The document that I laid on the table of the HOA board in the clubhouse that Thursday night was a yellowed set of covenants, eleven pages long, typed on a typewriter and bound with a brass fastener, and Article 12 had been highlighted by my wife in pink marker thirty one years before. I am Samuel Okafor, eighty three years old, of Chesterfield, Missouri, and I stood at the head of the long conference table on my walker with my good coat buttoned. Heather Lindgren, in her white blazer, smiled at me like a cat at a bird. Then she read the page, and she stopped smiling.
I read the article aloud, because she seemed to have forgotten how. No restriction in these covenants shall ever be enforced against the display of any decoration, medal, flag, uniform or symbol of military service at the home of a veteran, and any officer of the association who orders the removal or destruction of such a display, or who imposes a fine for it, shall at once forfeit that office and shall pay to the veteran ten times the amount of the fine. Mary Beth had written the second sentence herself, at our kitchen table in 1993, with her pencil in her hair.
The room was silent. Phil, the older board member, covered his mouth with a hand. Another member began to shuffle papers. Heather read the article again, aloud, in a smaller voice. She had fined me twenty five hundred dollars and cut the wreath from my door with a pair of garden shears. Under the covenants that I had written, she owed me twenty five thousand dollars and had forfeited her office. I asked, in a very mild voice, whether the board would like to take a short recess, or whether we might continue.
A yellowed covenant from 1993 gave one retired highway engineer the length of a board meeting to bring a bossy neighbor back to the truth in Chesterfield.
I gave my terms in the quiet of that clubhouse, with the pink highlighted page between us and my walker at my side. “Mrs. Lindgren, I am not a vengeful man. I have no use for your twenty five thousand dollars. I would like you to resign this evening. I would like the fines to be voided. And I would like an accounting of the funds of the association, because a person who would cut the wreath of a widower from his door is a person who would also, I suspect, have something in her own accounts that she would rather nobody read.”
Heather sat down in the chair at the head of the table and her white blazer seemed to lose its starch. Her eyes went to the face of Phil, and he looked away. “The fines,” she said at last, hoarsely. “They went into an account that I controlled. I paid for the wedding of my daughter with a piece of it. Eighteen thousand dollars. I told myself the association owed me for my time.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I have never been thanked for anything in this neighborhood. I wanted to feel important.”
But Heather had one more card, and it was in her handbag. As Phil reached for the ledger, she lunged across the table, snatched my covenants and the bank statements of the association, the whole bundle with the original signatures, and ran for the clubhouse door in her white heels, meaning to drive home and feed every page into her paper shredder. Her chair crashed. The board members rose. Someone cried out. And in the open doorway, pushing a casserole cart, stood six of my neighbors from Briar Hollow Court.
Heather stopped at the clubhouse door with the bundle clutched to her chest, because the neighbors, in coats and scarves, had come to the meeting at last, and they filled the doorway shoulder to shoulder. A young mother with a stroller, a retired dentist, a man in a Cardinals cap. The dentist spoke softly. “Heather, we came because Mr. Okafor put a note in our mailboxes. We have all gotten your letters. We have all been afraid of you. Please give him his papers.” The cart rolled aside. Heather looked from face to face. She walked back to the table and set the bundle in front of me.
The consequences were honest and a little embarrassing for everybody. Heather resigned that night, and the board accepted her resignation with relief. She repaid the eighteen thousand dollars over time, and the association, at its own expense, hired an auditor. All fines against me and three other residents were voided. I declined to collect the twenty five thousand dollars, but asked that it be given to the library for a fund for children. Phil carried the wreath out of the recycling bin himself, and wiped it clean with his handkerchief.
In the name of my wife Mary Beth, who passed three Christmases ago, I started the Mary Beth Okafor Fund. It pays for piano lessons for children whose families cannot afford them and for legal help for veterans and older residents facing unfair actions by their neighborhood associations, in St. Louis, St. Charles and Jefferson counties. In the first year we paid for lessons for one hundred and fifty children and defended fifty two homeowners. One was a ten year old boy from Ferguson who played his first scale for the volunteers and then sat very still, looking at his hands.
On the first Sunday of Advent, I stood on the porch of my brick colonial on Briar Hollow Court, leaning on my walker, with a cup of tea steaming in my other hand. Phil and the retired dentist and the young mother with the stroller were all there, hanging the wreath on my front door with a new brass hook. The strips of green wool of my old uniform caught the winter light, and the little brass buttons shone. “Every Christmas, Sam,” I said softly to the sky. “I promised.” And the whole street went quiet.
