By the Diablomountains Concord on the northeast side of the Bay Area of SanFrancisco lies on the western slopes of the Diablo mountain range whose peakand hills extends from Costa Contra County in the north to the Kern Countysouth where Bakersfield is county seat. Concord is the largest city of Costa Contra next to the county seat ofMartinez. My daughter’s house is about four houses from BuchananAirfield that straddles the border of Martinez and Concord. The airport is a controversial prime propertyand its function as an airport with jets has since been replaced by Byronairport and as an airfield diminished to hosting small propeller engineplanes. Buchanan’s history began as theConcord Air Force Base in the 1940s on to being an originating point tomilitary flights headed for the Korean theatre. On this week’s visit, my daughter’s Queensland heeler dogbarked as pilots training to fly prop planes from the airfield buzzed theneighborhood. The US Coast Guard usesthe facility for emergency purposes, particularly to drench bush fires in thebrown hills surrounding the verdant forest of the Diablo peaks seen from adistance. This is not a travelogue on the mountain range nor on theinteresting Bay Point of the San Francisco Bay Area extending towards PittsburgCA, the current end point of the BART’s Yellow Line. A descriptive tour might delight ourCalifornia readership, but that has not been the regular tone of this column. Nor an introduction of Concord, Martinez, and Walnut Creek(CM&WC) would be unwelcomed by the towns consumers for they have convertedtheir downtown areas as shopping centers of boutique quality, and in this mode,the towns are quaint with antiques, and contemporary in coffee shops where ahazelnut macchiato in espresso is not an uncommon fare! It is the “devil” in “Diablo” that intrigues us and why thatwould even be relevant in the downtown areas of CM&WC where retirees tendtheir social nets well and have come to live and are visibly in display allover the place enjoying the sunset of their years. There are younger families in the area, mydaughter’s included but of the short times she cruised with me in the threetowns looking for a place that might sell USB connectors to two external drivesthat have photos of my China home I wanted to share, the places teemed withwell-heeled retirees who did not hesitate to draw out their credit cards forany purchase in any of the stores. A disambiguation: “Diablo” is used as name for fictionalcharacters, music pieces, video games, places like the aforementioned mountainrange, sports personalities and teams, a gene that negatively interacts withthe death cell, and a type of hot, dry wind common in many deserts. There was once a USS DiabloAmerican submarine named after a deep-sea bottom-dwelling batfish of theWest Indies whose first assignment was to sail to Saipan after it wascommissioned just before the end of WWII hostilities. Exchange of firepower on Mt. Tapuchao ceasedbefore the Diablo reached its destination so its eventual first portage wasGuam. The submarine was delivered laterto the Pakistan navy in a military assistance package and became the Ghazi, Pakistan’s sole underwatermilitary submersible that mysteriously sank in 1971. My devilish sense looking up at the majestic mountain rangefrom Concord probably stems from my detachment from the rabid consumerism nowattendant to a country that still holds my fealty and political devotion. Everywhere I turn in my visits to my twodaughters’ families, the symbols of economic prosperity around them are held upas the overriding preoccupation of identity, vocation, and lifestyle. No activity or value is worth pursuing untilone had done the math on how much it will cost, or what amount will be gained,a cultural practice of estimation I am not privy to. As a retired member of the straddling class between the“silent” and “baby boomer” generations, I might still carry the traditionalvalue of personal character against personal wealth as criteria for measuringan individual’s worth. While financesare obviously very important, and my daughters are not by any measure countingtheir pennies, they have yet to make it the overriding consideration in gaugingpeople’s social standing. Happily, Imight claim that my daughters’ attitude, to a certain degree, reflects that oftheir father. I am evidently divorced from the contemporary preoccupationof personal worth by accumulation and expenditure, not from the inability toearn the dough (though the charge had been leveled against my earning skills)as it is an absence of passion to follow the acquisitive path; I am toohabitually at home in the monastic practice of earthly detachment. I do not condemn the practice but Iacknowledge that I no longer belong to this age. In fact, my room smells too much of my agethat I have to open my window to let the Diablo air and the hydrocarbonemissions of fast moving traffic on CA State Highway 4 not too far from mybreathing, to come in. The devil is in the details, we say. This one is mountain size. j'aime la vie pinoypanda2031@aol.com yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!