Your room is ready, Mr. Elephant

Different time, same old thorny issues … this illustration says three things: (1) the digital
iteration is locked away in a storage device I can't get to any more, it's so old, so this is a
photocopy of the archived issue; (2) I had Adobe®™ Illustrator©® and wasn't afraid to use
it; and (3) money makes the world go 'round …

How's everything out your way?

We here are terribly, terribly excited! Terribly! We are over the moon! — or so I'm told — because now the Sacramento Kings™® of the NBA©® can finally have its new stadium right downtown!

The Sacramento City Council™ voted 7-2 Tuesday for the $477 million stadium and financing plans to make it possible!

Key to the plan is that we as citizen/drivers need to pay more for parking downtown — and park much, much more frequently!

Sacramento's mayor, former NBA player and three-time All-star Kevin Johnson™, called the vote Sacramento's finest hour!

Now cancer will abate, everyone will have good jobs, and rain will fall precisely on our lawns and between the farm rows each early morning!

Meh.

The stadium issue has been going on for a long time. This hot mess of an illustration (above) is from 11 years ago, and the hue and cry for a new stadium was already an old and familiar sound. Since then the Kings and their arena have starred in a constant melodrama, pushed over and pulled from the brink many times, mere days away from leaving for Anaheim, then Seattle.

The specter of the arena has been moved around like a king on a chess board, inciting this and that political force to mess with the city. Now it's about three miles north of downtown in the floodplain called the Natoma District. Proponents say the stadium, called Sleep Train®™ Arena, is old and small and past its usefulness.

The proposed new stadium, which can also host concerts and ice hockey games, has been moved over the years to the abandoned railyards, slowly being gussied up … out to the state fairgrounds … and now right next to Interstate 5 and the chokepoint of the city's major freeways, where proponents say it will cause absolutely no congestion problems for games and concerts. None at all!

Past owners became villains, outside forces got caught trying to manipulate votes, the whole schmear. Most people, I'm guessing, stopped listening and caring long ago.

Now it's done. Opponent groups will block and parry once more with lawsuits and allegations — misuse of public money, hidden financial bombshells if the economy goes south — but it's done.

New Kings owner Vivek Ranadive has said the new stadium — a chrome-plated crown-shaped thing, judging from the renderings — will become a California icon, as memorable on postcards as the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge.

It won't, of course, but Ranadive condenses the whole. Damn. Problem:

Sacramento is forever trying to be what it's not.

By forever, I mean since the Gold Rush, when Sacramento became a boom service and supply town for the mining camps, but never eclipsed San Francisco's might with its perfect port and gateway to the world.

Even after it became one of the greatest railroad cities in the world, Sacramento still served other regions' growth, and most of the Big Four (merchants Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins) who created the great Central Pacific Railroad chose San Francisco for their ostentations.

Maybe for the heart of the 20th Century Sacramento filled its suit nicely, a place of industry and military bases and government, a walkable place with trolley cars. A big small city. I'm judging from what I read and see in books. But the bases closed and industry has shrunk.

Sacramento is, of course, the capital, the hub of government, its mainstay, but I've heard outsiders many times say, "This is the capital?" They're expecting the height of San Francisco or the breadth of Los Angeles, not Sacramento's pale copy of each.

And that's OK with me. It's never been OK with Sacramento, which is really a small Midwestern city nestled at the confluence of two Midwestern rivers out here in California. It can be a fine Midwestern city, promoting small-town ideas of caring for its own, or trying to.

But people in power and money want it to be Seattle, a truly great port city, with amazing centers of culture and entertainment that seem organic — and amazing heartbreaking problems.

Sacramento has the heartbreaking problems, of chronic crime and dearth of services, especially for its poorest communities.

The arena is supposed to solve all, and that's where the city's attention has gone for years. It'll become the keystone for its Seattle-ization. More likely, though, it'll be the same small Midwestern city, but with a chrome dome.

Once the arena is finished, the city will look around and say, "Hey, where did all these problems come from?" They were here all along; they'll still be here, exacerbated by neglect and diverted resources.

The mayor, whose platform has been the NBA®© — he was instrumental last month in representing NBA™® players for the lifetime ban on Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for racist comments he was caught making — will likely be off to higher office by then.

Sure, it colors my view that:

• I'm not a basketball fan, or a hockey fan or a goer to concerts or whatever else is planned. We took our kids once to a Kings game through a Scouting promotion, and calculated afterward that we could have bought the tickets, the promoted McDonalds™® Happy Meal®©, even the promotional miniature non-bouncing basketball, for much less on our own. And
• I have no civic pride.

For 27 years of living here, I still feel like I'm passing through. Sacramento's got some things I love — a century-old bike trail along the rivers that couldn't be built in today's fierce real-estate hunger, my wonderful Lake Natoma — but the city has never entranced me.

I have never thought, "I want to go downtown," and I rarely go.

That's just me. I'm weird. It's just where I live. Sorry, Sacramento.

The stadium will replace a has-been downtown mall, which is good. It'll spark a downtown revival, I suppose, and developments are underway already to anticipate the arena's catalytic conversion.

But it's a great big want for a monied minority, and the city has great big needs — not least of which are the needs of those whom the arena will displace downtown — and serious attention must be paid.

From my perch as a permanent tourist, I'm still trying to figure out what Sacramento's trying to pull.

Terribly, terribly exciting!

See the signs and know their meaning

Maura and Liam on our epic vacation of the Pacific Northwest. That's the Yaquina Head lighthouse
at Newport, Oregon, which we visited just weeks ago with Maura. This painting has potential;
a lot of flaws, but enough to suggest I need to take more cracks at watercolor.

Life circles back, as it will, kicking up dust of dreams in its arc, and I'm back in another time.

A sight, a sound, just a gesture, sparks fire of mind.

Right now I'm 18 years ago this summer.

Natalie Merchant has taken me there. She was singing "Stockton Gala Days" from a corner of the house, from back when she was with the group 10,000 Maniacs. My sister long ago had given us cassettes (yes, that long ago) of the group's "Our Time in Eden" and "In My Tribe" to hip us up a bit. (I know what you're gonna say; but one can't become hip in one step; we needed hand holding; and in 1994, 10,000 Maniacs were MTV-worthy. Though I've never been crazy about Natalie Merchant's dancing, or the way she sang off-key in live performances.)

(Good thing this is not about why I like this music and you should too. I'll never write a post like that. Probably.)

"Our Time in Eden" literally became our soundtrack for a family trip into the Idaho panhandle, for one last visit to my grandma near Spokane, Wash. before she passed, and across Washington all the way around the Olympic Peninsula and south along the Pacific Coast through Oregon on the way back home to Sacramento. We played that tape so much I'm sure we broke it.

When Natalie began "That summer fields grew high, with foxglove stalks and ivy …" or whatever the heck she was singing (it presents a grammar problem right away, and we never paid close enough attention to the fact that sometimes 10,000 Maniacs lyrics were often either morose laments paired with happy-go-lucky music, or were words written more to fit a beat than make much sense), I returned immediately to the wheat plains of central Washington, on our way to Lake Wenatchee, quiet among the mountains.

Could we, we'd still be there, suspended in time, watching our four-year-old son stand atop a boulder near the shore, posing as a superhero in his underwear, and our two-year-old daughter devouring a Washington peach nearly as big as her head.

(Carter's, the infants' clothes company had a slogan, "If they could just stay little 'til their Carter's wear out," which remains with me. Never bought the clothes, but never forgot the poignancy of that sentiment. This was a time before school and scouting and sports and all those daily dilemmas that, though necessary, I suppose, only made that breathtakingly brief time with our kids as wee ones all the more precious.)

We listen happily to "Jezebel," a rousing tune about a marriage tearing apart, as we fly west down Highway 2. Most of the gas stations en route to the Washington coast have new banners promoting espresso. We had no idea what that was, no idea that Starbucks was just beginning to spread its caffeinated tentacles across the land. The closer we got to Seattle, the more frequent the banners. Before we left the Olympic Peninsula, we were coffee junkies.

(The best coffee we ever had, out of all those Puget Sound mocha meccas, by the way, came from a pedal cart as a guy pushed his mobile business between the looooong lines of cars and their captive inhabitants, waiting, waiting, waiting to catch a ferry across to the peninsula. Go figure.)

When Natalie tries to coax someone out of deep depression in the danceable "If You Intend," I'm walking around neighborhoods of Aberdeen, Wash. (where Kurt Cobain was from), making sure not to go near the hospital that was treating our daughter for what we learned was called nursemaid's elbow.

In pulling our stubborn daughter up from a beach she did not want to leave, I had dislocated her elbow. She didn't cry; she just wouldn't use her arm anymore. In fact, it was because she wasn't crying that we did a doubletake (she wouldn't like us to say, but she was a tantrum princess in her time). In a panic, we brought her into to the nearest hospital, and we decided I'd bide my time out on the streets so some clinician wouldn't turn the incident into a child protective services issue.

Not all the memories of our 1,000-mile journey are good, you notice, but I wouldn't trade them. It was one of those trips that made us want to chuck all we had and reinvent ourselves at every stop, just make things up as we went along, the four of us and our balky chipped-paint Plymouth Voyager minivan.

All it takes is the distant gargly warble of Natalie Merchant, with her silly dance, and I'm there.

These are days you'll remember.
Never before and never since, I promise,
Will the whole world be warm as this.