Section two says a certificate transfers only upon approval of the board of governors and the application must bear the signature of a sponsoring member in good standing. Article 18. Section four says any member in good standing may inspect the corporate records upon written demand during business hours and may have copies at cost. I underlined that one twice. Let me say something to you here.
Go find the piece of paper you sign every year without reading. The renewal, the beneficiary card, the annual form from the association. Read it this time. Read all four sentences. I signed mine for 15 years and the four sentences I never read turned out to be the only power I had.
Comment below and tell me what yours is and subscribe because there is more. On Monday, July 6th, the annual meeting packet came. The packet goes to all 180 certificates every July. Same envelope every year. 10 by13 club logo in the corner.
Agenda treasurers report capital plan committee reports. 30ome pages printed on the office copier, so the toner is heavy on the left side. I made coffee and read it at the kitchen table like I always do. And I got to page nine. Page nine is the membership committee report.
It has a subsection called pending matters. And in most years, it has nothing under it but a note about the waiting list. That year, it had a line item 00071 Chalmer’s R transfer pending. I read that four times before I understood that the letters and the number were me. Underneath it in the summary paragraph, the committee had quoted the application’s stated basis.
They do that. Gwen types the reports and Gwen quotes everything because she believes a report should be able to defend itself. The member of record has resided in a care facility since 2022 and no longer administers the membership. It is easier for the family to administer without her. There it was the same sentence my daughter said to me over road noise on the 18th of December.
Only now it had been typed and photocopied and stapled and mailed to 180 households and filed. It is just easier without you there, Mom. It is easier for the family to administer without her. I want to tell you that I stood up or made a sound. I did not.
I got a pencil out of the drawer, one of the flat carpenter pencils Warren used to leave everywhere. I still have nine of them, and I underlined the word easier. Then I sat there in my robe with cold coffee, and I understood four things in about 90 seconds. One, my children had not simply stopped inviting me. They had given the club a reason for my absence, and the reason was that my mind was gone.
Two, Marian Puit was not confused. Marian Puit had been told. Three, somebody had filed an application to move certificate Duro71 out of my name, and the club had accepted it as a pending matter, which meant it had a signature on it that they believed was mine. Four, whatever I did next, I was going to do it with documents because I had spent 31 years watching people lose arguments they were right about, and they always lost them the same way. They got loud before they got the file.
I knew exactly what I had to do. I just could not do it yet. Everyone assumes the next thing I did was call my daughter. I didn’t. Not that day, not that month, not until she called me in November.
I want to explain that because it is the part people push back on. It looks like cowardice. It was the opposite. If I called Denise on July 6th, here’s what happens. She says there has been a misunderstanding.
She says the club wrote it up wrong. She says she was only trying to make things simpler for me and she cries a little and I apologize for upsetting her. Then she calls the office on Monday. The words on page nine get quietly softened and by Christmas there is nothing left to look at. Records vanish when you announce that you are looking for them.
So I did what I did for 31 years. I made a list of questions instead of a list of accusations. What was filed? When it was filed, who sponsored it, what the club believes it has from me, and what exactly has my signature on it. Then I went to get the brass fob out of the cabinet because I wanted to hold something from 1994.
There was only one fob on the hook. There were always two. Warren lived on his truck keys until 2018. And after the funeral, I hung it on the same cup hook with his wallet and his reading glasses. Two brass ovals, one worn smooth at the seven and one still sharp.
Now there was one. I stood there and thought back. The last time I could picture two of them was November of 2022 when Denise came down and helped me clean out cabinets. A brass fob opens the front gate at Juniper Mesa. That is all it does.
It cannot sign anything. People ask why I waited 2 months. Here is the answer and it is not dramatic. The membership committee meets in September. Whatever the committee did with that application in the spring, it was going to do something else in September and it was going to write it down.
If I demanded records in July, I would get everything through June and then I would have to demand again in October and they would know I was watching. So I waited for the file to finish growing. On Tuesday, September 8th, 2026, I mailed a written demand to inspect the corporate records of the Juniper Mesa Club certified mail return receipt $4.85 at the Oro Valley Post Office. I cited article eli section 4 of the bylaws. I also cited Arizona revised statute section 10 santo 11602 which is the part of the Arizona nonprofit corporation act that gives a member the right to inspect records after five business days written notice.
I stated my purpose in one sentence because the statute requires a proper purpose and I have rejected a hundred requests that did not state one. All records concerning founding equity certificate 0071, including applications, committee minutes, correspondence, and office intake logs from January 1st, 2022 to the present. Then I signed it. Robera Chalmer’s member of record certificate 0071. I have written perhaps 4,000 letters like that.