Leaving California

FROG HOSPITAL -- Sept 29, 2013

Leaving California

By Fred Owens

Not me. I'm not leaving. I love it here. The weather is great and the people are friendly. I was at Dodger Stadium last night watching a game -- beautiful skies in the city. My girlfriend, a native, was telling me how polluted it used to be downtown, when she was a kid, but there is far less smog now.

Look, I'm not selling the place. If you hate California, good for you, stay away.

But what mystifies me is why all these people left. Many thousands of people of have moved out of California in recent years -- gone to Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and other Western States.

Why did they leave? They just gave up and quit -- where's the gumption? I can understand the common complaints about California -- the high cost of living, bad schools, terrible traffic, too much government, and millions of immigrants, not forgetting moral degradation and a state income tax.

All these complaints are valid. So what did millions of Californians do? They quit. They left. They gave up..... Well, good riddance. We don't need you. We're going to fix a few things around here and make it better than it ever was. You just wait and see.

Gov't Shutdown

I'm expecting my Social Security check on Tuesday, so if they shut the gov't. down on Wednesday, it won't be a problem for me. I wasn't planning to go to the national parks, and I hope nobody starts a war in the next few weeks.
Uncle Ted

I promised my cousin Trish a story about her grandfather who was my Uncle Ted. I have thought about this story a good deal but I have only gotten two paragraphs written. Here it is.


What I remember most about Uncle Ted -- and remember this is me as a ten-year-old -- is that he had a very big nose. It came way out from between his eyes and then circled downwards toward his mouth. Uncle Ted's nose was an event in itself...... Also he never talked very much and we didn't see him too often.
Aunt Bee was his wife. I liked her but I thought it was funny she was named after a bug. I didn't know her real name was Berenice -- nobody ever told me.

That's as far as I have gotten.

Tom Robbins at the White Trash Food Festival

I like the title of this story, stepping off on a famous man, author Tom Robbins, and his real life role as Supreme Judge at the annual White Trash Food Festival.

The story is about Tom Robbins and how you can know a man. By his relations you shall know him.

It goes like this. Every year Tom judges the festival, along with co-judge Danny Jensen, aka "Danimal."

There's a lot of Jensen's in LaConner. Danny is probably related to Sybil Jensen who is one of the chief funders and docents at the Quilt Museum, which was founded by Art & Rita Hupy. Art was a well-known photographer who sometimes worked at the old Puget Sound Mail back when Bonnie McDade was the publisher. Bonnie was helped at the newspaper by her sister Maddy Free ( now married to Dan O'Donnell). Later Maddy got a job at the LaConner Post Office, and that's where Tom Robbins goes to pick up his mail everyday and, as many people in LaConner know, Tom loves to keep up a good old-fashioned non-Internet, snail-mail correspondence.

That is just one link of relations in a small town, and that is how you know people. I have notes and can spin out these relations for many pages.

Starting with Ralph Meeks, for example, dead 20 years now, an old fisherman who signed the protest pamphlet that objected to the jetty between Goat Island and McGlinn Island that was built in 1936 to benefit the Dunlap Towing Company but which also ruined the local salmon runs.

Ralph is somehow related to Bud Moore, who know lives in Ralph's old house. Bud is the son of Milo Moore who founded the Moore-Clark fish food company along with his brother Vernon Moore, who is somehow related to Gordy Bell, a longtime town employee, who is probably related to Sharon Bell, a close friend of Barbara Cram, who is no relation to Herb or Sally or Sam Cram. But Sally Cram is the sister of Mary Lam and the daughter of Pat O'Leary who used to own the Puget Sound Mail before Bonnie McDade owned the newspaper, whose sister is Maddy Free, who delivered the mail to Tom Robbins.

So it keeps going around -- for many more pages, but you get the idea.

Trust Your Dreams
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I did this calligraphy from my Arabic Studies. It is two words from a poem by Kahlil Gibran. It reads "Trust your dreams for in them is hidden the gate to eternity."

Kahlil Gibran was from Lebanon, when it was a peaceful and beautiful country. Now it is ravaged by war and flooded with refugees from Syria, but you still trust your dreams. What else can you do?

--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My blog is Fred Owens

send mail to:

Fred Owens
35 West Main St Suite B #391
Ventura CA 93001