Category Archives: Columns

On 25th Anniversary of 9/11, Some Reflecting

by Woody

In remembrance of today’s 25th anniversary of 9/11, here is my column that originally ran in 2015 following a road trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard…

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The Smiling Pool from a series of children’s books by Thornton Burgess is aptly named because its curved shape, when viewed from atop an overlooking hill – as Burgess did often during his boyhood in East Sandwich, Massachusetts – resembles a smile.

Indeed, it remains a happy place to sojourn as I learned during my recent tour of his home-turned-museum.

My emotions were completely polar at the next pool of water I visited. Actually, pools plural: the twin reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. The Crying Pools seems apropos.

Each reflecting pool is nearly an acre square and situated on the footprints where the Twin Towers once majestically stood. Water pours over all four edges of each pool at a rate of 3,000 gallons per minute, forming waterfall curtains, before disappearing down a small square abyss at the bottom.

The symbolism of the flow rate is heartrending because nearly 3,000 lives disappeared in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and Feb. 26, 1993. The victims’ names are inscribed on bronze panels on the parapets surrounding the pools. Visitors’ eyes, in turn, often become miniature reflecting pools overflowing with tears.

This was my first return to the site since Tuesday, June 11, 2002 (I still have my “WTC:00 Viewing Platform – 2:00-2:30 pm” ticket), nine months to the day after the World Trade Center became Ground Zero.

I remember very little from those 2002 NBA Finals I covered, other than the Los Angeles Lakers played the New Jersey Nets. But the sight of the steep-sided square hole in the ground remains unforgettable. It looked like a gargantuan grave.

Inside the completed 9/11 Memorial Museum the somberness is even more overwhelming than at the twin reflecting pools. Boxes of tissues are placed liberally throughout and empty quickly. My wife teared up within the first two minutes of entering the exhibition; I did so even sooner.

To tour the museum once is a must, I believe; I believe also I could not bear to do so again.

To describe the experience would require a dozen columns. Instead, I will share a single image that most profoundly punched me in the soul. It is the transcript of a phone call from Brian Sweeney, a 38-year-old passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 175, to his wife. Julie was not home, so he left his last words on their answering machine:

“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good. Go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I’ll try to call you.”

At 9:03 a.m. the plane crashed into the South Tower.

My trip of the Eastern Seaboard had earlier taken on an “author” theme with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Thornton W. Burgess playing roles.

However, I believe Brian Sweeney’s words – composed with no time for writer’s block, no chance to revise and edit and polish – are as potent and poignant as any left behind by the above literary masters.

After telling my son, whom I was visiting, to “do good” and have “a good time” and that I “absolutely love” him, I hugged him goodbye while blinking repeatedly to keep my twin reflecting pools from overflowing, and boarded a jetliner so similar –and so polar – to the one Brian Sweeney took.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Rivers Run Through Him

by Woody

“What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield, the narrator in “The Catcher in the Rye,” says, “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

That perfectly sums up how I felt when Roger W. Thompson’s debut book “My Best Friend’s Funeral,” a coming-of-age memoir, came out a dozen years ago.

As luck would have it, the author lives in Ventura and so instead of making a phone call, for I had never met him, I attended one of his book signings and asked if he wanted to get a beer sometime.

To my great luck, he did.

To my greater luck, we hit it off like trout and mountain streams and ever since have enjoyed “Beer Thirty” (to use Roger’s term) happy hours because (to use my late mom’s reasoning about why weddings should commence on the half-hour) time slows down when the minute hand is sweeping uphill.

Author Roger Thompson at play…

Roger’s second book, a travel memoir titled “We Stood Upon Stars,” made me fall further in love with his elegant prose that makes time seem to slow down as you savor the rhythm and cadence of his sentences that flow like burbling brooks, with eddies here and gentle riffles there, bends and pools elsewhere and hidden beauty and depth beneath the surface.

The above description of Roger’s writing came to me while reading his brand-new book, “The Wisdom of Rivers: Family, Friendship, and the Fly-Fishing Life,” that once again knocked me out.

I am therefore thrilled to be moderating a public conversation and Q & A with Roger at his book launch signing this Tuesday, September 8, from 6 to 8 p.m., at Iron & Resin at 324 E. Main Street in Downtown Ventura.

Norman Maclean’s masterwork “A River Runs Through It” has long been my favorite fishing-themed book, but it now shares top-shelf billing with “The Wisdom of the River.” With both the former novella and the latter memoir, one need not be a fly fisherman-or-woman to be hooked and enthralled.

More than about fishing, “The Wisdom of the River” is about Friendships, Fatherhood, Love, and Faith — these being the four tributaries this hardback gem forks into. Each section features a handful of themed essays, all of which carry faint echoes of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and prove the truth of this line by the Muir-bearded Thompson: “In every good fisherman, there is a better storyteller.”

A tall accomplishment considering Roger, a zealous angler since boyhood, has trout streams coursing through his veins.

“Our lives are filled with more important things than fishing,” Roger writes. “Sometimes, it take fishing to figure out what they are.”

“The Wisdom of the River” is filled with important things.

“What began as mine is now ours,” Roger further shares, speaking about teaching his wife, Melissa, and sons, Austin and Hayden, to fly fish. But this Angling Apostle is also talking to all of us who read his poetic prose and vicariously join him on a fishing (and life) journey by turning these pages — “Book Thirty” pages, because they are best read starting on the half-hour so they pass by more slowly.

Yes, what began as Rog’s writing is now ours to relish.

Me, I am doubly blessed because I get to have 16-ounce conversations whenever I feel like it with my terrific friend who wrote this knockout book.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Polar Outcomes For Two Friends

by Woody

Bookend stories about two friends of mine, former colleagues both, one ends in heartbreak and the other with a mended heart.

Let me begin with tears, but in doing so lead with a laugh.

Sitting in a press box alongside Stu Mathews, a gifted sportswriter for The Star for seven years in the 1990s, was like being in a comedy club on Open Mic Nite. His quirky humor routinely put me in stitches.

Of a million quips, this one stands out in my mind. It was in the newsroom and a know-it-all editor started pontificating about polar bears, describing their VW bus-like size and Bowie-knife claws and ten-mile sense of smell. He concluded his impromptu lecture by saying polar bears can charge “faster than a racehorse at 50 mph!” or some such made-up speed. (In truth, thoroughbreds top out at around 40 mph; polar bears at about 25 mph — I just looked it up.)

Stu, from across the room, asked deadpan: “Is that running on ice? Or tundra?”

That was more than a quarter of a century ago, and for the past 20 years rarely did I have an exchange with Stu — in person, phone, text — when one of us, or both, did not find a way to slip “ice or tundra?” into the conversation.

Now I have no one to share the inside joke with: Stuart Glenn Matthews died on June 22, far too young having just turned 62, after a five-year war with cancer.

When he was first diagnosed, Stu told me with the same sure confidence he displayed at the keyboard: “I’m going to beat it.”

It wasn’t a fair fight: Oral cancer, a stage IV tumor in his jaw, required a 12-hour operation to remove. The surgeons thought they got all of it, but the margins were “razor-thin” so six weeks of torturous radiation therapy followed.

The cancer eventually came back, as the heinous beast is wont to do, this time in his throat.

“I want to fight it bravely,” Stu texted me, sounding like Hemingway, whom he loved, and brave he was to the very end.

Six days before Stu passed away, our shared friend Ed Zintel very nearly died — and would have had a TV episode of “Baywatch” not played out in real life.

On June 16, on a sunny day on Strand Beach in Dana Point, Ed — a splendid sportswriter for The Star for five years through 2000 — suffered sudden cardiac arrest, at age 71, and collapsed unconscious in the parking lot.

Some might say a guardian angel was watching over him, but Ed thinks otherwise: he says five were. First, a woman who drives a shuttle golf cart transporting people to and from the beach, spotted Ed and administered CPR.

In a second godwink, two Orange County Park Rangers happened to be working nearby and rushed over with an Automated External Defibrillator — two separate shocks to Ed’s chest failed, but the third try restored a heartbeat.

Next, two firefighters arrived at the scene minutes after receiving a 911 call. They assisted the Park Rangers in stabilizing Ed and cared for him on the drive to the hospital.

Amazingly, remarkably, blessedly, Ed, now with a defibrillator/pacemaker, was discharged from the hospital after 10 days.

Against all odds, he has already attended a Dodgers home game and will soon make a road trip to see them play the Giants in San Francisco.

“It’s a wonderful life,” Ed says, adding knowingly, “especially when you get a second chance at it.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Private Sector Use For GLOVEs

by Woody

In “What could go wrong?” news, it has been reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend up to $20 million to equip ICE officers with electrified patrol gloves that are cleverly, or sadistically, named Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters — GLOVE, get it?

Those who do get it, literally, will receive a painful shock designed to force submission without leaving physical marks, nor bodily evidence of misuse. Indeed, What can can wrong?

An outcry has risen to ban GLOVEs, but I favor limited use in the private sector. For example, equip school librarians with GLOVEs so they can gently place a hand on the shoulders of parents who raise a ruckus to ban books: “Shhhhhh, now. I’m sorry for your discomfort, but books never hurt anyone.”

As for teachers, these are not “kid gloves” as the manufacturer expressly warns that the GLOVE should not be used on children — however, parents who become threatening would seem fair game.

Anyone who must shake hands with That Guy (and we have all met one, unfortunately, often a businessman who is louder than his neck tie; or an annoying uncle; or a former frat boy with an ego larger than his true golf handicap which he has officially made smaller by cheating) Who Turns A Handshake Into A Feat Of Trying To Prove His Alpha Masculinity By Squeezing Your Hand Hard(!) While Grinding Your Knuckles Until You Wince, can turn the tables with a GLOVE and make him cry uncle first.

In a twist from the 1920s, fashionably dressed (or even casually attired) women in 2026 should henceforth start routinely wearing GLOVEs — if her date gets a little handsy, she can elegantly place a hand on his cheek with an electrified caress that surpasses a slap by delivering the kick of a mule.

The sports world definitely can use new GLOVEs. For example, when an obnoxious fan gets truly unruly, or outbattles a kid for a foul ball, how better to handle the situation than with an electrified high-five!

In soccer, the epidemic of flopping and diving when a foul never happened can be eliminated overnight by giving referees a GLOVE and marching orders to lend a helping hand up off the ground to every cleated Shakespearean performer.

A special baseball GLOVE — MITT: Mighty Irritating Timing Tool (trademark pending) — will put an end to extended replay challenges. With electrified MITTs, a baserunner’s twitching body will make it obvious the precise instant he is tagged. Or, no twitch: “Safe!”

The GLOVE will be ideal for restaurant waitstaff when a drunk (or sober) patron gets out of hand or overly flirtatious with a touching hand. Recommended voltage: 15 to 20 percent. As for annoying customers who order a steak cooked rare and then complain because it is pink inside, servers can simply dial up the GLOVE’s intensity, place three fingers on the beef and zap it to “well done” right at the table.

Constituents at town hall meetings will be allowed to “take the gloves off” by putting GLOVEs on to shake hands with any elected official who dodges their questions or flat-out lies.

Walkers and runners will certainly love the GLOVE. When an off-leash dog rushes at them, an electrified hand can safely defuse the situation — not by “petting” the unleashed dog into submission, for the animal is not to blame; rather, by zapping the irresponsible dog owner for not controlling their pet.

Ditto, except with the voltage set to “medium well,” for any dog owner who fails to pick up after Fido does his business.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Small Voices, Big Performance

by Woody

The first concert I ever attended, in my teens half a century ago to see Fleetwood Mac at the height of their superstardom in an outdoor stadium in Southern California, remains perhaps my most memorable — but not because it was a fantastic show.

Rather, it was unforgettable because they did not put on a show at all thanks to a windy landslide-powerful storm that blew in shortly before the band was to take the stage, forcing a literal rain-check cancelation.

Another concert, a few years later, also remains unforgettable — also for an unfortunate reason. Held inside Inglewood’s Fabulous Forum, safe from an unfabulous rainout, my buddies and I arrived very early and decided to stay in our car in the parking lot and listen to the album “Tommy” instead of going in to see the who-are-they band that was opening for The Who.

We timed things perfectly and found our seats during The Who’s opening song.

Or so we thought.

After the electrifying concert ended, including a handful of encores, Keven, George and I grumbled our surprise and disappointment that they hadn’t played “Baba O’Riley — to which a fan next to us told we three tardy idiots, “They opened with it and it was amazing!”

Vowing “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” I have been fortunate to see some other memorable concerts, all without missing the opening song, including Paul McCartney, James Taylor a few times, Tom Petty, and, yes, Fleetwood Mac under a roof, to name a fab four of my favorites.

Big names are wonderful, but to my concert honor roll I added a new performance last weekend by the small attendees of the annual Crescendo Summer Music Camp. Their hour-long songfest, held in the Camarillo United Methodist Church, was nothing short of magical.

Magical does not mean flawless, for herding two dozen kindergarteners and first-graders onstage and into proper alignment is bound to have a lost sheep or two, so to speak, that needs a shepherd to guide it home.

Expectedly, not every note was sung in key, nor every dance step executed in sync — or even executed at all. Too, the sixth- and seventh-grade handbells symphony, under the expert direction of camp co-director Kristi VanKeersbilck, occasionally rang notes a fraction early, or late — but every note was struck with visible joy on the bellringers’ faces.

And that was the real magic of the concert — the joy on the faces of the 98 young performers and their eight music teachers’ countenances as well. Joy being highly contagious, the packed pews were also filled with the sunbeam smiles of siblings, parents, and grandparents, including my wife and me to watch our 7-year-old granddaughter Maya sing “I Am a Pizza” with laughter in her eyes and “You Are My Sunshine” with welling moisture in ours.

Another highlight was “Do Re Mi” sung by second- and third-graders, their rendition rivaling the Trapp children’s in my opinion.

Similarly, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was a roaring success and Prince’s “1999” was royally good; Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, and Earth Wind and Fire songs were also well worthy of applause.

But my favorite performance, most assuredly, was the finale. Under the guidance of co-camp director Connie Halpern (belovedly know as “Mrs. Fig,” who used to own The Bookworm bookstore in Camarillo), the Crescendo Campers took the stage en masse, spilling into the wings on either side, and sang — and signed with their hands — “Heal the World.”

Unlike “Baba O’Riley,” I would not have missed it for the world.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Mourning Beloved Irish Musical Poet

by Woody

Irish poet-singer-songwriter Glen Hansard died last week, tragically and far too young at age 56, leaving behind a wife and three-year-old son. As evidenced by the viral outpouring of grief on social media, he also left behind more fans worldwide than he could have possibly known he had — including me.

My son first introduced me to Hansard’s indie-folk music 20 years ago, and my daughter and I had a truly masterpiece evening together at one of his concerts last October, as shared in this column from my archives…

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Sometimes, rare wonderful times, when everything seems to be going wrong it somehow all turns out wonderfully. Such was the case the other evening when a young child cried and technology pouted and traffic threw a tantrum – and serendipity just kept smiling over and again, and once more.

Ever since she was a toddler my daughter and I have gone on “Daddy Dates,” as she called them then, and still does, because to my great fortune she has not outgrown these special outings, just the two of us, even though she is now well into her thirties.

In one of my favorite photographs, Dallas, maybe 5 years old, wears a sunflower dress and holds a bouquet to match, and I am in a “tuxedo” which is what she called the sport coat she requested I wear. I, in turn, requested that when she was older if a boy did not open car doors and pull out her chair, she not give him another date.

Naturally, when she and I went to a concert in San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium recently I opened doors and helped her into her seat because I do not want to be unworthy of future Daddy Dates.

This date almost ended before it even began because a tearful two-year-old did not want her mommy to leave. A delay that would surely make us late should have been frustrating, but instead it was actually a joy to watch my daughter soothe her own daughter with love and patience.

Heavy traffic, followed by a serpentine security line, then a brief snafu with our online tickets all conspired to make us miss the opening song. And yet, somehow, we made it to our seats literally five seconds before the house lights went down and the music rose up. It was as if serendipity winked and asked The Swell Season to wait specifically for us.

As for our seats, a birthday gift from my son, they were terrific: floor level, slightly left of the stage, and so close we could see Markéta Irglová’s fingers dancing – gently sometimes, other times frenetically and mesmerizingly, always seemingly perfectly – on the piano keys.

Similarly, the skill and passion of Glen Hansard strumming his acoustic guitar with speed and fury was a thrill to behold and explains the comet-shaped gash worn through its face just below the sound hole.

The Swell Season sang familiar old hits from the movie “Once” and new gems from their 2025 album “Forward,” but the highlight was the final encore, an acoustic rendition, sans microphones, with the ginger-and-grey-bearded Hansard magnetically leading 4,000 patrons in a goose-bumps beautiful sing-along of the classic American folk song “Passing Through” popularized long ago by Pete Seeger.

Joining in I was 11 again, transported back to elementary school when my beloved fifth-grade teacher Mr. Hawkins played guitar for sing-alongs.

Walking the city aimlessly after the concert, Dallas and I happened upon 608 Bush Street and serendipity smiled once more with a California Historical Society commemorative plaque noting that Robert Louis Stevenson, the great Scottish writer who penned “Treasure Island” and “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” briefly lived and wrote here in 1879 and 1880.

Our Jekyll-and-Hyde evening continued on the drive home with freeway traffic wheezing along as congested as lungs with pneumonia. Yet this, too, proved to be a silver lining because it wonderfully extended our time together.

Naturally, I walked my date to her front door – but there was no need to apologize to her father for missing curfew.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Broken In Bone, Not In Spirit

by Woody

Auden, my elfin three-year-old granddaughter, took a tumble the other day and despite landing on plush carpet fractured her left arm.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain said, and a poem in my family annals now includes these couplets: bed and sled, skating fall and basketball.

My daughter, long before she was Auden’s mommy, fell while roller-skating at slow speed and broke her left arm at age 10; a couple of years thereafter, my son, coincidentally also 10 at the time, broke his left arm playing basketball; and when I was 7, I too broke my left arm.

Four fractures, arms each, all in portside rhyme.

A brief trip down memory lane – rather, a sled ride down The Big Hill in my boyhood neighborhood in Ohio. Having reached the speed of a comet, I skidded off course through an icy turn…

CRASH!!!

…into a two-foot-high stout steel pole.

Brave Auden and me…

The pain screaming through my wrist and arm was nearly surpassed by the fear of my dad’s raised-voice scolding when he found out the Flexible Flyer I turned into bent steel and splintered wood – while also splintering my ulna and radius – had been “borrowed” from my friend’s big brother without asking.

At home, including at the table at dinner, I kept my winter coat on to cloak the swelling. Mom asked me to take it off. I kept it on. Dad insisted. Shedding the sleeve over my injured arm felt like peeling the skin off.

Mom, despite being a housewife not an orthopedist, without aid of an X-ray image instantly made an accurate diagnosis: “Oh, honey, you broke your arm!”

To which, family lore has it, I angrily huffed through tears: “I knew you’d say that!”

When I saw Auden seated at her kitchen table after bath time, refusing to put on a shirt because it hurt too much to move her arm, I quietly thought: “Oh, Audie, you broke your arm!” X-rays confirmed my silent diagnosis, albeit with twice the precision: it was fractured in two places.

Two hours in Urgent Care seemed like a week, but Auden waited patiently and bravely as we read books. When her name was finally called, she was greeted by doctors and technicians who not only provided expert medical treatment, they were experts at being friendly and warm and reassuring to a little girl in pain.

I won’t say Auden enjoyed getting X-rays taken (positioning her arm this way and that caused tears to flow anew) or getting a cast put on, but she did like staying up well past her bedtime.

She left Urgent Care with a smile having replaced her tears and with a “snazzy” – her newest word learned from her grandpa – fiberglass cast as colorful as a World Cup soccer jersey, a camouflage pattern of yellow, pink, blue, and green reaching from hand to shoulder.

Today’s casts are indeed snazzier than the plain white plaster ones of my youth, but the throwbacks had one advantage: friends and family could sign them whereas ink doesn’t take well to fiberglass.

It’s funny the small things we sometimes remember, even after half a century has slid by seemingly as fast as a sled down The Big Hill, and this remains indelible to me: my big brother Jimmy doodled a sledder on my cast and wrote: “Fast And Fearless!”

If I could I write on Auden’s slick cast without it smudging, I would quote from Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when Helena says of her friend Hermia: “And though she be but little, she is fierce.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Fair Makes Big-Eyed Kids of Us All

by Woody

The 152nd Ventura County Fair opening next week on July 29…

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The John Mellencamp song “County Fair” comes to my mind every summer with one lyric especially making me smile: “Kids with eyes as big as dollars / Rode all the rides.”

That, in a single image, sums up the Ventura County Fair to me – kids getting their thrills on carousels and trains, sky swings and the Tilt-a-Whirl, small roller coasters and the giant Ferris wheel. The latter always makes me think of two little girls.

The first girl, then age 5, went to her first County Fair alone with her father and on the drive home she could be heard softly whispering to herself, “Ferris wheel, Ferris wheel, Ferris wheel,” so as not to forget the name of her favorite of all the rides she rode.

Arriving home, the little girl – now my wife – raced inside and exclaimed: “Mom! I rode the merry-go-round!”

Another cherished Ferris wheel memory is captured in a framed 8-by-10 black-and-white photograph. Snapped candidly by former Star photographer Gary Phelps three decades past, before newspapers became colorful, it still hangs on my daughter’s childhood bedroom wall. Frozen in time, she is 4 years old with excited eyes as big as dollars. She is seated snugly beside her father – me – with one arm around her. We are both smiling as we soar skyward. It was her first VC Fair and made a lasting impression as one of her earliest childhood memories.

It is a magical memory of mine as well for the Fair makes kids of us all.

This year’s Fair theme is “Find Your Fun” and never has a challenge been easier. If not the rides, then the win-a-stuffed-animal games or various exhibits or concerts or culinary delights will give you eyes as big as silver dollars.

Legend has it Babe Ruth played an exhibition game a century ago in the mid-1920s at Seaside Park which is, and has been since 1914, the site for the Ventura County Fair that originated in 1874 at the Pierpont Bluffs. This claim to fame makes the current fairgrounds all the more special. After all, while throwing baseballs at milk bottles on the midway you can imagine yourself trying to strike out “The Sultan of Swat.”

The Fair is also special because of its spinning, dipping, whirling rides with G-forces to make a NASA astronaut’s stomach woozy.

Speaking of woozy, the Fair is special because the food can also make your stomach spin with concoctions that include almost anything imaginable served on a stick, deep-fried, or dipped in chocolate – or all three – and which the Star’s intrepid reporter Tom Kisken bravely samples and shares glutinous gastronomic reviews of annually.

The Fair is special because it serves as an excuse for young parents to play hooky from work for an afternoon.

The Fair is special because of the amazing exhibits of paintings and photography, handmade quilts and home-baked cakes, et cetera and so forth and so on.

The Fair is special because of the midway games, even if the basketball rims are too high and so bent out of round that Stephen Curry would be lucky to sink 1 out of 10.

The Fair is special because the carnies are such colorful characters.

The Fair is special because of the 4-H junior livestock auction and blue-ribbon rabbits the size of English bulldogs.

And the Ventura County Fair is most special of all because of the vertical merry-go-round overlooking the ocean. The seagull’s view atop the seaside Ferris wheel is even more magical if you are sitting beside a kid with eyes as big as silver dollars.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Golden Thoughts and Green Flashes

by Woody

In “Tortilla Flats,” John Steinbeck’s first novel of critical acclaim, the great author wrote: “Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.”

As are my thoughts while running any time of the day.

Late afternoon is my preferred time to be fast afoot, after finishing my writing day at the keyboard, and therefore my slow and deep and golden thoughts often stretch into the golden hour of sunset. It is difficult to imagine a day, even one that has already been a masterpiece—but especially a salt-in-the-coffee kind of day—not being made sweeter while savoring a sunset during a run when the sky becomes a child’s finger painting in progress, a kaleidoscope of grape and strawberry colors swirling and flowing Van Gogh-like.

My favorite sunsets are seascapes. Of these, the most magical—and which I have seen only twice, both times while pausing during beach runs—feature a “green flash” when, at the exact instant the sun fully melts into the water’s horizon, there truly is a rare bright-green pinpoint flash of sunlight.

A sunset in Hawaii, albeit with no green flash…

On each occasion—the first running barefoot on the bronze-hued sand in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; next in training shoes along a two-lane beachside road in Kona, Hawaii—I resumed my run feeling like I had a rising trade wind at my back and Hermes-like wings on my ankles.

On the same run that I saw the green flash in Kona, I momentarily watched two fishermen—one was a fisherboy, actually; grandfather and grandson, I surmised, the latter maybe ten years old. Though they were surfcasting, my thoughts turned to fly-fishing because it is the angling art my grandfather favored and gave me instruction in when I was a fisherboy.

The lessons were less than fully successful as I never mastered the rhythmic ten-to-two-o’clock ideal casting motion of the rod tip. Or, perhaps, what I learned simply took a good long while for me to appreciate because I now think running is my version of fly-fishing, affording respite from life’s busyness; a slice of quietude in a loud world; a brief escape from what needs escaping; time to myself for thoughts that are slow and deep and golden.

When I am out running on a beach or bike path, road or grass field, I am my father’s father patiently casting a hand-tied fly into a brook or stream or pond or lake. “The gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent fishing,” Grandpa Ansel liked to say, quoting an old proverb, and this is my adopted rationale as well for my hours spent running—for which I celebrated my 23rd “Streakiversary” earlier this week of having run a minimum of three miles every single day since July 7, 2003.

Playful epigram aside, from time to time I ask myself: Is time spent running time well spent? After all, as Ernest Hemingway poignantly added in a postscript to a letter to a friend: “Time is the least thing we have of.”

My daily hour or two dedicated to running is not precious time misspent, the gods would agree with me I have come to believe, because it leaves me, as Walt Whitman wrote of walking, “enriched of soul.”

More angler wisdom, this time from Henry David Thoreau: “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

My own flash—green flash!—of insight from my Streak: it is not entirely the run I am after.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Appreciating What You Will Miss

by Woody

From my column archives, originally running in July of 2012, now updated slightly…

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“My kids. Nick. Spring. Fall. Waffles. The concept of waffles. Bacon.”

These are the first few things writer-filmmaker Nora Ephron listed in her short essay titled “What I Will Miss” in her fine, and final, book: “I Remember Nothing And Other Reflections.”

Also: “A walk in the park. The idea of a walk in the park. The park. Shakespeare in the Park. The bed. Reading in bed.”

It is a superb essay, like all of Ephron’s writing, but when I read it – not in bed, for I am not an in-bed reader – I remember thinking it seemed out of place; she was too young; this piece was for a future book.

I had missed the clues that seem so obvious now, such as the previous essay “What I Won’t Miss” (“Dry skin. E-mail. Funerals. Small print…”) and the Acknowledgements page that concluded, “And also, of course, my doctors.”

Like the marvelous writer she was, Ephron had told us without telling us. She was battling leukemia. A battle she lost the first week of summer in 2012 at age 71.

Here is what I hope, that Ephron wrote “What I Will Miss” long before she first became ill, under a different title, perhaps “What I Love Now.” Such a list is something we should all write, right now, whatever our age, to help us more fully appreciate these things today.

In this spirit here is a short rundown, off the top of my head, of “What I Love Now”…

My four young grandchildren. My two kids and their spouses. My wife. Family and great friends – and Murray, our boxer, who is both. (Murray, sadly, is now on my “What I Miss Now” list.)

The beach. The ocean. “The Old Man And The Sea.”

The Ventura Pier. The Channel Islands. A Pacific sunset with clouds painted in the sky the colors of flames.

Yosemite Falls. Niagara Falls. The fall colors.

Summer. Daylight Saving Time. Watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The smell of sunscreen, the smell in the air after it rains, the smell of Thanksgiving all afternoon long.

Fleetwood Mac. The Beatles. The Who. James Taylor.

Running along the beach, any beach; in a park, especially New York’s Central Park; in the sun, in the rain, in a road race; and the adventures of running in a new place.

Every book by my hero John Steinbeck, my daughter Dallas Woodburn, and my dearest of friends Ken McAlpine.

Newspapers. (Sadly, again, these are rapidly joining my “I Miss” list.)

A hot shower. A warm bed. A cold pint. Not in that order.

John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” and my favorite Wooden-ism: “Make each day your masterpiece.”

The last moments awake in bed after a long, full, masterpiece day. Even better with the sound of rain on the roof.

The sound of Vin Scully on the radio. (“I Miss.”)

Date nights. Van Gogh’s Starry Night. A personal museum of paintings by my son.

The simple grace and quiet strength of trees and rivers – and some people. People who have empathy and authenticity. Curious people who never stop learning.

Chocolate-chip ice cream. Chocolate-chip cookies. Chocolate chips. Chocolate.

Finishing writing something that I feel is as good as I can do.

Movies, which for this list today seems fitting to pick three by Nora Ephron, even though I get them confused: “When Harry Met Sally”, “Sleepless In Seattle”, and “You’ve Got Mail.”

And yes, waffles instead of pancakes, definitely.

My grandchildren. My kids and their spouses. Lisa. I know I already said this, but I want to emphasize it.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.