Continued from part one....read part one here

Well, things didn’t quite work out that way. We married then quickly divorced, but not before my husband got his green card; I worked for Wired magazine in San Francisco, then left the magazine after two years to work full time as a freelancer once again. It was a rough life, made even rougher by my crazy landlord of seven years plotting to find “legal” ways to evict me. I was in the midst of fighting her insane legal efforts, when I got word that I had been awarded the Knight International Press Fellowship to Uganda in 2003. I promptly dropped my counter-suit against my loony landlady, Manuela, moved back to Sacramento, met my long-time boyfriend while was tending bar at my new, local favorite hangout, Joe Marty’s, and proceeded to prepare for nine months in Uganda, and beyond.

Well, we already know what happened next - the bad motorcycle accident and broken ankle which dumped me back in Sacramento. Except that I made one more run at Africa in 2005; I tried to go to Zimbabwe as a foreign journalist, stay under the radar of President Mugabe, who had banned all foreign journalists, and spent most of my short time there travelling back and forth across the border to South Africa, to renew my “tourist’s” visa every two weeks. I was ignominiously kicked out of the country after less than a month.

I returned to the arms of my boyfriend Ken, and the erstwhile charms of Sacramento. I was depressed, once again. It was too early for me to be back in the States, let alone Sacramento, and even though I loved my boyfriend, I hated my life and even his perennially bachelor-pad town house.

So when we were forced to move from it, you would think I would have been overjoyed. I was and I wasn’t. I didn’t like having to find a house on our budget in a few weeks, and I was in no physical condition to move since my car accident in 2006 had left me practically disabled. So I “let” my mom and boyfriend do all the work, I practically just sat on my ass and did nothing while they did everything.

So, here I was, still in Sacramento, still depressed and in despair and chronic pain, and wondering what the hell I was doing in Oak Park. It wasn’t nearly as cool as midtown, or so I thought, I didn’t take to my neighbors right away, and they didn’t take to me, and I fought with my boyfriend constantly. Largely over the fact that I would mostly sit around and watch TV and movies, and write the very occasional freelance piece for the Sacramento News & Review.

Well a few pivotal things happened to me recently that have literally turned my life around. A few months ago, my boyfriend of seven years moved out on me. That fact alone turned me back on myself; now, I had only myself to blame for my misery and isolation. So I started going out around the neighborhood by myself, mostly on my bike. I met great local merchants and friendly, local restaurateurs. I got to know my closest neighbors, who are all kind and trustworthy. I discovered the local budding, artist’s and gallery community, centering around such venerable exhibition spaces as the 40 Acres Gallery, and the Brickhouse, both on Broadway, a few blocks from where I live. I discovered an old friend had moved nearby, so close that we would ride our bikes to each other’s houses and hang out.

I also began to observe a very ambivalent vibe that I think might be exclusive to Oak Park. For example, the people who live in the houses of Oak Park are by and large, friendly, upstanding, and law-abiding citizens. But some aren’t, like the neighborhood kid who nearly ran me over with his flash Mercedes Benz, running through a stop sign, while I was on my bike in the intersection. He got out of his car, called me a bitch, pushed me, then grabbed my cell phone and threw it on the ground, breaking it. As he drove off, he threatened to “get me," if he saw me again. I memorized his license plate number and reported him to the police. They were very polite to me about it, but not terribly concerned about the threat, and said they would drive around for a while looking for him and that was about it. My guess is that they felt they have better things to pursue in Oak Park, and they are probably right. But their relatively au fait attitude towards the incident was rather off-putting, and I can understand the locals not liking the local beat cops in this neighborhood.

Then there are some merchants around here who are just plain mean. For example, the folks at Food Source, the only major food store in the area, refuse to serve certain folks who want to buy things from them. My local friends have been approached by apparently homeless men, who sleep sometimes in the empty lot across from Food Source. These men have asked my friends to take their money and go in and buy things for them, as Food Source will not take their business, even though they have the money, are bothering no one, are full dressed, and recently, at least, bathed.

I think that attitude on the part of Food Source’s management is disgusting.

Also, Food Source apparently has its own little police patrol car/private army, and policemen, perpetually parked in front of the store, whose beat is solely to protect Food Source from what, exactly? Homeless men who want to buy food there? An anticipated riot among local youths in the cereal aisle? I couldn’t guess, but I think the mere fact that Food Source and the Sacramento Police Department deem it necessary to keep a police car parked permanently out in front of the Food Source, is pathetic and revolting. I would even go so far as to recommend that locals boycott Food Source for that very reason, if not dozen’s of others, too numerous to mention.

Happily, I have found that most local merchants are nothing like Food Source. They are friendly, courteous, and law-abiding, in that they happily serve anyone who has the money and the proper attire.

So, I actually dig Oak Park. I am happy that they are getting rid of the local Starbucks on Broadway, to be replaced by a much more apt food and coffee joint called Soul Power. Every day, without fail, someone in my neighborhood, usually someone I don’t know, waves hello as I ride or drive by. The prices on most local merchandise can’t be beat. And strangers regularly try to turn you into friends.

I hope the admirable new mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, has great development plans for Oak Park. We all know he owns property here, and apparently makes his early morning jog through here, so we can have high expectations for his intentions for this neighborhood. I tried to get a hold of him and/or his communications director, Joaquim, before my deadline, but to no avail.

So I turned to perhaps even better sources on the prospects of Oak Park, past, present and future. A handful of local business owners and residents that work right around the corner from me.

The first is the handsome, charismatic, strapping owner of Kidd’s Gym on Second Avenue, Charles Kidd.

Kidd is not from Oak Park, and indeed not even from Sacramento; he comes from South Carolina originally. But he has become a de facto local leader and inspiration, especially among the youth of Oak Park.

A former college wide receiver, Kidd has worked in the Oak Park division of the Sacramento City Parks and Recreation Department for many years, mostly in the Physical Education department. He has been one of the people in charge of many local, after-school phys-ed programs for local high school students like those from Sacramento High, and he has now extended his interest in physical education, in particular with regard to the training of talented, local high school athletes, through his very own business, Kidd’s Gym.

He explains his success with these “surrogate children” of his simply. “You get what you give; I give them respect, they give me respect back." This can be a bit of a surprise in the current cultural atmosphere where parents and teachers of his “kids," are more permissive, and are more likely to want to be their friends, than to earn their respect. Kidd thinks this is a huge mistake. “You are not going to get a kid to pay attention to your position of authority of any kind, if you don’t command it in the right way."

I haven’t even mentioned the most amazing thing about 51-year-old, apparently tireless, Kidd. In addition to having raised six children of his own, he is currently the foster father of four teenage boys. They came to him from troubled backgrounds; now they are all good students and talented athletes. Why does he do it? Hasn’t he paid his fatherhood dues? Well, he says, “I learned by being raised by a good community.” I asked him if he meant that it “takes a village to raise a child.” “No, I mean that I was raised right by my mother, my grandmother, and other members of my family and I feel that I can pass on those values and help these kids.” He does so, by the way, as a single parent; he is not currently married. You ladies out there, pay attention!

Then there are the husband-and-wife local entrepreneurs and residents of Oak Park, Linda and Eddie Hill, who run a second-hand furniture and appliance business out of their property at 3940 Broadway, called Broadway Plaza. I call Linda and Eddie entrepreneurs, and they certainly are that, managing various Oak Park properties and other property-related services. But really, they are the “missionaries” of Oak Park, without the bible-thumping beat that might otherwise drown out their message.

“We do what we do, really, not to make money, but to help people,” say’s Linda, a handsome, witty, middle-aged woman with two kids, who is originally from Long Island, New York. Somehow, she made her way out to Sacramento and eventually Oak Park. She and her husband Eddie have lived and worked in Oak Park for nearly 15 years. She has high hopes for the future of Oak Park, but remembers when, only about ten years ago, the crime in her neighborhood in Oak Park was so bad, that she was afraid to sit on her own front porch, even during the day, because of the random gunplay and gang warfare nearby.

In spite of that experience, she will always have faith in the inherent goodness of people. Sometimes she gets “rewarded” for that faith by unwittingly welcoming a bad, law-breaking tenant into one of her rental properties in the neighborhood. She can, as she says, be “too soft-hearted,” when people come to her with their sob stories. She will give people breaks on rent, breaks on furniture, appliances and knick knacks they need for their home – she will even let people pay in installments, just so they can go home that day with a bed to sleep on or an oven to cook in.

By her estimation, she and her husband have helped furnish over 24 homes in Oak Park for families that have very little money. And she always makes sure that they are getting clean, high quality, working items. Also, by her estimation, she has helped provide at least 34 Oak Park families with computers that had none before. She sells them the whole computer set up at an amazingly discounted price, and loads the computer with her own software, so they don’t have to buy it themselves.

It’s the kids involved in these scenarios that she is most moved by. “A LOT of kids in this community don’t have access to computers in their homes, and everyone should have that. It’s become essential,” like having a working toilet, or some such.

And now, here is my final, emotional and spiritual and journalistic connection I would like to make between the relevancy of my experience in the “new” South Africa, and living here in Oak Park. In both places, there is a sense of expectation, of hope, of ambition, of dreams that can come true, where before there was none. For me, personally, as I discover Oak Park in my solitary perambulations, I feel the same sense of newness, of wonder at things never seen or experienced before, and of people of a certain, lovely, singular character that I had never come across before. When I sent to South Africa at that crucial time in its history, I saw and experienced wondrous things, good and bad, but mostly good. And that is exactly how I feel about my “discovery” of Oak Park as it is right now. It is a place in transition. And it is heading in a direction that I believe is for the better.