|
 After
the night I knew I was dying
After finding, after three years of illness,
I was alive
After concluding at age nine that I was on
earth to use my talents to make a unique
contribution
After four more decades of living
After a 1976 intended two week vacation to
San Francisco
After a year of challenging ideas and new
friends in San Francisco
After the collapse of the commune back home
in Hawaii
After investing my personal savings in a
building for a religious group in San Francisco
After the group backed out, fearing the
amount of work required to renovate an antique
building
After the inspector decreed the building
irrevocably zoned as a hotel; any other uses
forbidden
After all banks refused loans for remodeling
After two alleged “investing business
partners” finagled title to half the building
without investing a penny
After the “partners” declared “Whether you
like it or not, we own half the building and we
don’t like you. You must either sell us your half or
buy our half from us.”
After finding a lawyer who promised action
and filed
After rejecting the lawyer’s contract which,
if she won title from the defendants, gave it to her
After briefing ten law firms, all of whom
turned me down
After a prestigious law firm took me on, pro
bono
After the electrician broke out the tile face
of the fireplace in The Peacock Suite
After the building inspector condemned the
electrical ’s three floors of heating and lighting
work
After months of written forms and complaints
to the State Contractor’s License Board, which did
nothing
After the contractor-to-correct-the-work of
the previous contractor disappeared
After the new skylights leaked buckets of
rain into the ground floor
After the skylight contractor vanished
After the entire interior was repaired and
painted and the outside was painted red with gold
letters proclaiming “THE RED VICTORIAN”
After forty windows were repaired, painted,
shaded and curtained
After twenty five beds, thirty two chairs and
sixteen dressers, tables, desks were installed,
often by carrying them on the roof of my 1965
Plymouth Valiant
After giving each room a special name – the
Summer of Love Room, the Sunshine Room, the Rainbow
Room and all the others
After hanging seventy of my original Visual
Poems and paintings in the hallways
After a trickle of hotel guests began to come
After the hotel manager walked out
After a year and a half wait for a court date
to recover control and title
After the court appointed a receiver to
operate the hotel
After the receiver lost money each month
After finding an interim manager and
introducing him to the receiver
After the receiver rented him the entire
furnished eighteen rooms, including their income,
for the price of an ordinary unfurnished three room
apartment
After the trial date was set, the jury picked
After three weeks of courtroom attack: “The
victim-brought-it-on-herself”
After the jury restored my title to The Red
Victorian
After the interim caretaker-manager of the
hotel refused to leave, having made the hotel and
income his own
After the ground floor tenants also refused
to leave, citing their “lease” with the former
“partners”
After the hotel doorbell rang repeatedly
every night
After witnessing a hasty drug pickup in the
hallway
After police warned “people’s bodies have
been stuffed in the trunks of cars” for witnessing
such things
After two male silhouettes appeared in the
roof skylight above me one night, looking down into
my room
After spying a gun under the jacket of the
hotel manager
After coming home to find four of my large
paintings slashed from frame to frame, heaped on the
floor
After my office was broken into and documents
stolen
After escaping in the night
After multiple occasions of homelessness
After picking myself up by my own bootstraps.
Again. And again
After weeping, praying, meditating . . . .
painting
After paying the hotel manager $10,000 to
leave
After the ground floor tenants set up tables
on the sidewalk soliciting neighbors and hotel
customers to boycott “the landlord” who was trying
to “evict them”
After hundreds and thousands of negative
statements were circulated about me, depicting me
quite differently from the person I really am
After deciding not to strike back, not to
defame others
After the loss of my best friend
After my dog was stolen
After training half-hearted staff, then
training disinterested staff, then training
transient staff, then training dishonest staff, and
then pouring a lot of energy into unreliable staff
After not one staff person showed up whose
enthusiasm, hard work and commitment matched my own
month after month, year after year
After experiences of having one or all
employees leave, sometimes with no notice when the
hotel was full
After knowing I couldn’t build this business
alone, – years and years holding a vision that
others would come to share in the creation of a
fun,inspiring, socially innovative small business in
service to the world
After years of spiritual and emotional
fulfillment as part of a very special church
community
After the loss of that church community
After a diagnosis of breast cancer
After seeking counseling for stress at my HMO
and receiving no understanding and a bottle of pills
After rejecting the approaches of both the
oncology and psychiatric departments of the HMO
After looking deep within myself, changing
what I could of my life, using alternatives and
vanishing the cancer
After several decisions to sell the Red
Victorian because I lacked both energy and money to
keep the Vision alive one more day
After decades of formal and informal classes
and personal growth training experiences
After a Ph.D in Transformational Arts and
Societal Change
After a ten year wait to use my building’s
ground floor
After being free, at last, to welcome the
world to the street level Gallery of Meditative Art,
hotel reception, lobby, breakfast area and gift
shop.
I am still here. I have not abandoned my
dream which has blossomed to include thousands of
fascinating people from all over the world. They
come each year to stay in the Flower Child Room, the
Peace Room, the Sunshine Room or one of the other
popular guestrooms. I have designed these rooms and
our whole environment with the idea in mind of
welcoming people to feel relaxed, amused, friendly
and open, and to have an experience of the real San
Francisco and Haight-Ashbury. We are an Idea Center
and a Gallery of my Meditative Art and a Peace
Center. At The Red Victorian we are modeling what I
would like for the whole world.
- Sami Sunchild |
