60th birthday party takes the cake for columnist
Some of Riverside’s most delightful people gathered Sunday to wish me well for my 60th birthday. Softening the blow of the odometer change, almost all of them were older than me.
Even at 60, you can’t feel especially old if you’re practically the youngest person in the room.
(Side note: In his 40s, my dad was always greeted as “young man” at our town’s hardware store by its cardigan-clad, cane-using owner, a near-contemporary of Methuselah. My dad beamed.)
We were on the patio at Riverside’s utterly unique Weber House, the folk-art structure built in the 1930s by local architect Peter Weber. First there were the invited guests, most from the historical community, for a small party. They were followed by the general public, which amounted to, uh, a smaller party.
Oh well. But it was nice of everyone to make time.
Old Riverside Foundation, the nonprofit that uses the property as its headquarters and opens it for tours, hosted me and helped organize the event. So did Nancy L. Cox, my No. 1 fan in Riverside.
Upon my arrival, a plastic fedora with a “press” card in the band was given to me. I wore it throughout.
Susan Straight, the writer, beckoned me to the open chair next to her. “Have a seat. You’re 60. You’re tired,” Straight joked. “That’s why I’m sitting. I’m 63.”
Mostly I stayed on my feet, chatting with people. Tiffany Brooks and Jennifer Mermilliod got in a conversation about my recent interviews with each of them. Both remarked approvingly of how I don’t record interviews, just take notes.
“It makes you listen better,” Brooks theorized about my approach. “You captured everything I said perfectly.”
A cake was brought out with, hi
lariously, an edible picture of me on half of it. And two candles. I made a wish.
Asked to cut the cake, I sliced up the half without my face on it. Dragging a heavily serrated blade across an image of myself seemed a bit morbid.
(By the party’s end, that portion remained uncut. I don’t know what became of it, but I didn’t volunteer to take it home — delicious though I might be.)
Soon came a brief ceremony. A certificate of recognition from Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson was read aloud by foundation president Dave Stolte. The mayor congratulated yours truly “on reaching such a momentous milestone in your life.” Her own such milestone is a year off.
“Upland gave you a certificate,” noted Cox. “Our mayor didn’t want to be outdone.”
No one can outdo Lock Dawson. (Certainly not Jessica Qattawi, who finished a distant second in the March 5 mayoral election.)
Stolte said hosting the party gave his group a chance to expose new people to Weber House. Those included two first-timers who took tours, Al Delay and Jennifer Pigeon. I hope the tour gave Al Delay of the land. And that even from ground level, Pigeon got a bird’s-eye view.
On a personal note, it’s not like me to celebrate a birthday in public, aside from a discreet paragraph in my column. But I’m glad I put myself out there for my 60th. The positive reinforcement was welcome.
“Your best days are ahead,” insisted Katie Wider.
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” documentary filmmaker Tim Roche told me. “That’s why we’re here.”
Perhaps that means I’m doing something right.
Or not
After my recent column on current Rite Aid closures, a Riverside reader left a voicemail chiding me for not having cited a closure from last fall in his city. “But then again, it’s in Riverside,” he concluded, “and you sort of have an attitude about reporting about us.”
I do? Puzzled, I phoned him back and asked what he meant.
“You sometimes forget we exist out here,” he replied wryly. “You say it’s hard to get out here and when you do come to Riverside it’s within the ‘mile square’ of downtown. Other than when the bookstore left Canyon Crest, you never come out to other parts of the city. We are the largest city in the Inland Empire, you know.”
That’s a critique I didn’t see coming.
Usually it’s readers around the West End who lament that their cities — Ontario, Upland, Chino, etc. — aren’t getting as much coverage here as before because I’m in Riverside too often. Now a Riversider is griping I’m not in Riverside often enough, and that when I do visit, it’s to the wrong parts? Oy.
Anyway, I did a quick scan of headlines, and of my 149 (!) columns last year, 36 were exclusively about Riverside, far more than any other city got. Possibly too many, frankly. San Bernardino, for example, was the focus of eight, and we publish a newspaper there too.
Now it’s true that a lot of my Riverside columns originate downtown, but that’s because the Mission Inn and The Cheech are tourist attractions and thus of interest throughout the region.
But the old Farmhouse Motel, Citrus State Historic Park, Weber House and, yes, Canyon Crest Town Centre, none of them downtown, also got columns last year. This January, so did a 50-state marathon runner who lives in the Alessandro Heights neighborhood.
Briefly I despaired that whatever I do will never be enough. Then I returned another call, this one from a San Bernardino reader. She complimented a recent column on her city.
“I don’t know how you cover the large geographic area you do,” she said. “It’s kind of amazing. You are the center of our news for San Bernardino.”
It’s not for me to say whether either of these viewpoints is right or wrong. But for morale purposes, I definitely returned their calls in the right order.
briefly
In Riverside County’s Indian Wells last Thursday, the quarterfinals at tennis’ BNP Paribas Open were interrupted by visitors who’d flown in — and not snowbirds either. Intoned the chair umpire: “Play has been suspended due to bee invasion.” The bees were particularly interested in the umpire’s chair and the overhead camera. A beekeeper arrived, vacuumed them up into a livecatch cage and told the media casually that it was “a small swarm, probably about 3,500” bees. Oh, is that all (faints).