One by one, the things that comprise normal life have slipped away from us. Businesses and churches have closed, jobs and incomes have been lost. The life we knew just a few short weeks ago has become a fond memory. We can’t even buy toilet paper. The one thing we do have plenty of, those of us still lucky enough to be healthy, is time. Things that once kept us busy, so busy we sometimes complained about them, have given way to searching for things to fill our days. The first thing we lost was the freedom to come and go as we please. My wife and I are in the at-risk age group. No longer could we go…
Tim Woodward is a longtime Idaho columnist. His columns appear one Sunday a month, often more frequently, in The Idaho Press and are posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays.
Posts by Tim Woodward
Travel is said to broaden the mind, but in the new world of the coronavirus it can test the patience and cause unexpected financial woes. Long lines and security checks at airports have been frustrating travelers for years, and the virus has brought frustration on steroids. We were on final approach to Los Angeles on our way home to Boise last week when my wife got a text saying our flight to Seattle, then the virus’s U.S. epicenter, had been canceled. We were supposed to have flown directly home from there. Instead, the text said, we would be flying all night and most of the next day, from L.A. to Spokane to Portland to Seattle to Boise. And that was nothing…
Suggested headline: ‘A life in a few kilobytes’ Scientists would disagree, but time doesn’t always pass at the same speed. Anyone who has had to sit through a boring meeting can tell you that it seems to take forever, while a two-week vacation flashes by all too soon. Day in and day out, time seems to pass slowly. But when you look back on events in your life, or the lives of people you know, it’s as if they came and went in a heartbeat. A recent email from a man who attended the same elementary school I did is a case in point. He wanted to know if I knew whether a former classmate, a girl named Teresa, had been…
And now it’s McClatchy. This month’s news that the nation’s second largest news company has filed for bankruptcy was inevitable. McClatchy had been struggling for years and was the latest in a long line of bankruptcies, closures and layoffs that have plagued print publications in recent years. The once highly profitable newspaper industry has become a shadow of its former self. McClatchy owns The Idaho Statesman, where I spent virtually my entire newspaper career. Gannett, the company that owned The Statesman for most of that time, also has fallen on hard times and recently was forced to merge with another media company. Experts have said the combined company could slash up to $300 million in costs, which could cost a lot of journalists their…
Some places you remember for life. When I was seven, an uncle took my mother, sister and me to a beach lot he’d recently purchased near Monterey, Calif. There for only a few minutes, I made what must have struck him as a ridiculous request. “I know I’m just a kid, Uncle Bill, but please don’t ever sell this place to anybody but me.” That’s how beautiful it was. A cliff with a wooden stairway overlooked the blue Pacific and Uncle Bill’s 200 feet of beach. He sold it a few years later for $10,000 and thought he’d made a killing. Today, it would be worth millions. We spent several hours in Monterey that day, walking around town and looking…
Suggested headline: Noted musician’s other passion? Clocks When John Hansen was a young man trying to decide what to do with his life, he got a student loan and spent the money on a guitar. “I was living in Pocatello then. I registered and started school at Idaho State University and bought a new Martin guitar. I played rock and roll covers in a band and eventually started working for a couple who would go back east and buy antiques. She died, and he was half blind so I started going with him on his trips to buy antiques.” Things have a way of working out. Hansen never did finish college, but he ended up with two livelihoods. Most people know…
Facebook Twitter Email Print Save It’s an understatement to say that I am not a tech-savvy guy. Part of this has to do with being born in the wrong generation. My kids and grandkids, who grew up with computers and the Internet, do intuitively what has me screaming at the device of the moment. I threw my smartphone across a street once. It landed in tall grass and wasn’t damaged, though part of me wished it had been. Another part of it has to do with having the wrong kind of brain. I’m right-brained. Right-brained people tend to be creative and artistic, as opposed to left-brained people, who are better at things like math, science and mechanics. My wife is left-brained. She had to…
My wishes for the New Year are pretty basic. Good health, the well being of family and friends, the usual stuff. And one unusual wish. Wouldn’t it be a great New Year’s gift for all of us if Congress passed the Robocall Bill this year? The Robocall Bill would allow telephone carriers to block calls with pre-recorded messages. As you know if you’ve gotten them (and who hasn’t?), the relentless barrage of unwanted calls is beyond annoying. My wife and I estimate that roughly three of every four times our phone rings, it’s a call from a scam artist who thinks he or she has a perfect right to interrupt our lives. They call every day, often at the worst possible…
Artificial Christmas trees have come a long way. My wife and I had one of the early ones one year. One year was enough. When the holidays were over, we left it in the trash. The reason our artificial tree ended up in the trash was that it was patently ugly. It looked like it had been made with green pipe cleaners and smelled like shoe polish. No amount of tinsel, lights or ornaments could compensate for its existential hideousness. After that thankfully short-lived experiment, the trouble it took to have a real tree seemed worth it. The pipe-cleaner tree made us disdainful of artificial trees. People who had artificial Christmas trees, the reasoning went, would also have artificial flowers or…
Some of my favorite news stories are about treasures lost and rediscovered – a priceless painting found under decades of dust in someone’s attic, an unreleased Beatles song turning up in a vault, the discovery of a lost manuscript by a famous author. A lost manuscript by Vardis Fisher recently was found after lying untouched in a folder for nearly 80 years. “Vardis Who?” you may ask. A fair question. All but forgotten today, Fisher was once Idaho’s best known writer. He was brilliant, iconoclastic, infuriating. He wrote 36 books, evoking comparisons with Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. He also drove a wife to suicide and alienated both critics and readers with his acerbic observations – which earned him the nickname…