Columns

When I was 16, my parents let me go on a road trip with my best friend and her older sister. Along for the ride were two of her guy friends, amenable to taking turns driving and chaperoning us teenagers. We drove to a Guns’ N Roses concert in L.A., and stayed at my aunt’s house after the concert. This memory sprung back into my subconscious after my own teen daughter asked if she could go on her first road trip to see her first concert. “We will see,” I told her, and then my mind kicked into overdrive.

TIME magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ for 2018 is a group of imprisoned and slain journalists. The selection honors journalists as “guardians of the truth.” Besides being slain and jailed, journalists everywhere now face toughening challenges to investigate, report and defend the truth. This is true in oppressive non-democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and it is true right here where economic factors are eliminating journalist’s jobs and where our president calls journalists “enemies of the people.”

Lots of us have been attending high school graduations lately, while many more of us have not. Still, whether very new or faded into sepia by time, we all share cherished graduation memories.

August is both an exciting and difficult month for me, balancing the market with producing a big festival: the Bodega Seafood, Art & Wine Festival. I’m not writing about the festival in this column: if you’re curious check out our website. It’s a wonderful event happening the last weekend of this month. I’m mentioning it only because this column is going to be quite short … I’m too busy!

As a part of the county’s increased efforts to lower the number of unsheltered individuals in our community, we will review potential sites for increased services during our March 10 board of supervisors meeting.

Mike Benziger grows some of the best marijuana in Northern California. He grows it biodynamically at “Glentucky Family Farm.”

Across the county the last month, Sonoma County Library has been offering a series of free back to school events for teachers. This series of open houses are a great opportunity to learn about free resources available to educators that might help enrich your teaching for the year.

As with most parts of life in Sonoma County, now removed by one month from the Oct. 8 wildfires, our 2017 Thanksgiving gatherings will be unlike any previous ones, with extra thoughts and prayers reserved for the victims and volunteers of our region’s greatest natural disaster in history. The timing to pause and give thanks could not be better.