Paws Forward asked me to join their national board of directors in the ninth year. I said yes, because Diane asked, and I have never been able to say no to Diane. The board meetings were in different cities, and Elena came with me when she could, and Willow came always, because Willow went everywhere. At the first meeting, the executive director introduced me as "the reason half the country knows what a reasonable accommodation is," which was an exaggeration, but I let it stand. We launched a program called Homefront, specifically for veterans facing housing discrimination, with legal partnerships in twelve states. The first Homefront case was a Navy veteran in Florida whose condo association had tried to charge him a five-hundred-dollar "large dog fee" for his service dog. We sent him a folder. The association backed down in a week. A week. I called Diane, and I said, "It's getting faster." She said, "That's the point, honey. That's the whole point. Eventually, they won't try at all."
Elena's work grew too. She had gone back to school, social work, with a focus on trauma, and she started a support group for veterans' spouses, which met in our clubhouse on Thursday nights. The group grew. It outgrew the clubhouse. It moved to the community center, the old clubhouse, the one the cooperative had saved from Stratton Properties. Elena told me once, after a meeting, that three of the spouses in the group had partners who were facing HOA issues, and that she had given them all folders. "It's an epidemic," she said, half joking. "The folders. They're everywhere." I said, "Good." She leaned her head against my shoulder. "Good," she agreed.
And through all of it, the community kept being a community. The block parties. The marigolds. The fountain. The stone heron, which someone's kid was still always trying to climb, though the kids were different now, a new generation, growing up in a place where the plaque at the playground said ALL ARE WELCOME and the bench at Ranger's Corner said "He taught us what home means," and they read those words the way children read everything, as if they were simply true, which they were. Marisol used to say that the best revenge against Vanessa Aldridge was not the prison sentence. It was the neighborhood. "She wanted a museum," Marisol said. "We built a home." She was right. She was always right about those things.
Dorothy Pabst died in the eleventh year, at eighty-six, in her sleep, in the townhouse she had lived in for twenty-five years. I found out from Marisol, who called me at six in the morning, crying, which was the only time I ever heard Marisol cry on the phone. The community mourned her the way it had mourned Ranger, because Dorothy had been, in her way, as much a service to this place as any dog. The memorial was in the greenbelt. Four hundred people came. Her nephew David spoke, and he told the story of the phone number on the folded piece of paper, the one Dorothy had pressed into my hand in the clubhouse parking lot all those years ago. "My aunt gave a stranger her nephew's number," David said, "because she had watched an injustice and she refused to walk past it. That was Dorothy. She never walked past anything." The board voted unanimously to rename the accommodations committee the Dorothy Pabst Fair Housing Committee, and to hang her photo in the clubhouse lobby, next to the Fair Housing Act, next to the DOJ certificate. The lobby wall was getting crowded. Nobody minded. Marisol said the lobby should be crowded. "It's our history," she said. "Let it be crowded."
I think about Dorothy often, especially when I am tempted to believe that ordinary people cannot change things. Dorothy was eighty-four when she became chair of the accommodations committee. She walked with a cane. She had never been an activist. She had just been a woman who watched something shameful and decided not to be quiet about it. The committee she built processed over two hundred accommodation requests in its first decade, and approved all but three, and the three denials were for requests that the DOJ monitor agreed were unreasonable, which tells you everything about how the committee worked. Every approval came with a welcome letter. Dorothy wrote the first fifty herself, by hand, before her arthritis made it too hard, and then she dictated them, and then, at the end, she just signed them, her signature getting shakier every year, but she signed every one. "So they know a person did this," she said. "Not a policy. A person." When I visit the lobby now, I touch her frame, the way people touch things for luck. It is not luck I am looking for. It is a reminder. A person did this. A person can do this.