It was in March when I saw the Facebook meme, “I would like to exercise the 90-day return provision on the Year 2020.”

As more than one person has observed, 2020 has proven to be the conflated sum of cataclysmic elements from the 1918 flu pandemic, the financial crisis of 1929 and the social seismicity of 1968.

Katie Valenzuela won’t join the City Council until December. But she is already learning how she won’t fit in. Steve Hansen, the two-term councilmember Valenzuela defeated in March, won’t speak to her. Other members smile and offer congratulations, but the words carry little weight.

At first, this bothered Valenzuela. “I was pretty depressed when the pandemic started,” she says. Sheltered in her Boulevard Park home with her two rescue terriers, socially distanced from work and friends, months from being sworn into office, Valenzuela felt disconnected from the motivations that propelled her run for office.

Locking onto a snail with laser-guidance precision, Randy Paragary delivers a lightning strike on the gluttonous gastropod. “He died during the journey,” he says. With apologies to escargot, snails would be wise to steer clear of this backyard vegetable garden.

Paragary, his wife Stacy and executive chef-business partner Kurt Spataro have kept Sacramentans well fed and entertained for decades. While retaining his local dining and entertainment venues, Paragary has evolved his interests in recent years to include Midtown’s new Fort Sutter Hotel and (drumroll, please) his backyard tomatoes and other edibles.

Giving back has been the driving force of Dr. Barbara Arnold’s life. The celebrated ophthalmologist has generously donated her time, money and wisdom for decades—which she believes is the key to a life well lived.

“If you do big things young enough in life, you get to see the ripple effect as you get older,” says Arnold, who lives in Curtis Park, but also has an art studio off Scribner Road along the Sacramento River, where she paints the natural beauty out her window. “That’s why I encourage younger people to participate (in philanthropy). Do it within your vibrant lifetime to witness what your giving has done.”

Salvador Bradford takes pride in keeping his studio apartment tidy. His converted hotel room has around 250 square feet for a bathroom, stove and mini-fridge.

There is space for the trappings of a home: a shelf of Star Wars and Star Trek DVDs, and a small shrine to Jesus Christ, to whom Bradford credits his past five years of sobriety.

Inside Sacramento is looking for a few good community journalists. But not just from any community. We are interested in writers from neighborhoods that historically don’t get much attention from traditional media—unless the news is bad.

We want to see Sacramento’s underserved communities from a different, deeper, more personal perspective. This means we want stories by and about people who really know the neighborhoods.