PUblisher's Message

by Don Kindred

  In this issue we have highlighted a few worthy vendors of the varied skills it takes to improve our houses, specialists who can ably enhance the places we live. We show the fruits of talented artisans who can literally build dreams, beautify views and add to your life ‘the comforts of Kings’.

    But they can’t make it home. 

    Home means something different to each of us. In one perspective America is our home, we are instilled with pride in the land of the free, home of the brave and all that. We’re proud to be Californians too, when we get right down to it. But even here in little ol’ Orange County, a physical area that rates only a small speck in the global view, there is a vast difference in where or what we call home. To many, it remains a distant goal or a fond memory. A recent article in the Orange County Register estimated there were probably 34,000 people living on and off the streets of our county-wide community. The next day, a feature promoted a vacant house for sale at $50 million, the county’s highest listing to date. Ironic, the same freedom that allows no barriers to the heights we can attain, provide none to the depths we can fall. I’ve never been homeless, but I’ve often found myself so focused on the things that need to be done to my house, I forget the importance of having one.

    For this publication, San Clemente is home. A southwestern American shore that covers only a few square miles of the world’s most livable land, a land filled with beauty and with passionate people who have each found their own personal connections to her. For the last ten years, the San Clemente Journal has celebrated the relationship of those who have made San Clemente something more than just where they live, but have come to call her home. Those who have not only enjoyed her resources, but have become resources themselves. Those who have used their basic citizen-responsibilities as only a starting point, who rise beyond their jobs and duties and have committed themselves to making our collective home into 
a better one. 

     A home doesn’t always come with an address, and it doesn’t move in with the furniture, but it always demands a piece of your heart, some investment from your deepest feelings, some personal connection, something like love. 

    It doesn’t take much, for twenty years I’ve felt that personal connection when I’m driving down from some long and needless excursion to the hectic points North, and I finally see the red and yellow glow of the old ragged Denny’s sign, shining like a welcome beacon on a foggy night, beaming like a happy ten-year-old missing teeth. The pulse calms, and I know I’m home.