Over at Warhaven Building Supply at the corner of Bunting and Hummingbird, Debbie Dacnic was pulling her shift at the cash register. Few people use cash anymore, but that’s what we continue to call that machine here in Warhaven.
A grizzled old fellow from the Craggies, Stephen Limbon, was purchasing some pipe fittings. Debbie could tell he was his persnickety self as he walked up.
“What’s eating you, Stephen?”
“Everything’s eating me, but mostly the government, the federal government!”
She nodded. “It’s a big hungry beast, for sure.”
“For sure,” he agreed. “We ought to tear it apart and start over! Revolt!”
Debbie had no time for talk of revolution. “Listen, Stephen, if you can do without your Social Security and Medicare, if your grandkids and kids can do without public education, if you don’t mind pot holes and erratic electrical service, and if you don’t mind saying goodbye to the F.D.I.C. and your savings account, go right ahead.”
Stephen realized he had riled her and shut up.
“Here’s your receipt, Stephen. Good luck with the plumbing job.”
The rest of her day was non-eventful. She walked home to her second-floor apartment three blocks away, sat down on her couch and enjoyed a cup of earl gray tea.
In her meditative trance of habit she reviewed the day and offered appreciations. This young woman marveled at the rotations and revolutions that are our lives in Warhaven, our swirling hopes and angers, our narcissisms and self-loathings. Debbie thought of her exchange with Stephen Limbon, acknowledging she had little tolerance for whiners. She would practice warmer acceptance the next time their paths crossed. Debbie recalled a couplet written by Nikki Giovanni, “And if ever i touched a life i hope that life knows/ that i know that touching was and still is and always will be the true revolution.”
Her short tenure on the Warhaven City Council has fostered this perspective, this desire to get to common ground, not that the council was hostile to constituents, quite the opposite. It is the council’s united quest for the commonweal. Outrageous anger and vetted frustrations really do push themselves against the values around political compromise. Unless the regulatory change was harmful or fully stupid, it remains in the council’s and the community’s best interest to craft a workable answer, which inevitably required compromise all around the table, and with the county, state, and federal governments.
She sipped her tea.
Debbie’s mind darted back to the term revolution and then her father. Her parents were devout Presbyterians so when Debbie began to adapt goth girl ways, it upset an applecart of sorts for the elder Dacnics. Her senior year she was caught smoking cigarettes and for her dad, she had crossed a line of decorum. Angry lines of indignation welled from her memory, like, “My way or the highway!” and “If you want to revolt, do it at someone else’s dinner table! We’ll have no revolution in this household.”
The family held it together. She was a good student, A’s and B’s, but her behavior just didn’t match her father’s severe expectations. When she graduated from Warhaven High School, she packed her bags the next day and moved to Garfield, where she had secured a maintenance job and summer housing at Garfield Community College. She enrolled that fall term and applied herself, making the dean’s list all terms for two years and attained her Associate of Arts degree with honors.
Debbie was not particularly interested in pursuing a bachelor’s degree. She stayed on at the college in maintenance and learned all kinds of construction skills, becoming a very good plumber. She liked the notion of being a “jenny of all trades.” In her free time she studied poetry, theology and philosophy, simply for personal interest, taking courses for free as one of her perquisites. Her life was simple. She was a loner and was a content individual. Yet she longed for the rural ways of Warhaven.
When her parents announced they were moving to Ohio to be closer to her maternal grandparents, she could have been heard sighing.
“The universe provides,” she mused.
Debbie began reading the Warhaven Printed Plowshare, particularly its classified ads.
She found what she was looking for in an ad for a customer service clerk at Warhaven Building Supply. Her application came with three exceptionally strong recommendations; she beat out the competition. That was five years ago.
It’s a rare day when her competence and caring aren’t commented on by one customer or another. And she’s a natural on the city council. Warhaven has many local adages and one of these, to compliment an industrious, team-conscious soul, was recently applied to Councilor Debbie Dacnic, whose governmental work appears to be her calling as much as a bee’s is to gather pollen.
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The City Council is a work of fiction, written by Jim Tindall, appearing every other week in Columbia Gorge News.
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