Thelma’s Page

Thelma Angelo was a longtime resident of Shoshone Trail Park, a former client of Tecopa Community Center’s Senior Programs, and a Founding Mother of the SovereignTreatyShadeUnion, who has recently retired to more easily assisted apartment living in her Elder Brother’s Carson City Neighborhood. She has sent the following Poetry and Testimony in support of the Boycott…enjoy!
THELMA’S SONG
I don’t want to sound disrespectful
When I ask Saint Peter to wait,
But there’s a place I long to visit
Before I pass thru his Pearly Gate:
It’s a Land of Hills and Valleys,
The greenest ever seen,
Where the King of Leprechauns himself
Dances with the Faerie Queen..
When the Moon is full upon a warm night’s scene,
And the breeze off LockLomen brings the mists of dream,
And the music of the King’s fiddle puts me in hypnotic trance,
My feet, of their own accord, begin to tap and dance,
And the Queen of Faerie, with shamrock-braided golden hair,
Whirls me round and round until I loose all cares.
The Irish from my mother makes my heart wish to go
Where the bagpipes gives me goose bumps
And the blarney stories flow,
And the Mothers tell their children
“the banshee’s will get you if you’re not good”
So all the babes of Ireland are Angels,
And the music of life’s magic is clearly understood.
I’m asking you, dear St. Peter,
To be patient with me one last time,
While I frolic on the moonlit Green,
So that I can bring reminders to Eire’s Angels,
Of dancing with the Queen.

Testimony…October 29, 2006
Not much on TV, so I’m sitting in my one room in a nice city wishing I was back in the trailer I sold too cheap, at the edge of Death Valley…just a spot in the Road…one store and gas station, a café and bar together, a Museum, the Sheriff’s office, the Post Office where one had to go get mail, and next door, the Park office where I paid for the privilege of living on the space my trailer sat on for ten years, which was owned by a descendant of Great-Grandfather Brown(?). The trailer had a porch that my Son came and enclosed with screen, making a nice extra room where I could watch the cars go by. The hills changed colors as the sun went down, and the trees behind were a rare feathery kind of Tamarisk called ‘salt cedars ’ and they spread their limbs until they grew too heavy and old, and would crack and fall in a strong wind. I loved to listen to the soft, southern, summer breezes rustle thru them at night. It was not rare to hear coyotes calling to each other, and sometimes one would stroll thru the park. In back was a campground under the scattered trees, a barbeque pit, a laundry house, and a bath house for the Campers. The most wonderful thing was the swimming pool of flow-thru water, warm even in winter, with piped in water forming a waterfall. I was always amazed to see such a wonderful pool, not even crowded…it never was, and I had the pool to myself, likely as not, but enjoyed many hours with my old neighbors and friends, watching the bats come out after mosquitoes as the evenings got dark.
Death Valley’s being one of the Wonders of the Natural World, there were travelers from all over the World coming thru…some I met in the pool, and at the café. How I wished I could talk to them in their many languages.
Just 8 miles South was another spot in the road called Tecopa…long faded now, not even a store anymore, but still the home of a little steepled church, a Post Office, and an old motel where one Lady, my friend Sage, still lives because she wanted her dogs with her, and this was allowed. Two miles from the Post Office are the Hot Springs feeding the Once and Future Public Baths, one for men and one for women. Very nice. Two bath houses with hot mineral water constantly flowing thru, showers, a roof on one and the other open to the sun’s rays as you relax between 10 minute soaks. There are neighboring trailer parks and resorts with spaces, small cabins, and private baths that range from extra warm to cooking hot. Watch out for the lobster effect.
Because we live in a country where the government won’t let things stay the same as they used to be, now the Baths that Chief Tecopa refused to sell, and were free for all mankind since forever, now the government is charging a fee. The water is flowing freely out of Mother Nature for the use of People who need the healing waters to ease their aches and pains.
Many of the People who live around town are poor as well as crippled, and can’t afford the fees, and it just isn’t fair that they are forced to suffer.
For the tourists who can afford the fees, I say OK, But for the local People
who need the therapeutic treatments, I say, “Give them a free pass. They get medical benefits and compensation, don’t they?”
Don’t try to change what Chief Tecopa believed in. The Baths were meant to be FREE. Why charge? I bet Tecopa is turning in his grave, don’t you???