April 2023 has turned out to be a traveling month with our trips to southern and western states. With a couple of weeks in between, we were out of town at both the beginning and the end of the month.
It is nice to travel and see family members and different places. But it is even nicer to have a new appreciation for our daily life, such as the local weather, mountains and ocean, roads and houses, and most comforting of all, our soft bedding. All of sudden, these ordinary aspects have assumed a new and mystique appearance only to people with fresh eyes.
The other beauty of travel is help one to build up a certain degree of tolerance to otherwise intolerable events. At our breakfast table, I happened to glance at a joint guest commentary in yesterday’s Sentinel, called There's much more to the story of Santa Cruz libraries. I could not help but recall a related Sentinel article dated April 6, 2010, County Libraries on the block: closing neighbor branches could save $16M annually, staff says. The very La Selva Beach Library, a featured branch in the commentary, was one of the neighborhood branches to be chopped. The little branch would not become "the go-to spot for families, remote workers, and those needing internet access," if a former director and her administration had succeeded in executing their plan. It has survived, thanks to the tireless campaign of local residents for their library, as reported in La Selva residents rally around the library, another article in the same local newspaper seven months after.
Owing to the immune system recently fortified by traveling, I chuckled at the guest commentary. What can you do with people who speak out of both sides of their mouths, and who can use the executioner as a shield to get their own agendas fulfilled, without leaving any incriminating digital footprint? It is a true art perfected through a lifetime.
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