Each weekend I traveled the fifty-odd miles from Glacial Falls to Watertown, where I spent Friday night and all day Saturday in some sustained whisky drinking, tapering off Sundays with a few bottles of beer at The Parrot, eyes fixed on the television screen, cheering for my team. Cheering is a paltry description. The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation. With Huff I “stunted” up and down the room among the bar stools, preparing to “shoot the gap”; with Shoftner I faked two defenders “out of their cleats,” took high, swimming passes over my right shoulder and trotted, dipsy-doodle-like, into the end zone…”

That passage from Fred Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” always tickles me as I recall all the years I’ve spent hollering at TVs when someone on the Chicago Cubs would do something monstrously stupid.

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(Six-year-old Gabby was one of the hundreds of needy folks who got a pancake breakfast courtesy of Newport Beach-based Daddy Cakes Saturday at the Lighthouse church in Costa Mesa).

Some time ago after I went homeless for a day in February in Costa Mesa to get a more first-hand view of the issues I got a call from Mona practically demanding that I attend a cooking demonstration she had organized for one of her clients at Bloomingdale’s in South Coast Plaza. We had chatted a bit here and there up to that point and I had done a couple of little things on some of her clients, but we hadn’t met yet. It was a Friday night, the busiest night for me when I was the Daily Pilot city editor. Plus, I had to write my piece on going homeless for the Sunday paper. I had zero time to run down to South Coast Plaza, no matter how close it is to the Pilot office. But something told me to go anyway. It might have had something to do with the eager reception she gave my initial blogs on the homeless experience.

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I would have posted this earlier, but it’s been a heck of a week. Between settling into my new job and my new home, Mona got sick. Last weekend, Mona served as judge for the Brand Model talent search contest at the District shopping center in Tustin. And let me tell you in retrospect it was a gutty performance. She was not feeling well at all. And it just got worse, enough so that I insisted Monday night that she go to urgent care in the morning. So she did, but got turned away by two before she wisely went to the emergency room where she was diagnosed with an infection. She’s feeling much better now, thank God, but it sure scared us.

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