Newcomers Aren’T All New

Sometimes it’s interesting to hear what events people recall as having marked the year they moved here.

Often the milestones are personal: Marriage, the birth of a baby and so on. But occasionally the year-markers have to do with current affairs of the time. You know, “I moved here during Expo ‘74” or “We arrived about a week before the Museum of Native American Cultures closed.”

And every once in a while, you hear someone cite a different sort of event.

A few nights ago, the Rev. Ernest Mason was recalling a few highlights of his more than 60 years of local ministry when he mentioned first coming to Spokane as a young man.

It was 1938, the year of the “Anschluss,” when the Nazis took over Austria. World War II loomed on the near horizon.

Mason’s recollection offered a reminder. Not being born here isn’t necessarily synonymous with being a newcomer.

* You’re normal: If you’ve wondered about people falling on your porch or sidewalk and trying to sue you.

* Greater Spokane: Not long ago, we asked how far outside Seattle a person can live and still legitimately claim to live there. That was prompted, of course, by the suspicion that a lot of Western Washington residents are phonies. They want outsiders to believe they live a life of coffeeshop poetry in trendy waterfront neighborhoods while in fact they sit around watching sitcoms in some strip mall hell 30 miles from the shadow of the Space Needle.

You know it’s true.

Anyway, that prompted a reader to call and report that, to a lesser extent, the same thing happens over on this side of the state. She said she knows for a fact that, when traveling in other parts of the country, people from Colville to Colfax have been known to say they live in Spokane.

OK, that probably does happen. And no doubt those folks do Spokane proud.

But people doing that are just trying to provide meaningful information. Chances are, they aren’t seeking unearned status points.

“Oh, Spokane. Isn’t that where Microsoft isn’t?”

* Warm-up questions: What was your favorite find when Web surfing and typing in site addresses consisting of essentially random words, letters or names? What movie should everyone in the Spokane area rent?

* Today’s Slice question: What book should everyone in the Spokane area read?

(To keep this unpredictable, let’s exclude religious volumes from the nomination process.)