Any time you log onto Nextdoor, it feels like dipping your brain in acid. It’s a nonstop stream of the worst aspects of humanity, with suspicion and paranoia and conspiracy run amok. There has been one ray of light in my feed the last few years: Her name is Cindy Bonsteel, and she’s a mother trying to make sure she can give her son Nathan a special birthday this year.
The thing is, she needs our help.
Nathan’s birthday is coming up on March 22, and Cindy is hoping the citizens of Long Beach will pack a P.O. Box with birthday cards for her boy. Nathan has Down Syndrome and loves getting mail with his name on it.
“He loves mail like no other,” Cindy said. “Mail addressed to him is like hitting the lottery jackpot.”
Nathan is in the same boat as a lot of other young adults with special needs. He was part of a welcoming and nurturing school community while a student in the Long Beach Unified School District. After graduating, however, his family has struggled to find day programs and other supportive communities for him because of staffing issues, a situation that was exacerbated for the Bonsteels and many others by the isolating years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Nathan, having special needs, nobody was going to call him on his 21st birthday and say, ‘Hey Buddy, let’s go grab a beer,’” said Cindy. “He doesn’t get invited to birthday parties. And I just hoped this would make him feel special.”
It certainly worked in 2022, when the citizens of Long Beach responded to a column I wrote for The 562 and sent more than 3,000 cards and 150 packages, making it “the best birthday ever,” according to Nathan. The family invited me to come watch when Nathan’s mom led him outside to see the biggest surprise — all that mail piled up on a table, all of it with his name on it.
It’s a day I will never forget and a day I think about often when I’m feeling frustrated with the state of things in Long Beach. I’m hoping that the city’s residents will once again step up and help give Nathan a special birthday. If you’d like to send him a birthday card, the address is:
Nathan Bonsteel
c/o Cindy Bonsteel
6285 E. Spring Street #243
Long Beach, California 90808
The world can be a dark and frightening place. My antidote for when I’m feeling overwhelmed is to try and make a small impact with one person in my city. Nathan gets more joy from getting a birthday card from a stranger than I probably get from just about anything in my life. His mom says he saves each card and calls them “his treasure.”
How lucky are we to have people like Nathan in our city? How lucky are we that we can give a special young man a treasure with just a few minutes of our time? It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel like the world might not be such a dark and frightening place after all.
Long Beach Bites
People who know me really well know that one of my pet hobbies is weather statistics. My editor at the Post, Jeremiah, is now the recipient of a stream of rain-related texts as we’ve had one of the wettest Februarys in recorded Long Beach history. Per the LA Almanac’s data, which goes back to 1948: This 11.95 inches was the second most rain the city has ever gotten in February, trailing only the historic El Niño 1998 February that saw 12.09 inches of rain in the city. This was only the second time ever that the city got more than 10 inches of rain in February and only the fourth time ever that we got 10 inches of rain in any single month. With the 2023-24 rain year for the city currently at 19 inches even, we are only one inch of rain away from making history with the city’s first-ever back-to-back 20-inch rain years. The city only has nine 20-inch rain years in recorded history.
If you couldn’t tell by the above paragraph about precipitation statistics, I just turned 40. I was born on Leap Day, which means I know the following two things about people. One — every person, whether they’re your average Joe or an award-winning MacArthur Genius Grant comedy writer, will make the exact same joke when they find out you were born on Feb. 29. “Wait, so you’re like six years old?” Two — people are horrible at math. Leap Year comes every four years, and most of us were required to be able to multiply by fours to graduate from third or fourth grade. Yet every time it comes up I get, “So are you six?” “So are you five years old?” I would love to think I’m heading into my 40s looking like a 20-year-old, but I think it’s more likely that people didn’t retain their math facts as well as they should have.