Perception is truth, as politicians and columnists know

MORRO BAY, Calif. --- This is a city of about 10,000 whose main features make it look like it was all planned by the Topeka City Council. The biggest attraction is the 500-foot high rock (El Morro) in its bay, but it is partly obscured by a power plant with three towering smoke stacks which, for some reason, was built on the shore in front of it in 1952.

Two of the three stacks belch smoke. Being a seasoned journalist I know smoke stacks always belch smoke, rather than just emit it. The third stack is out of order, and stands there as a menace to hang gliders.

The best thing about the power plant is that its new owner, Duke Power, has promised to modernize it and do away with the stacks. It has run full-page color ads in the local newspaper showing what the horizon will be like with the great concrete pillars gone. It will be a vast improvement, to say the least, but Duke doesn't say when it will happen.

Juan Cabrillo, a Spanish explorer, discovered the rock in 1542 and promptly named it El Morro, but the word didn't spread. Two hundred years later another Spaniard, Gaspar de Portola, saw it and he, too, named it El Morro. Two hundred years after that, the local Chamber of Commerce got into the act and called it the Gibraltar of the Pacific.

It hasn't taken off. A really creative chamber would have referred to Gibraltar as the El Morro of the Mediterranean, and would have sold Prudential Insurance on using the local rock as its emblem of stability.

Ignore the power plant, and you have a garden spot with an interesting waterfront, and with a year-round average temperature of 65, meaning a temperature above 85 is rare. There are golf courses, surfing, fishing, 237 species of birds to watch, and probably that many restaurants and bars.

We are not here for any of that, however. We're here to visit my wife's older brother, Warren Linville, whose wife, the Rev. Harriet B. Linville, happens to be the rector of St. Peter's (By the Sea) Episcopal Church. She's my kind of rector, because she raises her wine glass to toast heaven, which she says will be "all parties and no meetings."

We obviously aren't spending all our time in meditation and prayer. We have found our way to the waterfront for fish and chips, prepared by establishments that offer at least 10 varieties of seafood to go with your chips, and eaten outside while at least 236 kinds of birds float overhead, threatening to bomb you if you don't feed them.

The fresh fish are delivered daily by a fleet of local fishing boats, and near where they dock there is a monument to fishermen who have been lost at sea. I don't know how long it has been there, but there are 55 names on it now, carved in the marble below a 7,000- pound anchor that tops the memorial.

Included are five sets of names, four of them listing two men with the same last name, and one set of four fisherman named Fanning. You are left to wonder how many fathers and sons, and brothers, went down together. Whatever, the monument says it is there to "comfort the living and honor the dead."

We don't spend many daylight hours in the Linville home, because it is undergoing a major renovation to the main level, which includes the kitchen, dining room and living room. The kitchen is non- existent, so Warren cooks breakfast on hot plates in the garage, while Harriet brews coffee on the floor.

The carpenters come at 8 a.m. and the pounding starts. You may be asking why we'd visit at such a time, and the answer is that there is no such thing as a bad time to freeload. The guest rooms are intact, and the price is right, so what's a little pounding? It beats Best Western.

I will remember Morro Bay not for the noise, but as the place where I lost about 20 pounds and kept it off the whole time I have been here. My story is that I weigh only when I'm ordered to at the doctor's office, and invariably, I check in at 195 to 200 pounds. That's the reason I shun scales otherwise, because I can't face the truth every day.

But here, there was a fancy set of scales in the bathroom, and I couldn't resist. I stepped on, and lo and behold the needle stopped at a slim, trim 180 pounds. I tried it again, and I've tried it several times a day, and I've convinced myself I really weight 180.

I told Harriet that if the scales were faulty I didn't want to know about it, and she said, "Then I won't tell you."

I may not look like a new man, but I feel like one. I shovel in peanuts and cookies with both hands, and I've gone from "Lite" this and that to the real thing. It hasn't made any difference. I checked in here at 180 and I'll leave here at 180.

The way I see it, I'm ready to do an infomercial on losing weight. Wait till you see the new me. Just don't look below my first chin.

Dick Snider can be reached at

dsnider@cjonline.com.

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