A note to readers

Robert Perea, The Fernley Reporter

One night in the spring of 2014, I sat in a hotel room south of San Francisco looking at my phone to find a nearby Chinese restaurant.

I was there to take my brother to a doctor’s appointment the next day at UC San Francisco, and as I found a place close by that had a great-looking menu, I thought I’d found exactly what I was looking for.

Unfortunately, when I got there, there was a note on the door that the restaurant would be closed for two weeks for a family vacation. I knew for sure then that I had found a treasure, because while all the words on the page said was that the restaurant would be closed for the vacation, the words not on the page told me that is the kind of place where the dishes that come from the kitchen are made not just of the ingredients that go in them, but with love.

Luckily for me that night, I found another place just down the street, and as an added bonus, it turned out to be the best Chinese food I’ve ever had, and not by a close margin.

All of that is just a long-winded introduction to what I’m trying to say.

Like that restaurant, The Fernley Reporter may wind up being closed for a few days, albeit, not for a vacation, but there are two parallels between that trip and the one I’m about to take.

I write this just a few hours before I will be leaving for a trip to the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where I will be having surgery.

I harbor no illusions that I will find a similar culinary treat as I did in that Bay Area restaurant, but I hope my trip to the hospital works out as well as it did for my brother. There, the doctor changed the course of treatment for my brother’s multiple sclerosis, and he is doing much better now than he was four years ago.

I’m not sure what I am in for, because the doctor won’t know the scope of the surgery until he begins.

While it’s my hope that this will be a short and simple operation, and that I’ll be out of action for merely a day or two, there is the possibility it could be much more involved, and that my absence could be extended beyond a few days.

I realize that this is a very unusual communique in the world of journalism, but unlike larger outlets that have people who can fill in for an absent worker, I am the Fernley reporter, and I am The Fernley Reporter. And like I imagine it to be for the owners of that restaurant that was closed, The Fernley Reporter for me is an act of love – the love of writing, love of the language, and the love of the feeling that if I write enough, something I put on a page might mean something to the person on the reading end of it.

The bottom line is that, like the hungry traveler I was finding the note on the door of that restaurant, readers of The Fernley Reporter may find nothing new posted on the site for a few days. I hope that will not be the case, but if it is, whether it be one day or several, I will be back as soon as possible to return to my quest to make The Fernley Reporter Fernley’s Hometown News.