OPENINGS, GRAND AND OTHERWISE

I think I’ve said it before. One of my favorite sports is putting away campaign brochures and not reading them until the voting is over. Things always seem clearer doing it that way.

Thoughtful people that they are, the folks from the Moses Mayne Council campaign helped me out this year by arranging to have a couple of their pieces not even arrive in the mail until after election day.

The first one came on the Thursday after, announcing the Grand Opening of the new Police Station at Eastmont Mall. Well, actually, the Grand Opening hasn’t been scheduled yet. They are "looking to open sometime in May." The brochure included a little tear-out sheet to mail back to Mr. Mayne so that you can be informed when the actual date was set. So we get an announcement comes about a Grand Opening that has yet to be scheduled for a building that has yet to be completed for a campaign that has already lost. Mercy.

The second piece of Mayne literature arrived almost a week after the election. It announced, on the front of the envelope, that it contained "An important message from MAYOR JERRY BROWN …" [the three dots and the all caps were his, not mine]. And inside the envelope? Nothing. Seems like I wasn’t the only one who got one of these.

Thought about it for a couple of days, and finally figured that maybe this was actually the message.
There’s nothing inside.

* * *

While I was going through my folder of campaign brochures, I came across, again, the infamous car crash piece put out for the Mayne and David Stein Council campaigns. The brochures were both produced by something called the "Pro-Choice Voter Alliance." They show a picture of the mutilated car in which U’Kendra Johnson was riding, next to the car driven by Eric Crawford, apparently taken at the scene of the accident last February.

This is the only print photo of the crash scene that’s ever been made public. And that got me to wondering…who took the picture, and how did it get into the hands of the "Pro-Choice Voter Alliance"? If it was taken by a news photographer, how come it never made it into any of the local papers?

Just a thought.

* * *

It’s gotta be spring. The creek beside our house has suddenly come alive again.

At the coming of the rains last week a lone frog set up shop in the bushes beside the bank, piping out her evening song. By the next day her relatives had begun arriving. Before week’s end they had a regular camp meeting going, so loud you had to close the doors to hear the television.

The mallard duck is back, too. Last summer he lost his mate, so he went off this winter and found another. Lucky duck. They spent one morning bobbing in the little pool just across from our apartment, watching a squirrel and a couple of crows get into an argument. Don’t know what the argument was about but it was definitely an Oakland argument…a lot of fur and feathers raised, and hopping about, and cackling back and forth. Squirrels are tough, but nothing beats a crow for talking smack. Like Ken Kesey said in "Sometimes A Great Notion": "From the tops of the firs they would swoop, laughing with a sort of pitiless amusement at the lesser birds… They reminded her of the magpies…but she thought there must be more to it than just that. Magpies were, all in all, rather silly birds. The crows, for all their raucous laughter, never seemed silly. … [W]in or lose, the crows always laughed—the hard, old jaded laughter that came of looking at the world with a black and practiced eye." Yes, Oakland kind of folks.

The Alameda County folks are holding a little ritual with our creek. Every couple of months, the maintenance fellows come around with their mowers and machetes and cut down every single bit of vegetation from the creek bank…grass, bushes, and all…until it is mud-flat bare. Who knows why? When the rain comes, it washes progressive chunks of the open creek bank down into the water. Now comes a county creek expert with his pads and pencils and maps, conducting a study on…you guessed it…how to stop erosion along Alameda County creek banks.

Spring in Oakland. Yes, indeed.