CHRISTMAS 2004

         In Silicon Valley there was a news event involving a person named Bergna. This brought to mind an amusing story involving his father, Louis Bergna, then the district attorney for Santa Clara County. We lived in hilly Saratoga on quiet Pike Road, a steep private road maintained by 15 homeowners, including the Bergna family. To discuss the annual road repairs, the road association had an evening meeting at the house of the people who lived above us. We had walked; all of the rest of the neighbors had driven to the house. We were engaged in discussion when some of the children who were running around outside came in to report that a cyclone fence was being installed across the two driveways to prevent people from leaving the meeting in their cars. The adults rushed outside to see the fence being put in, metal posts being set in concrete. A San Jose State law student who wanted to use one of two driveways had recently bought the land between the two driveways. She had been refused and her approach was to force one of the two homeowners to give her access. She had hired a cyclone fence contractor to put in a fence, while we were at the meeting, to seal off the cars and San Jose State police students to prevent the trapped people from removing the posts until the concrete had set. I came out to see the police students, in uniform, preventing Franz Ibish from removing a post in the middle of his driveway. Franz, a man of strong principle, was moving the post from side to side while the police students were trying to stop the motion. Louis Bergna telephoned his sheriff's police and soon a half dozen policemen armed and in full uniform, came with lights flashing. They rushed to the fence and told the police students to disappear or they'd be arrested and that would end their careers. It would have made a good short movie -- Franz shouting at the police students to get their damned hands off of the post, the law student shouting encouragement to the police students, the fencing contractor standing by with his crew, our neighbors who had their cars trapped shouting encouragement to Franz. After the police came, Louis Bergna told the fencing contractor and the law students he would give them 5 minutes to get the fence materials and crew away or they would ALL be hauled off to jail. Boy, what an evening! That ended the meeting -- the neighbors were too distressed to continue.

         For a small number of neighbors we seemed to have an unusual number of conflicts between homeowners. One neighbor had a large rooster as a pet. The rooster stayed at home during the day but flew over the fence to their neighbor's tree to roost at night. The roosting tree was right outside their bedroom and the rooster had an exceptionally loud crow at the break of dawn or whenever someone drove up the road at night with bright headlights. After much lost sleep from the crowing, the sleep-deprived homeowners hired a lawyer to force the removal of the rooster. In the small town of Saratoga the weekly newspaper, always at a loss for newsworthy events, carried a running account of the rooster story every week.

         Just above the rooster tree neighbor was a family that owned a donkey. Next to them, separated by a cyclone fence, were neighbors that had a flower garden against the fence. The woman who planted the flower garden complained that the donkey manure was so strong that she could smell only manure rather than the flower blossoms. Tempers flared and the donkey woman carried wheel barrel loads of fresh manure and dumped it against the fence opposite the flower garden. I never did find out how this problem was solved.

         Across the road from our place lived the Jessen family. Hank Jessen was also a research scientist but he specialized in being a branch chief and did not like getting his hands dirty. He had a grown daughter, Joan, who lived at home. She drove a well-used car and had complained to Hank that the brakes were failing, but got no response. One evening she was descending our steep road when the brakes failed completely. Thinking quickly, she turned the car into the Jones driveway and drove straight into a large tree. The tree was apparently old and rotted; it snapped off at ground level with a loud crack but stopped the car within a half dozen feet with little damage. Mr. Jones heard the loud crash in his yard and came out of his house in his underwear to see what had happened. Joan told him what had happened and that her dad would pay for the tree. Mr. Jones said that the tree was dead but he had not removed it because its large diameter made its removal difficult. He thanked her for knocking down the tree.

         There used to be a popular expression that one had to work hard in this life, so to be able to keep up with the Jones's. Our Jones family was among the most austere of any family that we knew of so it was a family joke. The Jones family had a milking cow. The cow became friendly with me because I would gather milkweed, a choice bovine food, along the road and present it to the cow. One day I was walking up the road with a handful of milkweed. Mrs. Jones was milking the cow into a milk pail on the far end of the pasture. Suddenly the cow spotted me, let out a bellow and galloped over to me, in the process upsetting Mrs. Jones and spilling the milk. I tried to apologize to Mrs. Jones who appeared to be dazed. I am sure that she blamed me rather than the cow for the lost milk.

         The neighbor across the road from the Jones's had a dog that used to accost me when I was walking down to the ride group car. I opened my paper bag lunch, broke off part of my sandwich and threw it to the dog. The dog continued to bark as best at it could with half a sandwich sticking out of its mouth. After that the dog would charge me, I would respond with half of my sandwich and the dog would let me pass. I remarked to the ride group that I had trained the dog. They responded with, just who had trained whom?

         At this time of the year I try to think back to the earliest I can remember. I remember going to Sunday school where starting probably in November we were given a picture of a bare evergreen tree ready for decoration. Each time I attended I was given a glue-backed stamp to attach to the tree. The stamp was in the form of a lighted candle, held in a socket that was a part of a saucer, which we could put on the tree. No, I am not that old -- electric lighted bulbs were in use; I never saw a real candle-lit tree. Now I wonder how many houses burned down each Christmas as a result of putting lighted candles on a long dead evergreen tree.