Donna Frye: ‘With all the turmoil in our world, stop and enjoy the simple things in 2025’

By Donna Frye / San Diego Union-Tribune Op-Ed / January 1, 2025

I was thinking about the coming new year and feeling overwhelmed by the bad stuff going on in the world. If only I had a magic wand to fix some of what ails us, I would be waving it all over the place like a whirling dervish. But I don’t, so all I could do was fret and worry about things I couldn’t do much about anyway.

I thought some music would help so I turned on San Diego’s Jazz 88.3. The Saturday show “Sing! Sing! Sing!” was being hosted by the esteemed jazz writer and author Will Friedwald. He was playing classic Frank Sinatra songs and I liked them all. But the one that magically cheered up my heart was “High Hopes,” not just because of the lyrics but because it reminded me of my parents who always played music in the house and loved Sinatra.

The next day while I was out walking, I found a postcard on the ground from Niland, California, with a picture of Salvation Mountain. It turns out the mountain was the inspirational work of Leonard Knight, a Korean War veteran who began constructing it “to get people to go back to a time when they had the capacity to be awestruck and instill in them a sense of wonder.”

When I got home, I sat down to read one of the many Sunday newspapers that I subscribe to and in the Los Angeles Times was a full-page article titled, “Salvation Mountain Keeps The Magic Alive.” The story was about how friends were coming together to save the partially collapsing sculpture in memory of Knight.

Just then I heard my husband, Skip, laughing and wondered what was so funny. I should have known he was reading Nick Canepa’s entertaining sports column in The San Diego Union-Tribune because it almost always makes him laugh out loud. Canepa is the St. Nick of all things sports and more. Skip sometimes reads parts of his column aloud to me, especially the stuff about City Hall politicians. Canepa is a class act who says what’s on his mind without being vulgar.

Later in the day, one of our wild black phoebes flew near the back door and sang to remind us it had been over an hour since we last fed him. I got the cup of live mealworms and took some out to him. He sat patiently on the back of a patio chair as I launched one into the air. He flew up and caught it in his beak and then landed back on the chair. We did this dance about five more times before he flew to the fence and waited for me to put some worms on the ground so he could eat at a more leisurely pace.

He was joined by baby bluebirds, sparrows, a towhee, wrens and warblers. A resident blue belly lizard momentarily jumped into the impromptu Birdland worm fest. It’s always a wonderment to see the birds and lizards eating worms together.

This weekend reminded me of some of the simple and good things in life such as family, music, reading, walking, laughing, sports, art, nature and especially mountain building and worm eating.

I will try to keep my hopes high for a blessed and peaceful New Year full of “miracles and wonder” for us all.

Donna Frye, a former San Diego City Council member who was nearly elected mayor, lives in Clairemont.