Amped About Novato

I am a devout Novatophile. My husband/business partner and I escaped the Philadelphia suburbs 28 years ago and found our way here. Here we grew our business and raised our three children, giving ourselves a “high five” every single day.

Novato is a city that acts more like a town, a town that often acts like it’s had a good dose of Red Bull. If seen from space, I think Novato would generate an unusual array of energy fields, because here someone or some group is excited about something all the time.

My kids call it “amped” or “amped up.” At first I thought the latter redundant – you can’t be “amped down” can you? But upon further reflection, there are Novatoans who amp down – they are the “NO-vatoans” – the citizens who get all riled up saying “no” to everything, often willy nilly. You know who I mean – like the gnarly old flower child who sneers at the city council from the podium in sheer, unmitigated disdain – mostly because she isn’t one of them.

Some folks get excited about many, many things here, while others pick a few choice causes. Sometimes our memories are long and sometimes short.

Once, about a decade ago, with my kids at Sinaloa at the time, I got all amped about something to do with the school district. Everyone I knew did too, and when we assembled en masse at the NUSD office, there were too many of us to fit inside, so they set up some sort of first-generation jumbotron with bad audio, in the parking lot. I duly handed in my card so I could present my three minutes of fervor – but I didn’t hear my name called and by the time someone told me, “whisper-down-the-lane” style, I lost my turn at bat.

Today, try as I might I cannot remember what I was all amped up about.

Novato gets bashed alot in the county and in San Francisco. Most of the time the bashes are inadvertent, but boy they get me riled up. I heard Willie Brown defending the salaries of cops and firefighters in a TV interview when he was mayor. He said sadly, “Those good people have to live all the way out in Novato to afford a house.” I’m guessing Willie never visited Novato in his life.

Right now I am working on a project that will really help Novato, with a woman who lives in the county but not in the city. “With the success of this project, Novato will be a better place, the place it was meant to be,” she says. Just for jollies, I interject an outrageous thought, “Isn’t it already?”

Yesterday, my business won an award in Sacramento. They gave us a really cool, 91 percent recycled blue-glass-rock-sort-of-thing. Since it was a “green” award I would have thought it would have been green or brown, because most wine and beer bottles are green and brown, while the only blue glass that comes to my mind is a handle of SKYY Vodka or bottle of Phillips Milk of Magnesia (if they still make it), lesser quantity beverages for sure. The presenter announced that we were from NEVADO. She seemed like a very smart lady, and she had all sorts of letters after her name, which would lead one to believe that, however, obviously she could not read. NO-VA-TO. No hidden consonants anywhere; amazingly straightforward. I got a little pissy, but I just held on to the beautiful blue-glass-rock-sort-of-thing and it cooled me down. It was inadvertent, I told myself, not a “diss.”

Last year, on a whim, my husband and I asked two local musician friends if they each could compose a tune for Novato’s 50th birthday and we would produce a music video to accompany them. The titles of both of these songs, to me, are quite indicative of this town we live, so unpretentious and sincere. They are ‘That Kind of Place” and “That’s Novato.”

Because it is.