Andover.

    Now the Daoist studies I’ve engaged propose a way of addressing it.  Daoism suggests that there are times to retreat and times to advance, times which call for more yang, times which call for more yin.  The wise man, Daoism says, adjusts his inner life to what it calls the temporary conditions, the way the Tao manifests itself.  This area of Daoist studies has my attention right now.  I’ll keep you informed because this struggle is not productive and it’s not over.

              


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Memories Politics 📎and tagged