City Superheroes

Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke

When I receive official-looking government mail, I worry. Usually I find the best approach is to carefully place the suspicious envelope at the bottom of the mail, under the magazines, to give it time to age. I find this works pretty well. Recently, in fact, several mailings have turned into Tourtelot cleanup reports, and I haven’t been in any trouble at all.

But this last time I wasn’t so lucky. Or was I?

After I went through bills, coupons, advertisements, charitable contribution requests and never-ending credit-card offers, I carefully opened the city envelope. The **NOTICE** in bold at the top and the lack of a friendly salutation - you know, something like "Hello Dave, hope you’re having a nice day!" – meant I was in for it.

Since there are just so many things of which one is a priori guilty – global warming, over population, air pollution, over consumption, and inattention to the important things in life to name just a few – and since our complicated world makes it impossible to get everything right, the problem with these notices is that one feels guilty even before reading them.

But this was more specific: I was being cited for harboring hippie trees in need of trimming.

Early in the summer I had cut off a few low-hanging branches so pedestrians wouldn’t get poked in the eye unless they were about six feet tall (myself, I’ve shrunk down closer to 5’ 11") and only SUVs would get scratched when parked in front of our house (we donated our Dodge Caravan). Since the notice from Rick Silva, acting P.W. Maintenance Supervisor, told us our trees needed to be 7 feet above the sidewalk and 14 feet above the street, I suspected I would find our trees wanting.

Nonetheless, I was mad with the city for telling me what to do. (I think it’s a father-son kind of problem, and I knew this even before Susan Faludi’s book "Stiffed" came out: When my father told me what to do, I didn’t like it even though he was usually right.) I grumbled a bit to myself and went outside to check our two deformed trees that appear normal enough, full and green, until fall strips them naked revealing two pitifully decapitated stumps dense with spindly new-growth limbs pointed skyward pleading retribution for their topped disgrace. Feeling their pain and being a lazy gardener, I was reluctant to exacerbate their deformity by ineptly trimming them.

As I ducked under the limbs – perhaps they had grown a bit since last trimmed - I confirmed Rick’s concern even if I didn’t know what Benicia Municipal Code Chapter 12.24 said, and, cornered by the law, I began to formulate my procrastination plan.

Since Rick gave me 30 days to do the work, I figured I had two weeks to create a plan for a plan, and then another week to really plan before I would have to do the actual trimming during the fourth week. No problem, I thought: I would have a day or two to spare before being arrested.

As a man of action, I felt better.

The very next day, if you can believe it, I was in the kitchen fixing coffee - it was about 7, maybe 7:30, in the morning - when two city workers drove up in two separate trucks, parked in front of our house, jumped out of their vehicles, tools at the ready, with more energy than I have so early in the morning, and started trimming our trees. At first I tried to ignore them; I tried to pretend I really hadn’t seen them; I tried to read the newspaper: After all, I should have been doing the trimming.

Finally, I went out to check on their progress and told Jim Catanesi, one of the workers from Parks and Community Services, that I had just received the letter from Rick and had planned to do the work the very next weekend.

What a liar guilt can make of me!

I was amazed to find that within just a few minutes, Jim and Steve Arons, the other worker, had done such a terrific job that our deformed trees had never looked better!

When I later telephoned Rick Silva to thank him and get the names of the workers, he told me that such trimming was not standard procedure and was probably in response to the police report on my vagrant, egregiously unkempt trees. (My words, not Rick’s.)

Well, maybe so and maybe I got a little lucky, but Jim and Steve took pride in their work and it shows, and I was once again reminded that a year ago my wife and I moved to a town made great by terrific people.