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Lincoln Avenue Lexicon: Filtering memories of seven years

I almost didn’t sit down to write this column this week, but in celebration of the fact that a sponsor rightfully believes in the value of a full-page ad on the page where my column usually runs, I decided on a confab with my most precious colleague, page designer Michelle Choat. She urged me to go for it.

Worst case, she said, we could toss my column out. OK, I’m being a wise-acre. She suggested I stop looking for excuses and write. Gosh, I’m gonna miss working with her.

Seven years ago this week, or maybe it was next week — I’m seven years older than when I arrived here, so it’s hard to remember — I first carried on a short series of even shorter emails regarding a position opening up as editor of The Weekly Calistogan.

“Interested in an editor’s job?” wrote the publisher, short and to the point. “Nope,” I replied with four swift keystrokes.

I’d been there. Done that. I don’t know why, but my eight digits and two thumbs, in a separate email, pecked, “Where?”

The Weekly Calistogan. Huh? What is that, and where’s it at? Napa Valley.

Jeez, another tourist destination. After a dozen years covering the Coachella Valley from Palm Springs to Indian Wells, Indio, La Quinta, and all the city governments in between, I’d had enough of that.

Nope, I wrote back. Still, something gnawed at me. It wasn’t pressing debt or the specter of unemployment, so I decided I’d come up from the south Orange County beach communities and check out this little burg, which could have been on Mars, for all I knew.

Today I can say, as we hear from visitors here all the time, “There is something special about Calistoga.”

I told someone I’d come up here for a few days, get a cheap room, check out the town and make a decision. “There are no cheap hotels in Calistoga,” that young 20-something in Orange County correctly pointed out to me. I spent three days at the Hideaway whatchacallits at Wilkinson’s on Fair Way. I loved it. Tidy. No bedbugs, no headboards slamming against the wall in the room next door. Less than $200 a night (barely). I loved it.

That weekend changed my life, which had already been changed by a year in cancer treatment and recovery. Here, I saw purpose.

I love history (maybe as much as our police chief, who has a degree in history — did you know that about Chief Jonathan Mills?), and I love newspapers with real history in towns with real history.

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