Behind the Mouth that Shares History is a Bite

I haven’t been this ready for a trip in a long time. Usually the dates just push up against me;  all of a sudden it’s the night before and I freeze thinking about all of the stuff I’m supposed to get done. But with a slimmer travel schedule so far in 2010, I’m easing into my Northern California trip and will even be organized enough to look up an old friend who moved west more than ten years ago during my time in Mendocino.

Bruce is a character.  I am fond of nicknames so this guy’s was “The Mudge.”  Which was short for ‘The Curmudgeon of the North.’  We called him this because Bruce was so irascible, so darned irritated, and used to come out with the most callous statements, like he just didn’t care about the person he was denigrating.

Yet despite his predilection for being down right rude, he’s an artist with a larger brain than most people, as his Stanford degrees attest.  So you could be sitting with him and all of a sudden you’d learn about the flora and fauna of a faraway place, or about the battle between the Saracens and the Romans, or about which King of England ruled during the 1066 war with France. He just has this storehouse of fascinating knowledge, but it sits behind a mouth that occasionally bites.

So I’ll phone up this guy I haven’t seen in ten years and tell him I’m in town. I hope that I’ll be able to get some insider’s tips about life in Mendocino for my readers–and I’m sure I’ll bring back some stories to share with my Valley friends about our long-lost friend Bruce out in Cali.