Claudia Sternbach

If you are hankering for turkey and pumpkin pie, steer clear of Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach’s house. She and her 8-year-old grandson, Dodger, won’t be sitting around dishing up gravy. They’ll be on the beach eating cheese puffs and apples from Bella’s orchard, building sandcastles and talking about gratitude. At the top of Sternbach’s list? Nancy Pelosi, pies from a freezer, her grandson’s giggles, airplanes, Lookout and you.

Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach has been spending time bobbing in a Florida pool, thinking about Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — and getting angry. Her aging, widowed mother-in-law, now in her 90s, lives in a mostly Jewish senior community and Sternbach sometimes flies down to visit her. Sternbach is frustrated and appalled by the recent rise of antisemitic rhetoric and worries for our country and for people, including her mother-in-law and her friends, who have faced discrimination their whole lives.

Election season is in the air. For Claudia Sternbach, the constant vitriol and opposition she sees online, in the news and even in warring Santa Cruz County yard signs is disturbing. Worried about our current divisions, she headed to her local bookstore and bought two new novels on the Civil War — “Booth” by well-known Santa Cruz author Karen Joy Fowler and “Horse” by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks. Both, she writes, speak to us today as we edge toward Nov. 8.

Claudia Sternbach knows the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. She spent years watching helplessly, she writes, as her mother declined and forgot key moments and people. For decades, Sternbach has helped raise awareness of the disease through the Alzheimer Association’s annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s. This year’s Santa Cruz County event is Saturday.

Writer Claudia Sternbach lost her younger sister Carol to cancer in 2013. That same week, she also “lost” her other sister, Carol’s twin, to a family rift she never understood and can’t — despite the years — mend. Sternbach has kept Carol’s ashes in a lidded ceramic bowl on a shelf in her Aptos home all these years, despite promising Carol she would spread them in the sea. She’s been unable to part with them without Carol’s twin, her other sister, present. But now, to mark Carol’s 70th birthday, Sternbach writes that she has decided to scatter the ashes and let go of the hurt that haunts her. She has found the perfect way.

Claudia Sternbach has lived in Aptos for 40 years and walks her beloved Seacliff State Beach almost every day. She recalls the beach of her childhood as a place of sun, fun and surfers, “those magical creatures celebrated by The Beach Boys.” She never considered the beach “feeling political.” But lately, she’s seen flags and shirts supporting the Second Amendment displayed prominently along her daily walk, which includes a memorial to her late sister. “Do I have a right, a duty even, to speak out? My gut instinct says, hell yes!,” she says. “My liberal, Santa Cruz mentality (after taking a deep breath) says no.”

Claudia Sternbach landed in Santa Cruz County by chance in 1981, when she and her husband, Michael, were idealists searching for a way to make a life close to the water. Today, their Aptos home is worth 10 times what they paid, but people she has known for decades are leaving, unable to afford the soaring home prices. Her daughter can’t afford to live here. She wonders aloud what Santa Cruz is becoming and what will happen to adventure-seeking young people today.