Opinion
It was only a month or so ago, in January and even February, that I was complaining that there was never any snow below Baldy Village. Or that there was barely any in the village. At least not for a long time.
I was telling friends about the time I went up Baldy Road, and there was no snow, or barely any, until I went into one of the tunnels and came out, suddenly, into a white wonderland. I couldn’t remember if it happened 15 years ago or if I remembered 15 years ago that it had happened years earlier.
I’ve consistently stood on the left side of the Covid fault line. Righteously filtering aerosols through my surgical mask, I dispensed public health facts and hand sanitizer with near religious fervor. Yet, I was seismically shaken to find my belief system undermined by individuals who stood with me on what I had considered the fact based side of the tectonic divide.
It appears the petition drive to compel Claremont Unified School District to pony up an estimated $273,000 for a special election will succeed.
What a shame.
What a waste.
In a passage from the World War II novel, “From Here to Eternity,” a U.S. Army captain based at Hawaii’s Schofield Barracks contemplates how he “liked to climb the stairs to HQ building. They did not look like concrete, they looked like old marble streaked gray and black. Age had polished down the once porous concrete and rounded the raw edges with rain and feet, and given it a smooth slick gloss. When the stains were wet they always caught and perpetuated the rainbow, like a promise. There will always be an Army, they said to him.”
The passage reflects a common human desire for continuity. In the face of inevitable change, it can be comforting to count on a beloved institution always being there to evoke proud memories and carry on its original vision. And like the stairs, a familiar object or landscape feature can embody that continuity.
As I reported last week, our neighbor Cashman “Cash” Whiteley is on the mend.
That is a joyful sentence to write.
Some may recall my August 12 story and subsequent columns about the 59-year-old unhoused man who had been suffering for several years with a large, open, and growing mystery wound on the left side of his face. The wound is a mystery no more: it is skin cancer.
But with the diagnosis has come an unlikely renaissance.
Normally I try to stay out of these us vs. them conflicts, or at least weigh in gently. But this time it’s too important to be anything but clear: this proposed special election is a colossal waste of money.
There is a movement afoot to collect the 99 required signatures of residents of Claremont Unified School District’s District 4 to force a special election to fill the vacant school board seat. That special election will cost CUSD $273,000. That’s right, the school district foots the bill for that special election.
There is also real value in stability, and the CUSD Board of Education could really use some right now. The Llanusa spectacle seems to be behind it now, but it has certainly has left a bad taste in the mouths of many constituents. The last thing this board needs is more drama. A drawn-out, expensive special election — which could result in no change at all — just does not fare well in the cost/benefit analysis. That $273,000 buys a lot of iPads.
Like everyone else I breathe a sigh of relief that the Laemmle Claremont 5 theater has not been dimmed. Claremont prides itself on its art and cultural connections, and how can any self-respecting college town not have the greatest of popular cultural art venues — a movie theatre?
Helping immigrants and refugees get settled, educated, employed and acclimated to American culture is spiritual work in action.
Ideally, bars, taverns, and pubs can occupy both physical and emotional territory. For me, like many, Upland’s Blackwatch Pub — which will celebrate its 40th anniversary Saturday — is such a place.
Wait. Is it okay for me to be doing this? Is it okay for me to be out here on this nice, crisp fall day? Am I supposed to be this far from home, on my own, in my wheelchair? Am I supposed to be going home from the colleges by myself, going along with all the students walking and skateboarding by, instead of getting a ride back?
“Hello, my name is Jenny, and I am from Claremont, California.” Prior to attending the annual Student Diversity Leadership Conference, this short introduction sufficed in making a stranger understand partially who I am, a driven high school girl who’s eager to dive deeper into her academic passions and get involved in her community. However, when I boarded the plane with five fellow students and 15 faculty members and flew off to San Antonio, Texas, I unknowingly embarked on a transformative journey that would allow me to, for the first time, examine each facet of my identity with a compassionate and grateful lens.
So long, 2022. You sure were a year of bracing contrasts. As I’ve written repeatedly this year, life is both exhilaratingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad, and 2022 provided those extreme backstops and everything in between. Covid took so many. We also lost friends to cancer, accidents, heart attacks, and suicide. There’s the yin. Babies were born, folks fell in love, and even in the face of hateful rhetoric and regressive, discriminatory legislationenacted or proposed across much of our country, I believe we inched closer to becoming more welcoming to the marginalized and underrepresented. Yang for the win.
By December 10 on one Llanusa thread alone I’d hidden a half dozen. By December 12, it was about a dozen. The reason? Some commenters were comparing shirtless men and some ill-advised looseness with monitoring alcohol with “pedophilia,” and “grooming,” a particularly abhorrent and relatively new homophobic trope. Some Facebook users said Llanusa should register as a sex offender. Another said he should be castrated. Really?
This past Saturday I sang a song at a wedding, attended a memorial for an old friend, then finished the day off with a birthday party for my youngest daughter, who turned 17. If I’d thrown in a birth and a graduation, I would have covered nearly all of life’s major milestones. It was an epic day full of big feelings.