Patrice Hickox would prefer I think of her as ordinary.

She isn’t.

The Fairfax resident’s a real-life Energizer Bunny.

Without floppy ears.

A perpetual motion machine with platinum-hued hair and hands that intermittently sketch pictures in thin air. A do-gooder everlastingly battling for one cause or another.

Since I’ve tilted at a few windmills myself, I like that.

Still, no matter how much she achieves, she’s never able to rest on her laurels.

 

She is resting one recent Saturday, however, on a memorial bench at the edge of Bolinas Park in Fairfax she fought hard to get installed at the end of May.

Not quite relaxed.

Trying to figure out how she best can help Marin’s foster children keeps her mind flashing like a July 4th sparkler.

She can’t know a Marin County Civil Grand Jury will shortly issue a report saying more funds must to be spent on the issue, more communication must occur between foster parents and social workers, and more access to therapy must be provided those neglected kids.

What to do? What to do?

She and I are together, me armed with interview pad and pen, she momentarily staring off into the distance at a bald hill she knows must be preserved.

Of course.

One cause at a time isn’t her style.

She’s also thinking about finding a way to replace “the dingy, worn-out, style-less sign announcing the Town of San Anselmo.”

And improving local median strips.

How?

“Re-plant, re-think, re-design,” she tells me.

The artsy wood bench we’re on is dedicated to the memory of her friend, Nancy Helmers, an environmental activist who died last year at age 82.

Patrice tactfully declines to reveal the political obstacles — “the kerfluffle, the brouhaha” — she had to vault to make it happen.

She’s just glad it’s a done deal.

Nancy had served on the county’s Open Space Committee for 10 years, as well as many other boards, and had been as non-stop energetic as Patrice.

She also was an unrelenting firebrand when it came to pushing petitions. “No one could collect a signature like Nancy,” Patrice tells me. “No one would say ‘No’ to her.

The two women met in 1988 when Nancy was collecting names in favor of creating a multi-purpose park on the 28 acres of the Marin Town and Country Club, which was being eyed by a developer.

The pair stopped the development from happening.

But they couldn’t come up with an effective plan to raise enough money to build their dream park.

“Instead, we became friends,” Patrice remembers. “We were both birders and environmentalists. We hiked, and we eventually collected thousands of signatures for a lot of things that failed.”

There were, however, sporadic triumphs.

Such as Lansdale Park in San Anselmo, a pocket-sized space with a children’s playground — or, as the town’s website says, “just what the neighborhood needed! Parents can enjoy a coffee-to-go from the nearby café while watching their children play outdoors.”

Patrice recalls “they were going to put condos there, but we got a petition to stop it. We got two grants from the Buck Fund, and got students from the White Hall Middle School in Fairfax to help. It was great.”

Her awareness began shortly after reading Rachel Carson’s best-selling “Silent Spring,” which detailed the detrimental use of pesticides.

“I was off and running after that,” she says. “I stopped eating meat and started paying attention. I was 14.”

As a Manhattan teenager, she’d attended be-in’s in Central Park, marched in Washington against the Vietnam War, and rallied for civil rights.

“I guess I’ve been a die-hard liberal ever since I figured out what that was,” she says.

Sometimes Patrice, who’s lived in Fairfax since 1995 with Charlie, her musician husband of 41 years, volunteers longer than she’d intended.

She helped out at WildCare for more than 10 years, for instance, “raising hundreds of baby things — from snakes to foxes to raccoons and squirrels.”

If she could accomplish anything in the world, what would it be, I ask. She replies without hesitation: “Get rid of Putin and Assad.”

Then she says, “I think I’d like to be empress of Oakland and just fix that city.”

And then, after a slight pause, she adds seriously, “Anything that I’d be effective at — so I wouldn’t have to beat my head against the wall again.”

I smile.

Since I’ve tilted at a few windmills myself, I understand completely.

You can contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net

 

No, of course I don’t eavesdrop on purpose.

But I do unintentionally pick up conversational crumbs during my dog-walking stints or other Ross Valley meanderings.

I’ve learned the vicinity is a veritable hotbed of amusing or thought provoking verbal tidbits. Such as the following, extracted from the pile of Post-it collectibles on my desk:

A pair of girl bicyclists rests, cross-legged, on a downtown San Anselmo sidewalk. Says one, “When I first met my boyfriend, he was feral.”

Chatting outside a Sleepy Hollow residence, a redheaded midlifer tells a male companion, “I thought Hostess was defunct, but I was wrong. Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s have new outlets. Which confirms what I’ve always believed — they have a shelf-life that ensures they, along with the cockroaches, will inherit the Earth.”

“When I see how many of my gismos, thingamajigs and appliances are breaking down, some after only 30 or 40 days,” laments a white-haired geezer to a checker in Fairfax’s Good Earth Natural Foods, “I hate to think about what’s going on in my body after 92 years.”

At the dog park behind Safeway in Red Hill, a grinning twentysomething guy rhetorically asks a chum, “Did you hear that canines here communicate via pee-mail?”

Husband in tattered shorts to overly loud wife in basic black outside Ross Post Office: “I heard what you meant.”

A blue-hair leaning on a cane at the Rino gas station in Fairfax says to a driver, “I don’t know about you but I can never rest in a restroom.”

Angry young woman to red-faced young man in Bolinas Park in Fairfax: “I am not a stand-in in your movie.”

As they both caress an assortment of nuts and bolts at Fairfax Lumber & Hardware, a young man with a nose-ring tells his girlfriend, who has both eyebrows pierced, “He got his B.S. degree in B.S.”

Succinctly, on the lawn of Town Hall in San Anselmo, a female teenager tells a gal pal, “I don’t do boredom.”

A forty-ish guy on the Kentfield campus of the College of Marin tells a younger classmate, “When anyone calls a celebrity ‘a legend,’ that means the person being referred to is old, old, old — or dead.”

At the Ross Valley Veterinary Hospital in San Anselmo, a mom asks her daughter: “When all the newspapers disappear, will puppies be trained on Kindles?”

Unsteady gray-haired guy in front of the San Anselmo’s Lincoln Park wine bar who clearly did more than taste: “My life can be measured in troublesome channels. When I was five, it was Guadalcanal. Now, it’s my alimentary canal.”

While discussing her daughter’s new boyfriend, a stylish Fairfax woman heading into 19 Broadway in Fairfax tells a companion, “My inner jury’s still out.”

Says one smiling matron to another as they window-shop at Fairfax Variety, “Having just learned that an American Headache Society exists gives me a headache.”

“She’s a magnet for desperadoes,” says one twinkle-eyed blonde in front of Andronico’s in San Anselmo to another.

A man in a 49ers’ cap says to a cop near the Parkade in Fairfax, “Oh, how quickly we forget. I wonder whatever happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Sperminator.”

Couplet overheard at the hub bus stop in San Anselmo: “Greeting cards are getting expensive.” “Yeah, but now they talk, sing and do your laundry.”

A redhead sips a latte in San Anselmo’s Marin Coffee Roasters and gripes, after her second date with the new man in her life, “I have yet to find his sense of humor or personality.”

An acne-ridden teen boy, licking a spoon in front of Gelato on San Anselmo Avenue: “I believe in stating the obvious — because most people overlook it.”

“I’m 87 years old and still very much a work in progress,” says a woman to her companion in Fairfax’s Siam Lotus.

In the doorway of the Sunshine Bicycle Center in Fairfax, a youth whispers to himself, “She’s somewhere between perfect and oh, my God.”

A housefrau enters Seawood Photo in San Anselmo telling one friend about another: “He lives partly in Manhattan, partly in Florida, and wholly in yesterday.”

Drake High School student describes a verbose acquaintance thusly: “He’s a wordaholic.”

And here’s my personal favorite:

A bald philosopher-king outside MC23 Salon in Ross says, “My recommendation for a bumper sticker is: ‘Life is not a bumper sticker.’”

You can contact Woody Weingarten @voodee@sbcglobal.net.

Woody’s [rating: 5]

It’s way too early for me to crawl out on this particular limb, but I’m impetuous enough to do it anyway.

The best flicks of any year, the sure-fire Oscar contenders, typically are released in December, often a day or two before year’s end.

That ensures eligibility.

And, usually, a booming box-office.

This year, a vibrant film I just saw breaks with the tradition.

“Boyhood” is Richard Linklater’s cinematic masterwork, a groundbreaking work of scripted fiction that took 12 years to film. It feels real.

Indeed, it’s the most emotionally nourishing movie I’ve seen in eons.

I expect it to cop the Oscar as 2014’s best.

Forget the competition.

For a dozen consecutive years, the director-writer’s cameras filmed the various actors while they grew up, grew furrowed, grew chunkier.

In three or four-day annual shoots.

Ellar Coltrane stars as Mason Junior, a youngster who loses his baby fat and innocence while we watch.

Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, realistically portrays the boy’s officious cinema sister, Samantha. Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) come off as his blemished but loving parents.

All four are understated.

The veteran filmmaker overcame his gimmick by making the movie a non-formulaic exploration of human development — without the usual cinematic clichés.

Except for an abusive husband-drunk.

The characters seem transparent, even when internal mini-crises envelop them.

Mostly, though, Linklater, 54, examines the impact ordinariness has on human beings.

His novel-like study — based in Texas, where he was born and yetlives — meanders, but generally focuses on the less showy flashes that can influence life: sibling squabbling, routine schooling, cussing, parental guidance and lapses, Bible- and gun-toting, revolving haircuts and facial hair, juvenile bewilderment and sexuality.

Linklater’s finest scenes exude humor, including gutter bowling and blue fingernails.

But his characters are genuine enough to have been my neighbors in Clearwater, Florida, or Willingboro, New Jersey.

For some viewers, namely those who prefer high drama to watching inch-by-inch life changes, “Boyhood” may seem plot-less. Other moviegoers may suffer from a lack of zitzfleisch, the project’s 165-minute length tough on their bony backsides.

I had no such problems.

Rather, I found the film to be epic — not in the sense of explosions or thousands of warriors and computer-graphic stunts, but epic in the sense of zooming in on people reacting to life’s commonplaceness.

I’ve long been a Linklater fan — especially the documentary “Fast Food Nation,” the fact-based black comedy “Bernie,” and his fictional trilogy, “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” which tracks a loving but contentious couple.

If there’s an antecedent to “Boyhood,” it’s director Michael Apted’s “7-Up,” a documentary series that took 14 seven-year-old British pupils from varied soci-economic backgrounds and revisited them every seven years for the next 49 so far.

The fabricated “Boyhood” has vastly more impact, however.

For me, it creates a time machine.

Although my coming of age didn’t resemble Mason’s in the least, it lets me relive the warmth and angst and crossroads I faced while growing up.

So, thanks, Mr. Visionary, for skipping a cinematic stone over the water’s edge and letting the ripples of my past glisten in the sun. Thanks, too, for reminding me that a parent can be only as joyous as the least happy child.

And thanks for verifying that there’s always a little kid inside an older body.

“Boyhood” will grab no prize for taking more than a decade to complete. Hitler propagandist Leni Riefenstahl started a script in 1934 but didn’t release “Tiefland” until 20 years later. The longevity winner, however, is an animated feature, “The Thief and the Cobbler,” which took 28 years — mainly because writer-director-head animator Richard Williams ran out of money.

No movie this year should be more prize-worthy than “Boyhood,” though.

Linklater has planted the right cinematic seeds to merit his harvesting Academy Awards as best director and best film.

I predict he will.

“Boyhood” is playing at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the California and Piedmont theaters in the East Bay, and the Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki Cinema and UA Stonestown Twin in San Francisco.

You can contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net.