Claudia Sternbach

When you can’t trust your memory, it’s time to whip out your phone and push the record button, says Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach, who is in her 70s. Sternbach is growing frustrated by her memory gaps — and that “there isn’t a single person left who might be able to confirm or deny” what she does remember. Here, she recounts a recent memory she wants to hold — a celebration of 50 years of Grateful Dead shows — and the freedom she experienced on the dance floor. Luckily, her husband caught it all on his cell.

Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach once again shares her thoughts and humor about aging. She ponders her “inevitable ‘sell by’ date,” her “Jeopardy!” weaknesses (Tik Tok for $600, anyone?) and how many men she has known in the “biblical sense” who are no longer living. “How am I supposed to feel about these romantic figures from my past at this late date?” she asks. She admits she is too old to have played with Barbie, but finds solace in the relationships that shaped her life.

Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach is horrified by the mud, water and sludge oozing into her husband’s longtime Pajaro tractor business. But she is furious at the human impact of the floods. “People with low incomes and lesser means, who have so much stacked against them, continue to lose out in our society,” she writes. “Someone took a good look at the price of creating a levee that was much less likely to fail and weighed that against actual human lives and decided money was more important than the lives of those living right across the county line.”

Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach feels cheated. February is more than half over and she doesn’t feel she — or the rest of the public — has learned much new about Black history. “Perhaps we should flip the tables and devote 11 months of the year learning about how Black Americans were treated and what many achieved despite the odds which were and still are stacked against them,” she writes. She also has some choice words for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose State of the Union rebuttal appalled her. “Huckabee Sanders seems terrified children will learn the actual facts of our past, whether it be about race or the LGBTQ+ movement,” she says.

Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach understands Alec Baldwin, at least a little. At least his stunned, nauseated reaction after he accidentally killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins while filming “Rust” in October 2021. Sternbach, too, has felt sick this week, as tragedies in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay enveloped us. “In both cases, the people in charge of the deadly weapons all claim that the guns were stored or handled properly,” she writes. “They are positive no one was in danger. Well, isn’t it time to call bull?”

Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach remembers her “Christmas pasts” in Santa Cruz, when as a young mother she tried to give her daughter the sort of memories she didn’t have as a child. She remembers window shopping at Leask’s department store on Pacific Avenue and when shopkeepers handed out cookies and cocoa. Now, she realizes, the memories are more hers than her daughter’s. She’s OK with that. The memories sustain her all year.