"Ludicrous" Campaign Financing in Noblesville

In a January 27^th story in the Indianapolis Star, I was quoted questioning Mayor John Ditslear’s campaign financing methods, a system I call the “Money Machine.” My concern? The Mayor invites City contractors and their wanna-bes to give him campaign donations. This is not proof of anything illegal. But the Money Machine system gives the appearance of “pay-to-play,” as if the donation is the cost of admission to being considered for City contracts.

Again, I’m not saying that’s what’s happening, but with this existing outward appearance, if the next mayor were truly conducting an illegal pay-to-play scheme, there’d be no way to tell because it would look exactly the same.

In the Star article, Mayor Ditslear called my argument, “ludicrous.”

Here’s a brief history of what I’m talking about:

In the mid-‘90s, during former Mayor Dennis Redick’s first term, the Money Machine concept took hold locally. It appeared as though the City’s accounts payable records and Planning Department application records had been gathered into a mailing list. These engineering firms, construction managers, architects, developers, consultants, builders, road pavers and trash haulers were invited to a golf outing with the mayor . . . for the price of a donation.

This system was so successful Redick entered the next two elections very well funded.

In June of ’03, after winning the primary election for a 3^rd term, Redick was charged with domestic assault and his power began to unravel. John Ditslear threw his hat in the ring, running as an Independent. Ditslear had a record of civic involvement and so had solid local connections to draw upon for contributions. As a result, 90% of Ditslear’s pre-election campaign funds came from local sources.

In the run-up to the general elections, the Money Machine donors largely stuck with the incumbent, Dennis Redick.

But that November John Ditslear won and allegiances immediately shifted. According to campaign fillings, in the 40 days after winning, before he was even sworn in, Redick’s former Money Machine donors sent Ditslear nearly $20,000 – even though the election was over.

It didn’t stop there. Within 9 months of taking office Ditslear held his first golf outing and reaped big bucks from Redick’s old Money Machine donors. And oh what a machine it is. In 2004 Ditslear raked in over $70,000. In ’05 he raised $80,000 and in ’06 took an additional $75,000. Of that nearly quarter of a million dollars, over 75% came from out of town business interests who couldn’t vote in local elections.

None of this is illegal, but it should be, because it’s fundamentally unethical.

An example: When constructing the new city hall, two lucrative contracts were handed out. One went to Odle, McGuire, & Shook of Indianapolis, the architects who designed the building. The other went to Meyer/Najem of Fishers, who would be the construction managers. Neither contract required competitive bids. Both companies’ combined donations to John Ditslear totaled nearly $9,000. Their smallest donations came in the mayor’s first year in office, then grew larger in ’05 and ’06 as the City Hall project was in full swing.

Absolutely none of this suggests anybody did anything illegal. But consider the process: the Mayor sends invitations for a campaign fundraising golf outing to people who can’t vote for him but who’s business relies on winning government contracts, and they oblige.

The Money Machine is dangerous because even though John Ditslear, Meyer/Najem and McGuire, Odle, & Shook may be the most ethical collection of Hoosiers ever assembled – and I’m absolutely ready to believe they are, the next mayor and contractor/campaign contributors may not be. And if that next mayor actually traded contracts for campaign donations – classic pay-to-play, how would we know? We wouldn’t. And what if it’s as simple as a mayor giving contracts to those he feels most obligated to, no secret agreement, just a feeling of obligation because of a big donation? That’s still wrong.

Is that argument “ludicrous?” I don’t think so. That’s why 7 states, including neighboring Illinois have barred entities bidding on governmental contracts from making political contributions to government officials. This movement has been prompted by a wave of pay-to-play scandals across the country.

In the Star article, Mayor Ditslear actually argued, “They [the donors] offer to help me get re-elected because they think I do a good job,” and “I don’t invite people because they do business with the city; I invite people who I think would enjoy a round of golf and a nice meal.”

Now that’s ludicrous.

First off, they generally don’t “offer,” they’re asked to donate. And go to the county’s web page (http://www.hamiltoncounty.in.gov/), click the “Laws, Elections . . .” tab in the right hand sidebar and download Mayor Ditslear’s campaign filing for 2010. Look through the list of donors and see how many typical Noblesville voters you find - you know, local folks who think the Mayor is doing a good job and want to enjoy a round of golf and a nice meal with him.

Good luck with that needle-in-a-haystack endeavor. There are only a few on the donor list. The overwhelming majority are people who don’t live in Noblesville and can’t vote for Ditslear. So if he’s looking for people who think he’s doing and good job and want to help him get re-elected, why doesn’t the Mayor look in Noblesville? Why is he pursuing out of town people who have and/or want City contracts – people who can’t vote for him?

What’s more, why would somebody from Naperville, Illinois (who last year gave Ditslear $1,550) or Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin (who last year gave $500) give a crap how good the mayor of Noblesville, Indiana is? Is it because of the golf and the nice meal or is it because both of those donors represent engineering firms?

As ironic as it is unfortunate, at least once when he invited these out of town contractors to donate, the front of the invitation read, “Wanna Play?”

The Beerfest

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” –Ben Franklin

Entering the Brewers of Indiana Guild Winterfest at the State Fair grounds with my oldest son Cal Saturday there was a giddy thump in my heart: the promise of endless samples of micro-brewed beer.

Once through the doors a lanyard is placed around our necks with a handy rubber O-ring that cradles a small drinking glass. Love it, love it, LOVE IT! Don’t have to hold the beer glass while I’m eating.

Did I mention I love it?

We hit the closest row of brewer’s booths, getting 2 oz. samples at World Class, BBC, Victory and 3 other breweries in a sipping flurry. It’s only when we make it through the Harpoon, Brooklyn, Rogue, Pyramid, Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada booths I realize we’ve already had the equivalent of 2 beers.

There is a passing notion to pace myself.

And frankly, I don’t like some of what I’m drinking. So before the next sample, I ask the brewer to dump out the last half of the last brewer’s sample from my cup. This endears me to the guy. He winks, nods and smiles as if to say, “Yeah, that guy’s beer sucks.”

All along the way we’re filling our swag bags with free bottle openers, coasters, and a broad assortment of stickers I have absolutely no use for, but hell, they’re free. I even get a Bell’s Brewery temporary tattoo. Sah-weeet!

There are fashion trends at work. People are wearing homemade necklaces made of ordinary cotton string strung with pretzels. Some get clever with a big baked pretzel as an eye-catching pendant, surrounded by smaller store-bought pretzels. Drink a little beer – eat some pretzels - repeat as needed.

I have no pretzel necklace and suddenly feel naked.

Neck Beards Abound!

Cal proclaims, “Lotta neck beards here,” as we move to the second aisle of booths. He’s right. There are a lot of guys pouring brew with neck beards – you know, where the guy doesn’t shave his neck. This is often accompanied by a gray or muddy-khaki button up shirt, occasionally accessorized with a sock cap.

In all, it’s a pretty mellow crowd. You’d think copious drinking would lead to trouble, but no. The fact that everyone is drinking a depressant might have something to do with it. Folks smoke around the campfires in the Beer Garden, helping each other lite up, making room for strangers, letting others cut in line I front of kegs.

The Rinse Tank: Nobody wants stout foam in their porter.

Halfway down the 2^nd row I realize I’m not really an India Pale Ale (IPA) guy anymore. This style was originally created for transport to British troops in India. The extra hops acted as a preservative and the extra strength allowed for bottle fermenting on the long journey ‘round the horn of Africa. I learned to like it back in the day when it primarily came from England and India. But when the American microbrewery craze hit in the late ‘80s, the IPA seemed to morph into a super-hoppy, tongue-burning, blazing guitar solo of a beer. And like guitar solos, the first couple are pretty damn cool, then I just wish they’d stop. And they like to give ‘em cute names like Good Karma, Yellow Snow, Bitter Woman, Torpedo Extra.

Yeah, whatever beer dudes. I’m not looking for beer acrobatics. As I age, I find I admire the finessed dipsy-doodle more than the in-your-face-slam-dunk.

I start requesting more stouts, porters, Scottish ales, lagers and the rare Czech-style pilsners.

Somewhere in the fog of booth hopping someone calls out, “Kurt,” and grabs my arm. It’s Marsh Davis, President of Historic Landmarks Foundation. Known the guy for 20-plus years. He gives Cal the, “I knew you when you were this high,” routine. We catch up and move on.

Cal has taken to inserting himself in the background of group photos. He’s tall, so he stands behind any group of strangers posing for a picture, then makes this bizarre ugly face (at right).

The most endearing thing about the microbrewery movement is that many of those pouring samples actually brewed it themselves. They’re trying to carve out a little flavor identity in their Indiana Town. I sampled beers from Aurora, LaPorte, Brazil, Brown County, Kokomo, Lafayette, Auburn, Warsaw, Elkhart, Crown Point, and yes, Noblesville’s own Barley Island. The crowd is bias in favor of these little guys, with a nod of respect toward the big guys who were once little guys, with the exception of the chain restaurant brewers like RAM – which I actually heard someone boo as they passed up a sample.

As Cal and I stumble out into the cold air of the Fair Grounds there’s a warmth in my chest, clouds in my head, and a latent IPA burn on my tongue. And almost immediately, there’s our designated driver, my 19-year-old son, Jack pulling up beside the Coliseum.

Perfect day.

Becky's Wedding

A Vintage Contrarian

This originally appeared in NUVO Newsweekly in April of 2001

Couple years back my family converged on the tiny town in Tipton County where we lived when I was small. My younger cousin Becky had been a missionary in the environs of New Guinea for several years and come home to marry a wonderful black South African man she’d met there. The wedding reception was held in a park that was built on the site of the school where I went to first and second grade. It was across the playground from the ball diamond where my big brother played little league, across the street from the house where our doctor lived and saw patients, a half block down from the house where my mother left me with a baby sitter, a block down from the corner diner where we often ate and the volunteer fire department that my father had served with, and a block from the water tower I used to lay under on my back with friends at noon to see if we could stand the ear piercing blast of the siren that was tested each day. But that was nearly forty years ago. It is a different place now.

Beside the park where the wedding reception was held stood the gymnasium, the only part of the old school that was saved. As the wedding reception wore on, as people took pictures of each other with the disposable cameras on the table, my older sister and I wondered into the old gymnasium and studied the giant, framed, black and white photographs of the Pep Club taken more than three decades ago. We searched for my aunt and finally found her in one of the groupings from the early ’60s. She sat in the bleachers among a crowd of teenagers; all seemingly wearing painted corduroys and saddle shoes.

As we wondered through the darkened, cavernous gymnasium, I found myself studying my sister – this remarkable woman, as she walked about. Now in her forties, once she was a little girl taking gym classes here, playing in this innocent place, still unaware that she was a lesbian and that the world would hate her for it.

She and I and my brother and my other sister grew up in this town and went to school in that long gone building that was once next door. My sister and her companion live in California. She’s a nuclear engineer with an MBA – the only woman on her company’s board of directors. My other sister is also a wonderful success in life, a woman who has overcome great struggles to be happy. My brother is a college grad and an incredibly talented artist. I am a schoolteacher, a Realtor, a writer. We four are all college grads, all homeowners, all gamefully employed.

What I was thinking as I studied my sister and remembered this place is that we all found success in life, having been educated at a school that would be considered substandard today. There were no TVs hanging from the classroom walls continuously running PBS specials. There were no computer labs with Internet access, no planetariums or indoor swimming pools. There was no robotics labs, no greenhouse, and no security guards, not even air conditioning. Unlike my own children today, we did not come home each day from elementary school with an hour or more of homework.

When you consider what is believed to be necessary to insure the success of the average child today, my siblings and I should be utter failures.

After school our parents didn’t drive us around to endless enrichment activities - ballet, piano, gymnastics, soccer and baseball (in overlapping seasons), indoor soccer and basketball (in overlapping seasons), computer camps, space camps, horseback riding lessons. Sure, we did some of that, but just a little. In those days summer was 12 weeks long. We filled our spare time riding bikes, flying kites, fiddling with frogs and fish in a stream and playing basketball on a dirt court against our garage. We camped in the back yard and read comic books. We actually played hide and seek and kick the can – games that are foreign to most children today. We had no cable TV, no VCR, no Play Station. When we went on long trips, we didn’t have a mini van with a TV/VCR for the kids to watch, no Game Boys to pass the time. We had to look at the countryside, play word games and use our imagination. Yet, I don’t feel cheated. Quite the contrary.

In that distant town that was once in this place, low calorie diet foods were almost unheard of, yet children then were far less likely to be obese. In this weird world where we grew up there was a commercial area at the edge of our neighborhood that children were free to interact in and we could walk to school – two things that would rarely be designed into the average new community today.

Still, in some ways I know it is a better place now. My sister is less likely to be ostracized here and my white, freckle faced cousin can marry a black man from South Africa in the park and cause little or no commotion.

Yet, in my childhood here, considering we were so deprived of what are considered necessities for any middle class kid today, how did we become computer literate breadwinners who know how to set our VCRs?

My own three children wondered into the old building to find us. They looked about that old 1930s-era gymnasium, that aging temple to a Hoosier God, and wondered at its foreignness. There were no practice gyms off to the side, no state of the art sound systems, no health club-quality weight lifting facilities. The looks on their faces said it all, “What a strange . . . primitive place.” They looked into the old Pep Club pictures and giggled. These children, grown up with fashion trends like the plumber’s-butt, low rider pants of hip hop culture, face piercings and the unfortunate return of bell-bottoms and clogs, dared to say, “Why did they dress so funny?”

With everything my children have I sometimes worry what will become of them. They’ve come to expect so much of life – materially. Granted, they have some very valuable things I didn’t have. I would have never been taken to an interracial wedding in my childhood, nor would two of my most beloved relatives be an “out” lesbian couple. Still, as we left that old gym, I wished I could give my children what little I had when I was their age. In some ways it looks more valuable than the material things they have. Less is more? Perhaps.

Later, as I sat among the wedding crowd looking at what remained of the place I once new so well, I thought that perhaps the worst thing we could give our children is the best of everything.

Found In Translation

The night before New Years Eve my son’s Japanese girlfriend, Machiko made dinner for our family. Afterwards, Greta and I, Cal and Machiko downloaded Toy Story 3 to watch together.

As the animated film unfolded, I could hear Machiko quietly quizzing Cal about what was happening in the story. Her English is good, but when the dialogue is complicated she loses detail.

I’m missing some of the movie myself thinking about something connected to this moment that I saw that day on Facebook. Scrolling through the posts I see a list of people who “have the new profile,” and see a familiar face: Florence.

When I arrived in London for the first time in 1982, Florence was sitting behind the hotel desk, a lovely, aloof French girl with shoulder length, coal black hair, dressed in a style that would later become known as “Goth.” The Austrian night clerk told me in his broken English, “She like to play hard to get.” Once I got to know her I told him, “No, she just is hard to get.”

In the months I lived in that hotel Florence and I became close friends, drinking gin into the night in her room where the walls were plastered with David Bowie posters, a fragrant vile of ground flower petals sat on the window sill, and Ricki Lee Jones played from a cassette deck.

One night Florence and I took the subway to Piccadilly Circus and saw, “On Golden Pond,” a late career film for both Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn.

I have vivid memories of sitting in that theater with Florence. As the film unfolded, she quizzed me about what was happening in the story. Her English was good, but when the dialogue got complicated, she lost detail.

At some point she quit asking questions and watched quietly at my shoulder. Near the end, in an emotional climax when both Fonda and Hepburn’s characters are forced to confront their aging, ever-limited abilities, I saw Florence wiping tears from her face. The pantomime of action, the gentle flourish of orchestral strings meant to tug at the heart, punctuated by the nouns and verbs she was getting were enough. She understood pretty much what we English speakers in the theater were getting.

When we emerged from the dark theater onto that glimmering circle of the city, I asked if she understood what she had seen. “I didn’t understand everything they said, but I understood the meaning,” she said to me.

When Florence friended me on Facebook a year ago, it had been 23 years since I last saw her. The year after Greta and I were married, we backpacked Europe and Florence drove up to meet us in St. Raphael on the coast of France. I scanned her FB photos and saw recent vacation pictures that, if I had to guess, looked to be taken on the coast in northern Africa – there is a handsome husband in the photos and two teenage girls who look like they must be Florence’s daughters. The voyeuristic miracle of Facebook – to be able to peak into the lives of old friends from thousands of miles and a quarter century away.

At the end of Toy Story 3, when the grown up Andy handed over his own childhood toys to the little girl, I looked back over my shoulder at Machiko, snuggled up against my son and see that she’s wiping tears from her cheeks. I’ve had enough conversations with her to know that the dialogue is going too fast for her to understand all that’s being said, but that doesn’t matter. She understands.

Language and meaning are funny things. So essential, and at other times not so necessary.

At the end of the movie I accessed Facebook on my cell phone and sent a message to Florence: “I wish all the best for you and your family in the new year.” And a day later she responds in pretty darn good English, “My best wishes for this new year also. I think of you all very often. With all my friendship.”

South of France 1983

A photo Florence sent me on Facebook last year, one she took of me in the garden of her parent's hotel in St. Tropez in the summer of 1983.

Conspiracy Theories and Dirty Underwear

Many years ago, soon after moving into a new home, a neighbor waved me over. He’d read my newspaper column in that day’s paper and said it made him think of something he wanted to share. But there was no connection whatsoever between what I wrote and what he told me.

He claimed NASA never landed on the moon. “It was all filmed in the desert in Texas,” he said. He claimed that governments of the world were controlled by a triumvirate of Jewish businessmen who adjust world events for profit. You think you’re voting for this person or that, but elections are fixed. The fake moon landing was simple misdirection, devised to distract the world from what was really going on.

As this hallucinogenic riff built up steam, I began to suspect he was nibbling at the edges of Holocaust denial. That’s when I lied that I heard the phone ringing and headed back in the house.

Some years later this neighbor concocted a conspiracy theory about me built on an ironic grain of truth.

“Who do you think you’re fooling?” he sneered. “I know you’re up to something. I’ve seen you sneaking around.”

I actually had been sneaking around.

After that first loony tunes conversation I’d avoided him at all costs. If he walked down the sidewalk while I was doing yard work, I’d walk casually into the garage, as if looking for a tool, then watch from the window until he passed by. I’d do anything to avoid the crazy talk. He apparently caught that vibe and thought it looked sinister rather than what it really was: pathetic.

In December of 2001, just 3 months after 9/11 I arrived at a banquet hall in Indianapolis for 2 days of classes to renew my real estate license. As the room filled with nearly 100 people, I noticed everyone avoided seats near a Middle Eastern-looking man. I felt bad about how Muslim-Americans were being treated in the aftermath of the attacks and decided to conduct a random act of kindness. I right next to him. He looked up with wide, gentle eyes that seemed to say, “thank you.”

During the morning break we chatted about his childhood home in Afghanistan, the cold shoulder he’d gotten from his neighbors since 9/11, and news he was hearing from family back in the Middle East. As we gathered our things to break for lunch he leaned close and whispered to me, “You know, on the morning of September 11^th, the Jews who worked in the Twin Towers didn’t go to work.”

“You gotta be f’in kidding me,” I thought to myself.

I’d heard this little lump of horseshit already. The conspiracy theory that Israel was behind 9/11 – did it so that we’d go ape-shit on the Arab world, doing Israel’s dirty work for them.

I nodded a thoughtful, “Hmmmmm,” in response. Returning after lunch I sat far, far away from the Afghani man.

On one hand I’m embarrassed for conspiracy theorists. But I know that believing the conspiracy satisfies something in the believer. As they say of those cheated by a con man, “You can’t be conned by a con man if you don’t really want what he’s selling.”

I have to admit I have my own proclivities. If I could choose what was true, I’d believe a lot of things I can’t prove. I’d love to believe in ghosts. But I’ve been living in old houses my entire life and still haven’t seen anything remotely passing as proof.

I’d love to believe in UFOs. When I was a kid I laid on the grass in the backyard endless summer nights staring up at the sky with my brother and sisters, looking for proof – “Please, please, please let me see something flying in the sky that’s unexplainable,” I’d plead silently to the great beyond. Never saw a thing.

So if a UFO landed in the street and a ghost appeared nearby, a part of me would be ready to believe. But another part of me would quickly suspect a car crash resulting in smoke from an engine fire.

Wanting to believe something isn’t enough to make it true.

My conspiracy theorist neighbor eventually moved away. Who knows, maybe I scared him off. The new neighbor is a lovable smart ass. He found a pair of the previous owner’s underwear tucked in the old plaster walls around a window for insulation. He knew it was the guy’s underwear because it had his name sewn along the back label (I promise, I’m not making this up). Also knowing of the animosity between myself and the old neighbor (as it is now legendary in our neighborhood), last year the new neighbor gift-wrapped the underwear and left it on my front porch at Christmas as a joke. It was labeled, “To Kurt, from Santa.”

I will gladly take dirty underwear over conspiracy theories whenever given the choice.

The Tiny Kitchen

Of the hundreds of columns and blog entries I’ve written over the past 13 years for various local papers, this is one people still ask me about, so I’m sending it along again this Christmas. It was first published in the old Noblesville Ledger in 1998.

The grandchildren mentioned in the story are nearly all adults now. Sam teaches school in inner-city Washington D.C., Joe is a Junior at UCon, Rachel has graduated from Miami of Ohio and works in Cincinnati, Laura is a high school senior at an American school in Uruguay, Cal is a college senior who will heading to Japan for his last year, Jack is a flourishing journalism student who spent part of last summer traveling and writing in China, the Sally, who was 4 when this was originally written just danced of the Arabian in the Nutcracker and will get her driver’s license soon.

We no longer have Christmas in the house mentioned in this story. The grandparents are already in Florida.

The Tiny Kitchen

At Christmas each year 18 of us - 11 adults and 7 children, converge on a big old house in Bluffton, Indiana with large rooms, tall ceilings and lots of bedrooms. The kitchen there is hopelessly small - perhaps eight by eight with a 12-foot ceiling, as if it were built for incredibly skinny, tall people. Along with the cabinets, stove, sink and refrigerator are three doorways and a little antique table that sits in the middle, leaving a square, narrow path for cooking and socializing.

We like to complain about that kitchen, but quiet enough so the grandparents don’t hear.

There are rooms in that house with comfortable chairs, places to sit and talk, yet, more times than not, complaints aside, we huddle in that tiny kitchen, drawn by nature like bugs to a back porch light. If you want a Coke or milk, either someone must move or you have to crack the refrigerator door just enough to stretch your arm in. If you want to open a cabinet, microwave, stove or rinse a glass in the sink, somebody . . . or somebodies, must move. Still we stay and gab.

It is most like this in late afternoon. There is a roast packed with spices sizzling in the oven, things steaming on the stove and 8 or 10 of us wedged in there elbow to elbow, nibbling on nuts and chips, each of us with a beer or martini. Children push their way through the legs, looking for a mother or father or cookie or cracker, or they push on to the back room where pies and Christmas cookies sit on the washer and dryer, waiting for desert.

There were years when our babies were breast-fed and burped and cradled to sleep in this crowded, hot, tiny kitchen filled with the smells of pine needles, coffee, leg of lamb and boiling potatoes, where middle-aged brothers and sisters catch up on another intervening year. We always hoped and prayed the babies would sleep through dinner. But I think our “baby” years are behinds us all and a couple of those babies who once fell asleep over their mother’s shoulder beside the warm stove are nearly as tall as the shortest of their aunts.

There is something about that cramped, cozy space, something completely at odds with the modern notion of what a kitchen must be like in a new house. There is little counter space, no dishwasher or trash compactor, no commercial-sized stove or water and ice in the frig door. It is a remarkably impractical kitchen. Thumb through an issue of Martha Stewart magazine or watch a few episodes of This Old House - each make it clear that such a kitchen could be best helped with a stick of dynamite.

We like to complain about that tiny kitchen. My wife even rearranged the space a bit this past Thanksgiving, but there’s not a lot you can do with it without a sledgehammer. Still I wonder, would we be drawn there the same if it were a kitchen worthy of praise from Martha Stewart or Architectural Digest? I doubt it. More space, more burners, better lighting and comfy bar stools could not make us enjoy each other’s company more or make the food taste better. If it were large and spacious, if it were the “entertaining/performance space” that architects go on about on This Old House, would we be drawn there the same? I doubt it.

There’s something about close quarters that can free people’s tongues in the nicest way. You can’t design that into a modern kitchen without breaking all the rules.

Everyone here is successful. All are well-educated college graduates who have traveled abroad. One family has been living abroad for years while another comes from Washington where the father has tried cases before the Supreme Court. From Cleveland another shepherds ads we have all seen on TV. One runs his own advertising agency. One has published a book. Everyone here could or does have a finer kitchen in their own homes. But I would guess none of us have had as many loving, memorable moments in our own kitchens as have been had over the Christmases we’ve tolerated, or perhaps reveled in the cramped space and one another’s company in that tiny kitchen.

It makes me wonder about the things we think we need and work so hard to get, especially in this season so over-inflated with consuming and having. The pleasures of Christmas in that tiny kitchen contradict the rest of the year we spend working so hard to buy comfort for ourselves.

In The Shadow of The Courthouse

On one of the last warm days of autumn I’m at the stop light at 8^th and Logan when I see him coming up the sidewalk from the county parking lot. He’s maybe 25 with freshly cut shaggy blonde hair, a deep indigo tattoo on his arm and a piercing on his lower lip. There’s a chain from his belt to a black leather wallet tucked in his back pocket. His tight, ill-fitting clothes look borrowed or found in the back of the closet, maybe leftover from graduation or a wedding. He enters the cross walk distracted, alternately and warily eyeing a legal-sized document in his hand and the Judicial Center.

He’s just one in the cast of characters on the courthouse square on any given day. As people head to offices or courtrooms, you never get more than a glimpse at their story or mission.

There is an array of lawyers passing on the sidewalk, some familiar, some unknown. I see two of Noblesville’s well-established attorneys on the same day. Jack Hittle ambles along beneath the shadow of the courthouse, bolt upright wearing a tweed driving cap. He sees my red van and offers a stiff wave as I pass. Steve Holt turns the corner of 10^th and Conner in a navy blue suite with a clutch of files under his arm.

At lunchtime a scrum of B-team attorneys wait at the crosswalk. I’ve seen this group in the Hamilton or Asian Grill. A couple dominate the conversation while a young one sits with arms crossed at the edge of the action scanning the room and the faces at his table, looking lost.

You normally don’t see judges. They park underground beneath the Judicial Center. But during the lunch hour Judge Pflegging might round a corner plodding down the sidewalk in running shoes and shorts, jogging his lunch hour away. Sitting with my lunchtime gang at the coffee shop, I’ll often see a magistrate and a judge pass the window headed to Subway.

And the county employees: these are the people popping out of the alleyways at 7:50 each morning waiting for traffic that won’t stop to let them pass, the ones who get chased out of crosswalks by drivers talking on their cell phones, the ones being brow-beaten right now to cut spending, the ones trying to manage your child support payments, your property tax payments, your court date, your farm’s drainage issues, your child’s vaccinations and a thousand other things too numerous to mention.

I know scores of these folks by site, not name. I see them in the coffee shop in the morning, in restaurants at lunch, and passing under the Conner Street Bridge at the end of the day. Some hapless souls stand in the snow, smoking at break time, hugging themselves with a cigarette between two fingers beneath the granite overhang of the Judicial Center. Two of them power walk through Old Town neighborhoods during their lunch hour. And I note the mysterious habit of female workers: they carry multiple bags to and from work – some carrying as many of three shoulder or tote bags.

Comedy relief in this chaotic production comes in the form of the gorilla-marketing dude on the corner of 8^th and Conner dancing in his dollar bill costume, carrying a sign that says, “We Buy Gold,” and the elderly man who sometimes sits on a bench with a sign that reads, “Jesus Saved Me From Cigarettes.”

Of all that I see on the courthouse square there’s one thing that sends a cold shadow across my heart: the television news trucks. Their arrival usually signals a moment of warped human perspective. If a hardworking, low-income mother isn’t getting child support payments from her child’s father, the news trucks will not arrive. If a deceased billionaire’s first wife sues his 2^nd wife, they will be there with their satellite dishes extended skyward. If a Carmel High School student was being recognized by the County Commissioners for winning the National Science Fair, they won’t be there. If a Carmel High School athlete gives another student an “atomic goose” on the back of a team bus, the cameras will be there for the assault hearing, capturing the earnest words of a reporter’s dispatch from the courthouse lawn.

Look about next time you’re caught at a stoplight downtown. On any given workday you can witness suggested tragedies, hints of law enforcement, glimpses of criminal justice, and the beginning of half-told stories.