senior center tempest

For a few brief minutes this morning the sky was littered with pink zebras ... brilliant stripes rising up and moving across the grey pastureland of the coming day. Then they were gone, leaving in their wake the grey ... and the old chestnut, "Red sky in the morning/ Sailors take warning./ Red sky at night/ Sailors delight..

Yesterday, I blew my writing wad on the local senior center, dipping my oar in the argument that the Park and Rec department (through the mayor) had exceeded its mandate by appropriating senior center space for the office space it needed. Actually, the mayor made the call without consulting the old geezers who use the center and in some cases love it. "My bad" the mayor conceded at a public meeting that brought out the old duffers: The appropriated space was "temporary," he said, but he declined to put a time limit on when it might end and the old folks are smart enough to know that once something is in place, it is doubly hard to undo.

Somehow the situation banged some very old red-meat distastes in my mouth ... suspecting that putting the pinch on the elderly was a safe bet because they were convivial pushovers. I sent an email to all the city councilors and all of the trustees of the senior center suggesting that now was the time to create a search committee to find less "temporary" digs. My ward representative responded that such a group was beyond the mandate of the city council, to which I replied that if the councilors were inventive enough to get elected, surely they were inventive enough to represent and defend an underserved constituency... shaping, as they might, the court of public opinion.

The issue is more nuanced than what is presented here and it will probably all fall between the cracks and be forgotten, but I had my say, much to my surprise. It took the stuffing out of this old chicken.

And yesterday as well, the thought blip turned briefly to a clear reality I cannot adequately explain, but someone may find useful. My Zen teacher was right: "Create the universe." Anything less will leave people dissatisfied and forever creating improvements that don't honestly improve.