As I write this, it is Christmas afternoon, and I am looking at a gray day outside the dormer window of my cabin above the Point Reyes Station Mesa. On the far side of the bright-green pastures of the Bar Or horse ranch and the Waldo and Rich Giacomini dairy ranch, Inverness Ridge rises up like an army-green redoubt against tempests off the Pacific.
But not all is overcast. Crying out from my stereo in her amazingly deep voice, the Brazilian torch singer Simone is filling the cabin with melodramas of lost love and eternal hope. As an editor divorced three times, I can identify with all that. This morning, the only companion sharing my bed was the notorious Beta Cat, who had jumped up beside me during the night.
Throwing caution to the tempests off the Pacific, I agreed to babysit Beta Cat while her owner, Light photography correspondent Barbara Thomas, attended a family reunion in Redding. Despite my initial apprehension, it was a good decision. I won’t bore you with more stories about this once-feral cat, but just having to attend to her required my getting going Christmas morning. Soon I was cooking breakfast and trekking down my long driveway to pick up one of the thinnest Chronicles of the year.
As previously noted in this column, I am among millions of people in northern latitudes who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, better known as SAD. In short, we tend to get depressed when days are short and we don’t get enough sunlight. An estimated 25 percent of all Americans suffer from mild winter SAD, and about five percent suffer from severe forms.
While in the newsroom, I fight SAD by blasting myself all day with a lightbox beside my desk, and this seems to help. So does keeping busy, which for me is never a problem; there are always so many news stories I want to read, books I want to finish, household projects needing attention, and people I want to see.
In fact, dropping in first on Christmas Eve was a Monterey pine that fell over on my neighbors’ property and landed on mine. High winds apparently combined with sodden ground from a week of wet weather to bring it down. No harm done, but the trunk is more than 40 feet long, so it will take a few hours to cut up.
Normally, I write this column, as well as Sheriff’s Calls, Tuesday evenings at The Light, but what with Christmas and all, I had intended to work late Monday evening, knowing we would have only the Wednesday after Christmas to put this issue to bed. Unfortunately, as computers are wont to do, mine froze up last night.
I tried all the repairs I knew, finally gave up, and drove over to Café Reyes (the only Point Reyes Station business other than the Western Saloon open on Christmas Eve). Restaurateur Bob Harvel and I pretty much had his café to ourselves, and we watched Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz on TV while I ate and he chewed tobacco.
It had been decades since I’d seen the movie, and I was immediately struck by how dazzling the special effects were for a film released in 1939. Of course, I immediately recognized Garland as Dorothy, Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, and Bert Lehr as the Cowardly Lion. But who played the Tin Man? His name seems to have disappeared from our collective memory – sort of like the fourth and fifth Marx Brothers, Zeppo and Gummo.
Which indirectly gets me to two interesting books I received for Christmas. Light circulation manager Missy Patterson gave me Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan while my ex-wife Cynthia gave me Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg, a New York Times writer. As Marin Scope Community Newspapers pundit Dick Spotswood recently noted, Groucho Marx eventually came to the conclusion: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read."
Happy New Year!