People

This is another in a short series of conversations with people in their 20s who have grown up here and left, and then returned, or who may have never actually wandered off. 

Have you ever been with your child or grandchild and wondered, “How am I going to get through this day since this child is not listening?” You start to ask yourself, “Is this ‘Opposite Day?’” since when you say ask them to do one thing...

I sat down with Gaby (at Retrograde Coffee) on April 7. That ended up being a pretty big day for those of us who who were waiting for the overdue appointment to the Supreme Court of a Black woman. Ketanji Brown Jackson (RBG to KBJ) got the nod that day, and we were suddenly in a country a notch closer to Rev. King’s dream of reaching the time when all of us “would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

I took Rosie, our usually sweet black lab/pointer out for a walk the other day. Passing the CVS, there was an older gentleman sitting on the ground near the entrance. Rosie went right up to him, and the two really hit it off. The man had a sign about having been recently evicted from his home and was reaching out for some sort of assistance.

There is a word in Yiddish, (a Jewish language that is part Hebrew, part German, part other eastern European influences) that sums up Jon Gonzales. He’s a mensch. 

Rick is remarkable. He’ll be teaching an on court tennis clinic, and someone will walk by outside the court, and he yells, “Hi Beth!” Or it may be “Hey there, Larry! How’s your knee doing?” Or he’ll ask me about my father-in-law who he met once 20 years ago. “How’s Erni doing?”  I don’t have an explanation for how the guy remembers everyone’s name, except for the possibility that he really cares. 

I’ve been running into Marilyn Read for years. We first met at Memorial Hospice where we both worked as nurses. Then I’d see Marilyn every summer up at the Kate Wolf festival where she would be hanging out with her banjo and her Love Choir community. Later, as a ukulele instructor at the Sebastopol Cultural Center, she got my wife hooked on the thing. 

The following are excerpted from Sebastopol Police Department daily crime log entries and listed at the time the alleged violation was reported.

Just before Thanksgiving, there seems to be an influx of youngish people around here. They are the college kids, and those a bit older, who return just for the holiday and some reconnecting with family, and their old high school chums. Some of them stop by the house and we catch up a bit. It’s always like being in a time machine, because my recollection of these newly-minted adults is of kids running on a soccer field, or when they came to our door on Halloween dressed as princesses or Batmans, or maybe as pimply teens waiting to grow out of their most awkward years. 

The following are crimes excerpted from Sebastopol Police Department daily crime log entries and listed at the time the alleged violation was reported.