Columns

Monday’s Healdsburg City Council meeting agenda was long, and by far the most consequential item on the agenda was the last item: deciding how to move forward with Mayor Leah Gold’s soon-to-be-vacant council seat. Three options were on the table: to leave the seat vacant until a special election could be held; to make a short-term appointment to the seat, which would then be permanently filled by special election; or to appoint someone to the seat’s full remaining term of around two years. What resulted was a travesty of bureaucratic proportions.

I am not watching the Super Bowl. It has become a corporate spectacle.

“Dark Land, Dark Mirror,” Jonah Raskin’s new, suspenseful murder mystery takes place in Sonoma County in the present day. The detective is a feisty woman named Tioga Vignetta. The criminals are all pretending to be respectable citizens. The fall guy who’s framed for a murder in town is a Mexican from Chiapas named Kiko Martinez who grows flowers and has hit songs south of the border.

Let’s face it — none of us are getting any younger these days. Then again, who wants to? Counting our ages and tracking our generational footprints has become baffling. Old truisms, social definitions, markers for achieving adulthood and official government census numbers all need updating. If 70 is the new 50, and 35 is the old 25, how are we supposed to know how to act?

Spring is springing all over Sonoma County this week, with its official arrival set for next Monday, March 20. Someone forgot to tell the yellow daffodils, wild mustard and snow white shooting stars which have been blooming for weeks now. With the muddy vineyards...