Tag: places

Are we there yet?

Why I Love: Geology

IT’S THE SMELL OF THE rocks. It’s knowing what everything on the surface is sitting on. It’s the finding of hand-samples. (It’s also the finding of fossils.) It’s the divisions of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. It’s the appreciation of Deep…

Don’t Look Up

OF ALL THE PET PEEVES this modern life offers, one of the most soul-sucking is checking out at the grocery store. I’m specifically talking about the debit-card machine. Time was, you could fill the two-to-three-minute transaction with friendly banter; ask…

Living-Room Torah

INSIDE A MODEST HOME ON Sonoma’s East Side sits our town’s best-kept open Jewish secret. Dubbed the “France Street Shtibbl” (or, for non-Yiddish speakers, the “France Street Beit Midrash (house of study)”), our living room has hosted a semi-monthly (or,…

Overheard in Sonoma

(For Leah Garchik’s back-page-of-the-San Francisco Chronicle feature.) Ms. Garchik, I was walking on the west side of Sonoma Plaza this morning when I passed a middle-aged touristy couple, just as the man was saying to his female companion, “Someday, she’ll…

Deadline: 2036

ONE THING I MISS ABOUT the pre-21st-century days is the sense of humanity plunging headlong toward some destination. These days, that collective goal seems hellbound and handbasket-wrapped. But in the days and years leading up to 1/1/2000, the Great Rollover,…