BIG CHANGE: For more than 20 years, I’ve lived on the Westside. But when I woke Tuesday morning, I discovered I’d magically moved to the Mesa. That’s because this Monday, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to approve the new boundary lines for the city’s six new voting districts. The map is part of the settlement to the district elections lawsuit filed last November against City Hall. Because I happen to live on West Valerio Street a few blocks above Mountain Avenue, I have been reincarnated — at least according to this map — as an honorary Mesa Rat. For all these years, I find out, I’ve been living a lie. My self-image needs serious recalibration.
I like the Mesa just fine. I shop at Albertsons. I go to Hendry’s Beach. But the Westside’s sense of place and space resonates infinitely more. It’s where I get my hair cut. It’s where I marvel at the beckoning beacon of the Foodland Market’s come-hither neon sign. It’s where I crest the swope and swale of the Micheltorena Street bridge, dodging possums and skunks, though not always successfully. It’s where I get an earful — solicited or not — on the intricate treacheries of U.S.-Iranian politics while looking for screws at the San Andres Hardware store.
Things change. I will adjust. Maybe I’ll learn to love living on “Baja Mesa” or the “Mesa Annex” — as some insist on calling my neighborhood. I might even come to terms with “Valerio Canyon,” a tag developed by real estate agents nervous about the downscale cloud cast on their properties by “the Westside” appellation. But I doubt it.