Well, it is less than twenty-four hours before Kol Nidre as I write, and naturally my mind is full of the great matters of life and meaning and transcendence (and white clothes and drinking lots of water ahead of time and...) But writing this column for October (so soon and yet so far) makes me realize for a moment that there will be real life to live after the heavenly gates close. So, for a personal change of pace, a bit of reflection on something which will hopefully soon exist on the material plane.
Now and then I've mentioned C-SHAC, the Coast Senior Housing (something starting with an A -- Assistance???) Corporation, which started a few years ago when Steve Antler and I were strolling in Van Damme and brainstorming about what kinds of service and justice work we'd like to see the Jewish community involved in. Our chat dovetailed with things Ira Rosenberg had been thinking about, and it was back in the time (hopefully to re-up soon) when Arnold Sternberg, our housing guru, lived here on the Coast. All of us were aware of the catastrophic shortage of every sort of affordable housing here. All of us have at least some grey hair ourselves, and we were happily cognizant of the growing population of elders here. Steve, Ira, Arnold and I got together with some other interested folks and C-SHAC was born.
I knew nothing at all about creating community housing when we started. Now I know next to nothing, but one thing I do know now is that creating housing is not so different from finding and buying your own house. You have to find property you want to build your place on. It's a bit like dating. There is no steady upward vector of daily or even monthly progress. Instead, it is "nothing, nothing, nothing -- everything!" You do all sorts of background work to get legal, to look presentable, and then you go out on the meat market, looking for properties. Some you check out for awhile, and they don't quite pan out. Others string you along for months. Sometimes you hear out of the blue about something new coming on the market and you get all excited. Every once in awhile you decide to take a new approach, look at things you wouldn't have considered years or months before. And then, hopefully, one day, there is a click, a match.
From the beginning I've called our little project the "Senior Teepees." I do so because it sounds funny, and because I believe that language helps to create reality. And I'm looking ahead to the day when (keinahara!) I'm going to want to live in senior housing. I personally look forward to something kind of hippie-friendly, a little off-kilter of the proper clean lines and sensible layouts of the very nice senior housing I have seen. I don't know exactly what that might mean. But it is delightful to dream, to play and to laugh about wild and unorthodox settings full of ourselves and our friends and neighbors. For just one tiny example, Steve met some senior housing developers who told him of one of their innovations: a cafe in the complex which is open all night, since it is known that many seniors sleep a lot less than we younger folks. But hey, why just a cafe? How about middle-of-the-night yoga classes? Poetry readings at 3 AM? An observatory?
I'm just playing around here. But I think that playing around is a good idea, even when trying rather seriously to address a rent in our social fabric. Imagination, dreaming, inspires what can otherwise be rather tedious work. So I'd like to invite you into the loop here -- not necessarily to do the hard work (not yet anyhow -- God willing there will soon be lots of actual work to develop an actual place, and we will definitely ask you then) but to start playing too. So sometime when you're on a long drive, or pulling weeds, or paying bills, maybe you'll help by letting your mind wander and dream. What would be your blissful ideal for your own housing when you get older -- or now if you're already older? What would you want such a place to look like? Operate like? What kinds of services and support would maximize meaning and joy for you? What could be built in, either into the physical structure or into the human dimension, that would be fun? Intellectually engaging? Inspiring? Of course once we go to actually create the Senior Teepees, there will be all sorts of constraints to deal with. But there aren't any on our minds.
So if you get any inspirations, I hope you'll share them with me. Not that we're promising to realize everyone's wildest dreams (that would be quite a housing project!) But I'm hoping that by the time we sign any mortgage papers (karov, b'yameinu -- quickly, in our lifetimes!), there will be a big, long list of dreams and fancies to inspire us as even as we settle down and get serious. If I'm making the daily life of C-SHAC sound tedious, I shouldn't. It's actually a lot of fun.
It's fun because we're a bunch of friends doing something together. We look forward to seeing each other, and we look forward to living together -- if not exactly these same people then others like them, our friends and neighbors. And it's fun because it involves the imagination. I think it's always a good thing when play and service get together, when imagination and social need hang out together. So if teepees aren't your fondest dream (and actually, they're not mine either) think about what is. And let 5763 be the year when our dreams, some of them anyhow, especially dreams for the good of our life together, come true.
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 08/29/2002 (rge)