Englewood Story

Link: http://englewoodstory.com

Lost in memories full of feeling, Bill and I sit under our umbrella tree in the back yard of Poets' Rest, Pearl Street. A single candlelight flickers the darkness. Outlined in my peripheral vision stands our chicken coop, turned garden shed. The lines of it also help to evoke the flight of my imagination.

After a while, Bill says, “You are so quiet. What are you thinking?”

I tell him that once, years ago, I dined with the King of Vendaland.

“What did you say?” He’s not sure he heard correctly.

“Not alone, but along with my five band members from Youth For Christ. We had been asked to sing at some teachers colleges and had driven up from South Africa only to find ourselves situated at a dimly campsite. We didn’t have wood for a fire pit, so we cut up salad and rolls and ate simply.

“I remember that in the background, the crackling sounds from British Radio and other places accompanied our meal. Someone had brought us a short wave radio, and we cooked our evening meal to that and laughed and sang with the songs that aired telling memoirs about them. It was surprisingly peaceful, being left to our own devices in the open air.

“Our host brought us some pillows and sleeping gear, and we camped out.

“The next morning, we performed Christian music and testimonies at a teachers college, with an interpreter nearby. The college students danced and waved their arms in approval to the songs, even though, our music was of a very different beat and sound to their own. They were so welcoming.

“Afterwards, we were quickly hustled away with all manner of importance and taken to a hotel with a very long tribal table fitted with chairs waiting in a dimly lit dining room. As we were standing there, the King of Vendaland, decked in grand colorful robes, too hot for summertime, with one of his five wives, the choice flower for social gatherings, accompanied him to the table, and he welcomed us to lunch.

“We listened to the King talk about his Country. Then, we were brought plates of food, and all that I recall from that meal are the giant shrimp on each plate. I’ve never laid eyes on shrimp that size since. I remember all of our gasps and delighted laughter. The shrimp were each the size of a rock lobster tail, about the length of my hand. Fat, juicy, sweet,-- on a bed of rice.”

Bill is insanely jealous, not only because he loves shrimp, but he also wonders why I have never told him this story before. “I don’t know,” I say, “I always think of it when we sit out here like this.”

Link: http://EyeOnEnglewood.com

This Easter marks the one year anniversary of last year's celebration when the Judge dismissed Englewood's first criminal prosecution of us. So I feel it is appropriate to celebrate with an entry in my journal.

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Link: http://www.EyeOnEnglewood.com

Our beautiful four bedroom home was finished…almost. We had touch-up painting and some wood trim to complete. Guys who used to live with us came to help. One of Bill's patients from Craig Hospital offered to help because he said, "I owe Bill big time," and he he helped paint the interior in exchange for a steak dinner.

Our neighbor, Miguel Drake, called the City to complain that we had installed a new water heater. "You know they no longer have a contractor? So, does that require a permit?... No? Then, sorry to bother you." We didn't know Ducky had called until months later when we obtained copies of the City's phone messages.

In late September, 2007, I was hanging curtains in a guest room one afternoon when a call came in from Teikyo Loretto Heights.

It was the South Korean student who was having a hard time. He couldn’t eat American food, and his room was next door to the men’s bathroom. He was starving and he couldn’t sleep.

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Link: http://EyeOnEnglewood.com

When I designed the house and hired the contractor, it was with a contingency for a treehouse in the grand umbrella looking tree out back. I drew a few steps up from the deck out the back of that room and into an awaiting secret hideout in the tree.

Being a tomboy growing up, I was always intrigued with living in trees. My elder sister called me "monkey" and even tried to humiliate me by reporting my new fiancé that I used to make monkey sounds in front of the mirror. She underestimated the fortitude of Wild Bill with Shorts.

Wild Bill, or Bill with Shorts, didn’t come by those nick-names without reason. He was a man who walked to work in the Winter with his little black shorts on. He had some hot blood running through those veins. One of my favorite pictures is of him in his black shorts, black windbreaker, white socks and black sandals on a rocky volcanic mound on a stormy Vancouver coastline holding an umbrella. He looks like Christopher Robin to me somehow.

We were staying in a treehouse designed after the Canadian's Winnie the Poo stories, in a youth hostel, on Salt Spring Island that year for holiday.

On our 10th anniversary, I had bribed him to visit Africa with me by booking us in a tree house that hung over the fiery Zambezi River with crocodiles and hippos beneath, and the possibility of a green mamba snake coiled nearby.

Once, I had discovered an entire magazine of the finest treehouses in the world and dreamed for hours, days, months over it. How was it possible in America to live in a treehouse?

Well, one might buy a property with mature trees, for instance, and then design and build one from the regular house, so that one might have access to a real kitchen and a nearby potty. Yes. That’s it!

We built our home, but with the contractor fired, and my husband a nurse, not a builder of homes or even treehouses, I was a frustrated monkey to be sure.

But after our Seminary boys finished our decks for us (one was building the new Nordstroms downtown with his father who was the project manager there, and the other was an experienced framer from before Seminary days bringing in some of the bread and butter for his family because of the loss of his father who had died prematurely)... I saw that we were already IN the tree.

We no longer needed a treehouse, because the deck was embraced by the limbs of the tree. In short order, that room which was to be a den in the house became our bedroom.

Over the next two years, the wonder of our private getaway in the tree proved magical. The chatter of birds in the early morning woke us up with a childlike wonder plastered across our faces.

We pretended we lived in Africa. We pretended in the rainstorms, and on calm Saturday mornings.

We marveled at the turning of seasons in our tree. In Autumn, the transparent yellow with lemony sunshine radiating through,-- in Winter, the dramatic arching, twisting limbs of black and white, draped in snow, and in Springtime, the baby lime leaves sprouting. This room was my happiness, my secret joy.

On mornings when I had barely slept the night before because of sleepless problem solving with the various onslaughts of the neighbors and the City, I would wake up to the funny squirrels playing in the tree.

I could hear them overhead, running across the roof, see them leap into the tree, chase each other, defy each other, primp each other, hump each other, carry the small furry balls of their babies into safe hiding, and even calmly stared them down a mere two or three feet from eye to eye.

I would bring out rotting fruit as offerings to my entertaining jesters in this courtyard.

The dichotomy of our heavenly Father's loving kindness to us in the midst of our angst was a daily reprieve. In fact, we began to say, this was not the exception to our private hell, but it was rather our private heaven in which hell was attempting to overtake. That put things into perspective.

Once, during the first year of the onslaught, I attempted to propose an ordinance to the City as a remedy for the situation.

In my open records obtained from the City a short time later, I discovered how I was being mocked by the City Manager and City Attorney Brotzman. “What shall we call this ordinance?” One proposed. “Oh, that’s a no-brainer,” came the reply. “Our house is a very, very, very fine house… with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard…” Brotzman had written.

Little did they know.