Denials, appeals, subpoena responses, certified transcript demands. That was the first one I ever wrote for myself. Gwen Akerly called on the 10th and set the appointment for Monday the 21st at 9 in the morning. She sounded normal. Gwen has sounded normal since 1994.
2 days after that, Pette Vandergri called me. Pette had not called me on a weekday in 6 years. Pette Vandergri is 68, certificate 0104. She’s been on the membership committee since 2013 and she has been what people call my dear friend since about 1996. She opened with my health, not directly.
She is better than that. She asked how I was managing, which is a word with a hook in it. She asked whether I still drove at night. She asked whether the house was too much. I said the house was fine.
Then she said, “You know, we’d all love to see you up here. It’s been so long.” Though I suppose the drive is a lot now and then laughing like it was an old joke between us. Honestly, Roberta, you’ve had Christmas since Clinton. She has said that sentence to me exactly twice. The first time was Saturday, October 15th, 2016 in the parking lot after the annual meeting.
Pette had put a motion on the floor to make the permanent holiday weeks rotate on a 10-year cycle. She drew the second week of August in 1994. Sedona in August is 104° and closed pools. I spoke against it. 2 minutes, no notes.
I said the draw was a term of purchase that people paid $8,000 in 1994, partly on the strength of a slip out of a coffee can and that a corporation which reassigns what it sold is one nobody can plan around. The motion failed 61 to 44. In the parking lot. She said it with a smile that did not go anywhere near her eyes. 10 years later, she said it again on the telephone, and I finally understood that she had never once been joking.
I thanked her for calling. I asked after her husband’s shoulder. Then I hung up and wrote the date and time in the margin of my copy of the letter. Monday, September 21st, 9 in the morning. The small conference room behind the club office which smells like carpet glue and printer toner and faintly juniper.
Gwen Akerly is 74. Certificate Zoro Gro 9. She has run that office since the club opened and will not retire because in her words, “Nobody else will do it right.” She wheeled in three file boxes and left the door open, which I noticed. “Take as long as you want,” she said.
“I’ll be at my desk.” I read for 4 hours. I did not skim. Skimming is how you miss the one line that matters. And the one line that matters is never on the page you expect.
At the end, I asked for $214 pages, 25 cents a page. $53.50. Gwen wrote the receipt by hand on a carbon pad and stamped it. Paid. Box one was minutes.
Box two was correspondence. In box one, I found something I had not gone looking for. The original member card for 0071. Green card stock typed on a machine in 1994. The O’s punched slightly through the paper.
Chalmer’s Warren R and Robera A. Purchase date $41594. Amount $8,000. Cassita assignment 12. I turned it over on the back in Warren’s pencil.
The same flat carpenter pencil. The same all caps he used on plat sheets. Somebody had let him write the draw result himself. Deck 1926, Perm. I sat there with my hand flat on the back of a green index card longer than I would like to admit.
Then I opened box three. Box three was applications and on top in a manila folder with a red dot sticker was a membership transfer application form MTA2 dated Monday, June 22nd, 2026. I turned to the last page to see who had signed it. The application asked the board of governors to approve the transfer of founding equity certificate 0071 from Roberta A. Chalmer’s to Denise Chalmer’s Rooker.
It was two pages of boxes. Somebody had typed the answers which surprised me. Denise handwrites everything. Box four, relationship of transferee to member of record daughter. Box six, reason for transfer.
Member of record has resided in a care facility since 2022 and is unable to administer the membership. Family administration requested. There it was in a box on a form. Since 2022, a specific year, somebody had picked a year the way you pick a year when you are filling in a blank and it needs to look like a fact. In 2022, I drove to Sedona for Ray’s knee.
In 2023, I bought a water heater. In 2024, I served on a school bond committee. In 2025, I sat in my own kitchen and asked about a pecan pie. Box 9 required the signature of a sponsoring member in good standing per article 9 section two. No application is accepted without one.
It is a friction point. It makes somebody put their own name on it. Pette Vandergriff certificate 0104 signed in blue ink dated June 19th, 2026. She had signed it 3 days before it was filed and 85 days before she called to ask whether I still drove at night. Box 11 was consent of member of record.
There was a check mark in it and a notation C attached signature page. I turned to the attachment. My signature was on it. My real one. The long R, the flat A, the way the S in Chalmer’s turns into a line because I signed 40 documents a day for 14 years.