“I haven’t read a newspaper in years,” she confessed while she diligently worked on consuming her entree and downed her second margarita. Later she told me that most of her news comes from TV, online and radio.
Elsie Vargas and I had agreed to meet for dinner at that swanky looking restaurant across the street from Walmart in Ukiah. Although I had suggested we meet halfway from Lakeport to her home in Santa Rosa in Cloverdale, she said she did not mind driving approximately an hour to meet me. Considering when she worked in Lakeport at the Social Security administration two years ago she was commuting to the Santa Rosa office two to three times a week, and since she travels to be with her family in Clovis every other weekend, it probably wasn’t too much of a trek for her.
She goes by a different name now since she got married a few years ago, but Elsie and of my best friends in High School Luis Lopez hung out a lot during our junior and senior years before everyone left for college to start their careers and the rest of their lives.
Elsie and I reconnected through Facebook and I last saw her at a dinner party given by one of our mutual high school friends about five or six years ago. I do have fond memories of hanging out with Elsie and Luis, especially in 11th grade. We were no angels, but no one is completely innocent at age 17 and I remember fondly routinely ditching the last two periods of the school day during senior year (why not? We all had more than enough credits to graduate and everyone was already suffering from acute Senioritis at the time looking forward to college or whatever they had planned for summer and beyond.)
Elsie was my first Platonic friend and also probably the first person I ever got drunk with. She, Lopez and I ditched school one day and ended up downing a 24 pack of some cheap bear on a warm sunny afternoon in Elysian Park in L.A.
Driving out to Ukiah I worried if the government shutdown, which has now been temporarily halted and lasted 35 days, the longest in history, had adversely affected my old high school friend. A recent Washington Post poll revealed that only four out of 10 Americans support President Trump’s proposed $5.7 billion border wall, with the Democratic leadership opposing it and hundreds of thousands of federal workers affected by the stalemate. Fortunately, Elsie was not one of them, she told me that only 25 percent of the agency’s workers were adversely financially impacted by the shutdown.
As we ate and drank that evening, we briefly caught up with our careers because we had wondered how we coincidentally both ended up working in Lake County, albeit at different periods of our lives. She had been asked if she could work at the Lakeport office circa 2014, shortly after the last time we saw each other in person in L.A. She was then asked to transfer to the Santa Rosa office two years later. I guess the plan was to move with her husband and two daughters, but he could not find a job in Lakeport and moved back to Clovis while she stayed in Lake County commuting back and forth from the Santa Rosa and Lakeport offices. Isn’t it a small world?
When the Tubbs fire started in the fall of 2017, she wasn’t even aware of it. She was visiting friends in Southern California with family when her manager called to ask her if she was OK. “Santa Rosa is burning,” her boss told her in reference to the deadly blaze that season. As City Editor of the Willits News in Mendocino County at the time, I recall vividly the effects of those October fires as cell towers and lines burned and we lost internet connection for three days in Willits. Now that both her daughters have grown up, Elsie is considering going back home to Clovis permanently one day in the future.
She asked if coming from a big area like Los Angeles, I found it difficult to now live in Lakeport. I said no because I was so busy, after the first few weeks working in Mendocino County in late 2016, there was hardly any time to get homesick and I had previously worked in small communities here and in Texas and New Mexico. Weekends were tough and sometimes they still are, as they are for her, so she sought friends and loved ones to spend time with. On this particular occasion, she expressed thankfulness for my having dinner with her. I said “no worries” and on the short drive back to Lake County I thought one of the best aspects of living and working here is the lack of heavy traffic. Whereas it took me an hour and a half to drive 30 miles on a Friday night last time I was in L.A., I was back home from Ukiah in under 30 minutes that night. I told myself next time I see Elsie that I will convince her to get a subscription to her local newspaper.
Ariel Carmona Jr. is the managing editor of the Lake County Record-Bee.
