January 27: Tackling Regional Park’s trails; building a nest

Excelsior!

January has proved to be a great month for visiting. Both friends and places I love have occupied this month of chill. Warms the heart.

As for places, those have included brief forays into the backcountry of our sacred Regional Park. While it’s officially called the Sonoma Valley Regional Park, we folks of this village know that it’s wholly and holy Glen Ellen … a fascinating place of mystery and discovery.

Due to varying degrees of “crunchiness,” one of the afflictions of arthritis, it had been some time since I wandered the many trails of the Regional Park. But late last summer, I set myself an unfailing routine. While Sweetie entertained the dogs at the Elizabeth Anne Perrone Dog Park, a fenced enclosure at the east edge of the Regional Park, at Highway 12, I walked its doggy perimeter. Despite aching limbs and swollen knees, I kept it up day after day, always cautiously, always gently. Beginning with one difficult circuit, I advanced, ever so slowly (asking more patience than I believed I possessed), to multiple circuits, walking at least half an hour.

Eventually, I knew I was ready for the trails. First to be tackled was the round trip from the dog park to Joe and Molly Donovan’s table, halfway down the trail from Highway 12 toward the center of Glen Ellen. A daily visit, a quickly mumbled prayer, and a return uphill to the car became my routine.

Soon, I was ready for Sky Rock, where Barry Decker’s bench looks over the Bouverie Ranch, one of my favorite sites in all the Valley. Now I can do both the Donovan’s table and Sky Rock, with a short rest at the bench of Divine Love.

But it wasn’t just these places that I visited this January. I found my way to friends’ homes and offices, too, and spent hours of good cheer laughing and visiting with folks I admire.

Physician’s architect builds a nest

Architect Mark Perry and his wife, physician Tracy Dooley, and daughter, 11-month-old Alanna, were among the folks who Sweetie and I visited this month. I called Mark after getting a brief email from him where he described his almost-completed home. “The new white stucco and western red cedar building at the corner of London Ranch and Robertson Roads was designed by my firm (MTP Architecture),” Mark said, “and built by a local contractor (Ron Luddy with R&B Builders in Sonoma).”

Ever since construction started on that tiny lot just at the head of Robertson Road, I wondered what Mark would create. When we served together on a committee to save the historic main building at the Sonoma Development Center (just a few years ago), Mark told me he had bought that lot. Since then, Mark has been involved in several interesting projects, including the Napa Courthouse working with Michael Ross, and his multi-year project working with Kathy Swett at the Sonoma Community Center.

Having grown up in Glen Ellen, not far up Arnold Drive from where he now lives, Mark knew he wanted to return to this village. He said it was easy to talk his wife into making Glen Ellen her home, too. Then, when Tracy became pregnant with baby Alanna, they began construction in earnest.  Of course, Mark was the designer, and looking at the beautiful structure that he so carefully set into that tiny, hillside lot, I don’t believe that anyone could have made a more loving nest, a more beautiful home on that little patch of land.

Mark sited the home to take advantage of the intimate open space behind the building and to use passive solar. Further, he emphasized the beautiful views across rooftops from the second story.

The result is one of the finest homes in downtown Glen Ellen. Like its elegant neighbor, artist Douglas Fenn Wilson’s home, just cattycorner to Mark’s, it blesses our central village with a refined gracefulness. I love both of these homes and am proud of the elegance they bring to our town.

Bill and I loved visiting with Mark, and meeting Tracy and baby Alanna. We all laughed about earlier days of Dunbar’s school plays where Mark once played a prince opposite a pink dragoned Ada Limon … or was Mark the dragon and Ada the princess?

We laughed too about Mark’s “Johnny Be Good” guitar solo that wowed the crowds at a 1988 Dunbar talent show. Mark clearly loved our local schools and he offered that now he lives just down the lane from three of his favorite teachers, Ray Fredricks and Margaret and George Degliantoni. Mark admitted that just about everything he knows about cooking comes from Mrs. D’s lessons at Altimira. We’re pretty sure that Mark’s parents are more than happy to have all three of them close to home these days. Grandmama Ellen Perry is a happy babysitter and Tom Perry is often seen pulling up in his old ’78 Chevy pickup with his Lab in the cab beside him. Tracy grew up in Berkeley and her parents are close by, too, as well as Alanna’s great grandmama.

Mark, Tracy and Alanna are easy to spot around town. Just look for 6’4” Mark, 5’0” Tracy, and 2’0” Alanna; she’s the bundle of many layers of pink, strapped to one or the other of her parents. We welcome them back to Glen Ellen.

More visits with Valley friends

Next column (two weeks away) I’ll share a few of the stories that Newton Dal Poggetto told me, ranging from generations of Glen Ellen folks to Valley murder mysteries.

For now, I wanted to alert you to another former Dunbar student’s harrowing tales in the recent issue of The New Yorker. Luke Mogelson writes about the ebola epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Luke recently served on a panel at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he won the 2013 Livingston Award for Journalism. That was for his fascinating and frightening story “The Dream Boat,” the tale of refugees from Iran. Many have died on those journeys and Luke’s courage and excellent reporting has brought their plight to attention. The panel discussion and the story are both available online.

Luke also has a story in the spring 2014 issue of the “Paris Review,” all pretty heady stuff for a kid from Dunbar. We congratulate Luke on his courageous and profound writings which open our eyes to the greater world.

Weaving multi-colored ribbons

Today I want to end with the one true communion that I experienced this holiday season. Sonoma Shakespeare folks Aidan O’Reilly and his Sweetie Jocelyn Joy Murphy held a one evening show of the original play, “The Twelve Dates of Christmas,” with a dinner performance at Murphy’s Pub. Sweetie and I attended that evening show with our friend Ann Peden. As we took our seats, near the front of the small Snug room at the rear of the pub, I glanced around the audience to a host of friends I’ve known for years, decades, even. If I could have stretched a multi-colored ribbon to each of the folks that I knew so well, and dramatized in that way our special relationship, and could do the same for each one gathered … friends, co-workers, theater partners, business partners, relatives … what a weaving. I looked around the room: oh yes, I knew her husband before they were married, before he died too, too young … oh yes, we acted together in “Christmas Carol” back in the ’80s … oh yes, weren’t we in the same birth class together? … and yes, there’s my doctor’s colleague, another family practitioner, oh yes, I taught his kids in middle school … and yes, he taught my students at Justin Sienna. As I contemplated all these ribbons of connection, I saw a fabric of  many colors, some dark with depressions of grief-filled times, some bright with elations of happy days. My vision covered the audience, holding us in its warm embrace while Jocelyn began her show … a story of love lost, love missed and love found again, in the most unusual and unsuspected form.

It was a beautiful and touching story, simply told, emotionally moving. As Jocelyn took her final bow and as Aidan thanked the audience, we began to clap, and clap and clap with praise and gratitude, not just for the beautiful actor Jocelyn and the adept director Aidan, but for all of us, for each other, and for all of the past that we’ve shared together and apart, for the connections that a small town like Sonoma and a smaller village like Glen Ellen offer to their people. We’re just folks and we’re all just doing our best to get by. We try to treat one another with respect and compassion, and mostly we do. But even when we don’t, we all forgive and we are all forgiven, and we try again.

I didn’t expect to find such profound redemption and forgiveness at a pub, not even at Murphy’s. However, I am grateful that I did. And you, how are you “living this one and only precious life” as the poet Mary Oliver asks? I wish you well, with health and happiness in this new year of 2015.

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The Folks in Glen Ellen column also appears online. Look for my column on the Index-Tribune website sonomanews.com under the category Lifestyle. Click on Sylvia Crawford for current and old columns. Want to see your own name in the news? Call or write me at 996-5995 or P.O. Box 518, GE 95442. Or email me at Creekbottom@earthlink.net. Glen Ellen chatter rarely requires timeliness; however, if your news does, please be sure to contact me at least three weeks before your desired publication date.