More from Claudia Sternbach

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.

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.