Okay. Now that you've recovered from the sheer delight of this revelation.
What? Oh? Well. Hot off the presses. It looks like there yet another impressive surprise for my readers as they remain suspended in curious abeyance: Jimmy Valdez was roped into HOA service as a board member for the next three years! All it took was his attendance at the annual meeting last night. (I asked him and my son to accompany me to the festivities to a fill a couple more seats: 150+ homeowners but there's always less than 20 who show up.) No one raised a hand when the query for new board members was tossed into the ring, but my husband smiled. Say no more. He caught the eye of the one long-term female member on the board who knows me pretty well. Evidently, if you are in my physical vicinity when the call for help goes out, I exude eau du volunteerism, and the scent rubs off. "It's a done deal, bear!" (From a favorite children's book I used to read to my children.) It's actually a pretty low-key gig. One of the best aspects of the position is that of meeting neighbors you'd otherwise never know. And for my husband, it's a very good thing for him to make the acquaintance of a few of the folks in our surrounding cul-de-sacs.
One of the hot topics up for discussion centered around the abuse of mailbox rights in our community. We're one of those hoods sporting the same black mail receptacles. It's the responsibility of the homeowner to replace or repair them as needed. We've lived here for 8+ years now; twice our mailbox has been plowed through, so twice we have replaced it at $275 a pop! And as for minor repairs, limp flags, droopy doors, rust -- the thing always needs a minor facelift of some sort. However, the covenants are vague and the board has no power to actually enforce this rampant problem of mailbox abuse, save from sending out notices. Thus, there are bent flags, flapping doors and full-on broken-down boxes with configurations of duct tape and bungee cords in use to extend life and save the pocketbook. In a middle-class neighborhood like ours, with quarterly dues paid regularly by most, this ghetto chic habit is an assault to the sensibilities of certain folks.
(I have to offer full disclosure here and state that though I regularly, REGULARLY, walk, walk, WALK, through the streets of Jamison Place, and I notice the disrepair, it doesn't actually rate on my radar of annoyances. It won't come as a surprise to most that my reasons for volunteering to serve on the architectural committee centers around my sense of responsibility: I just want to do my part for my neighborhood. I'm NOT interested in having my fingers in everyone else's pie and flaunting what very little power the position holds to nitpick and make contacts for my future political career as I make the very slow climb up the ladder of local government.)
At one point in the great mailbox debate, while ideas were hurtling through the airspace of the church room we were using for the meeting, I declared, "God bless America. Land where we have the freedom and luxury to groan about mailboxes!" That got a few smiles from the board; people who thoroughly researched every aspect of the subject for well over a year and treated it with the gravity due homeowners who care for their property and diligently send in their HOA fees check every 3 months. And yet their own lives are burgeoning with far weightier issues, I know.
And that's just it. It's that significant aspect of my life that I want never to forget. I had absolutely NO choice in the circumstances of my birth, including the my citizenship. I'm American, as opposed to Syrian, Iranian, Latvian, Hungarian, Swedish, Japanese, Polynesian or Liberian, only because of the location of my entrance into the community of the entire PLANET. Because I'm American, because I'm a suburbanite, because my husband has been blessed with a job history which has allowed me to remain at home full-time throughout a significant portion of our 24-year+ married life, I can sit in a fold-up chair in one of many 'spare' rooms in a large local place of Christian worship and listen to my neighbors opine about the state of their comfortable brick homes with indoor plumbing to several working bathrooms, laundry room and roomy kitchens; two-car garages where cars don't even reside due to the congestion of mowers, bicycles, tools and gardening supplies; driveways spacious enough to accommodate a lesser-sized home elsewhere in my town, or several huts or shacks in third-world countries; yards green with the luxury crop of grass which requires enough summer water to supply an entire small village with cooking and bathing for at least a few months; and access to grocery stores, doctors, vets, churches, shops of all kinds and technology to the N'th degree.
(May I briefly digress and ask that you pay minor homage to that last paragraph? Not the length of the third sentence. NOT bad, eh?)
I'm an American. It's a privilege and not my right. I feel fortunate. I don't feel superior to other nations. Nor do I want to see entire populations of 'enemy' countries wiped off the face of the map. Under other circumstances, I could be one in the numerous other populations which pepper the land masses of our enormous and diverse Earth. Every day I am alive, I try to exercise my citizenship with the proper perspective and gravity I have ben afforded. That includes voting because I won't be forcibly dissuaded from trying to get to the polls. That includes attending Church at Cross Point in a public manner because I'm not like one of my friends who works in the Middle East to further the cause of self-sustaining agriculture and disperse the seeds of his faith without the freedom to actually discuss said faith online or in real time with real people. That includes sending my daughters to school because they won't be shot in the head for attempting to secure an education. That includes walking side-by-side with my husband at the mall, and even holding hands if I like, because I won't be stoned by the men in my community. And I enjoy clipping my toenails, pulling weeds, playing Bunco, baking lemon biscotti, watching the news while I wash dishes, hunting for the dish sponge when the cat hunts it and drags it to her mistress' room as a trophy of her indoor prowess, chasing Hankie Mutt down the road when he escapes the yard, chatting it up with the Wal-Mart checkout employee, sending cards across the country, FaceTiming with my daughter and son-in-law in Germany, posting morning-hair pictures of myself on Facebook and even rounding up those pesky balls of hair in the bathroom which like to congregate behind doors and in corners -- the mundane and momentous -- each and every . . . all because I CAN.
As I've said many a time before, I'd rather be poor or grieving or dying in America than many other places 'out there.'
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