Good morning, and Merry Christmas Eve Day to you.

  Christmas Eve is the main event of Christmas at our house, much more so than Christmas morning.

  My wife is busy preparing goodies days in advance – cookies, pie, homemade fudge … The entire clan gathers in the living room to open gifts. It’s a tradition that began with her family when she was growing up. Christmas Eve was the big deal for them, too. Christmas Day was an afterthought. 

  The Christmas Eve gift opening at our house reminds me of Christmas morning at the Parker household in the movie “A Christmas Story.” Ribbons and wrappers flying, squeals and peals of laughter … chaos.

  Christmas, of course, isn’t just about gifts. More on that later.

  Selecting and purchasing Christmas gifts, as anyone who has done it is well aware, can be challenging, expensive, stressful. One year I was still roaming store aisles searching for gifts on Christmas Eve itself. You only do that once before vowing never, ever to do it again.

  With all that goes into buying and receiving gifts, it’s surprising that we may not remember some or any of the gifts we received the preceding Christmas. Do you remember what you got for Christmas last year? I don’t remember a single gift. Neither does my wife.

  Only one gift through all the years stands out, a gift remembered for life.

  I was a teenager at the time, smitten by rock and roll and saving up for my first good guitar. It was a slow process for a kid making a dollar an hour working summers on the end of a shovel. 

  My father and an uncle were partners in a company that installed lawn sprinkling systems. Dad figured that a job with the company would teach me the value of hard work. (It’s also possible that he couldn’t find anyone else willing to work that hard for a buck an hour.)

  I saved virtually every dollar made on that job, but when Christmas came around I was still $150 short of having enough for the guitar. My parents surprised me by making up the difference and giving it to me for Christmas. I sat and stared at it for a long time without taking it out of the case. It was almost too beautiful to touch. To this day, it remains the only Christmas gift I still remember.

  So maybe the gifts we stress over aren’t all that important. 

  More than any of the gifts I’ve received, a Christmas experience still stands out many years later. It was a Christmas Eve so vividly remembered that it’s as if it happened last year rather than decades ago. I’d have been eight or nine at the time.

  As Christmas Eves go, it was almost perfect. My great grandmother had come to stay with us for one of her extended visits, and the house was filled with the aroma of her baking. Dad was busy in the kitchen, making a batch of his signature Tom and Jerrys. Lights glittered on the tree, a fire crackled in the fireplace and George Melachrino’s “Christmas Joy,” still my favorite Christmas album, played softly on the stereo.

 The only thing missing was snow.

  That December, much like this December, had been unusually dry. Hardly any snow at all. Dreams of a white Christmas appeared to be that and only that – dreams.

  Until Christmas Eve. No snow had fallen that day or most of the evening. We had a tradition in our family of opening one gift on Christmas Eve, the others on Christmas morning. We’d had dinner, opened our gifts, and still no snow. Then, a little before bedtime, I looked out the dining room window and couldn’t believe what was happening.

  Snow was coming down so hard it was if it were making up for lost time the rest of the month. I stood and watched, wonder-struck, as it fell in the yellow glow of the old-fashioned streetlight on our corner.

 The flakes looked to be as big as quarters. Instead of diminishing, as snowstorms often do in the valley, this one intensified. Snowflakes fell, and fell, and fell. Lawns disappeared, streets glistened; curbs and sidewalks, even cars were buried. It happened quickly, a no-nonsense storm, and it was a thing of transcendent  beauty.

  The snow was still falling at bedtime, promising snowballs and snow forts on Christmas day. 

   I’ll never forget the feeling of watching a perfectly timed and extraordinarily beautiful snowstorm on that Christmas Eve. It was special enough to be remembered for a lifetime. All these years later, when countless gifts have been forgotten, I’m still grateful for having experienced it.

  It isn’t the shopping or the gifts or the goodies that embody the spirit of Christmas. The spirit of Christmas is something deeper, something that gives us, for a brief but magical time, the feeling that cares and conflicts are on hold and all is well with the world.

  My wish to you is that you’ve known or will know the sort of wonder I felt on that long-ago Christmas Eve. That was a gift to be  remembered.

  Merry Christmas.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  I know; I promised not to do any more columns about dogs for a while.

  That was before I saw the fliers.

  Perhaps you’ve seen them – some 200 of them, all over East Boise, the BSU campus, the Greenbelt …

  “Lost dog. She is our best friend. Please help us.”

  I have a good idea of how the people who wrote that feel. Two of my recent columns were about our family’s dog, who died in September. We were crazy about her, and it’s obvious from reading the fliers that the owners of the lost dog feel the same way about her.

  The dog’s name is Daisy, and her owners are offering a $1,000 reward for her return. There may have been larger rewards for lost pets, but if so I’ve never seen one. Clearly these people love their dog. And, as a fellow dog lover, I wanted to meet them. 

  Their names are Steven Moore and Kristi Bronkema. Daisy went missing  from their East Boise home the day before Thanksgiving. They were careful to keep the back yard gate shut, but on the fateful day a service technician left it open. Steven and Kristi didn’t know that when they let Daisy out of the house the next morning.

  “We let her out to go potty,” Steven said. “Kristi was on a conference call so it was a while before she went out to the back yard to let her in. She called her name and she didn’t come.”

  “I freaked out,” Kristi said. “I started calling her name frantically. I was afraid she’d get hit by a car. I went next door and asked the people there if they’d seen her, then got in the car and drove the street.”

  Almost immediately, an alert neighbor posted a picture of Daisy on a neighborhood website and asked “whose beautiful dog is this? She’s really friendly.”

  “I went to her house right away,” Kristi said. “Unfortunately she didn’t bring Daisy in. She said later that she was so sorry she didn’t do that.”

  “But we’re not blaming anybody,” Steven added.

  Daisy wasn’t wearing her collar when she got out of the yard because they took it off at night so she’d be more comfortable sleeping.

  “People who saw her might have thought she was a stray because she didn’t have her collar on,” Kristi said.

   Daisy’s friendliness might also have contributed. A Husky mix, she’s one of those dogs who loves everybody. She’d have hopped right into the car of a friendly stranger.

  I asked her owners to tell me more about her.

   She’s two years old. Steven and Kristi have had her for a year and a half. They don’t have children, and “she’s pretty much our daughter,” Steven said. 

  Kristi described her as having “a lot of personality. And she’s really affectionate. She loves to cuddle and snuggle.”  

  Smart?

  “Really smart,” Steven  said. “She knows all the commands. She knows how to shake hands, sit, stay, lie down … Puppies can be rambunctious, but she wasn’t that way at all. When we taught her to sit, we only had to show her a couple of times and she got it.”

  When they first got Daisy, she didn’t know how to climb stairs. They taught her by putting doggie treats on the steps.

  “It’s like having a child, watching them learn and grow,” Steven said. 

  They’ve searched relentlessly. Steven works nights, starts looking for her as soon as he gets off work and says he’s logged over 100 miles walking in his neighborhood, on the Greenbelt, in the Foothills, even in Canyon County.  

  They’ve done social media posts and created a Daisy website accessible by scanning a bar code on their newest fliers, which have neon ink and glow in the dark. They even hired a company that uses tracking dogs to help with the search.

  Unfortunately, Steven said, Daisy “isn’t chipped and hasn’t been spayed yet, either. We’d planned on getting that done. We’d just got new jobs and were saving up the money for it, and then she went missing.

   “We’re pretty sure somebody picked her up because no one’s seen her since that first day. Maybe if whoever found her has bad intentions, like trying to breed her, they might just bring her back and take the cash instead. Cousins, aunts and uncles helped us come up with the $1,000. If we could, we’d do $10,000.”

 “Because she went missing the day before Thanksgiving, we think maybe someone who was traveling found her,” Kristi said. “That’s our fear, that they might have picked her up and taken her home to wherever they live.”

  That’s why Steven has been pounding the pavement as far away as Nampa.

  They’re gratified, maybe even a bit overwhelmed, by the response to their efforts.

  “The community has been so amazing,” Steven said. “Everyone has been so friendly and kind. We’ve had people go out looking and put up posters. I get five to seven calls a day from people asking if we’ve found her. We can’t thank them enough for taking time out of their busy lives to help us.”

  “We try to think that a good person has found her and not someone that wouldn’t treat her well,” Kristi said. “When we think about that happening we break down and start crying.”

  “I hope that right now she’s at a house with a family and that they do the right thing,” Steven added. “I understand that kids get attached to a dog, but we need her back. If they bring her back to us we’d be more than happy to have the kids visit.”

  Here’s hoping that whoever found Daisy reads this and does do the right thing. I told Steven and Kristi that if she is found and returned, it would surprise me if the person who did it actually claimed the reward.

  “That’s what everyone has been saying,” Steven said. “They say that most people wouldn’t take the reward, that it would be enough just to bring your dog back to you.”

  There were no tears during our interview. They say they put on a brave face in public, but “behind closed doors we shed our tears and hug each other.”

  If you see Daisy – or if you have her – please call them at 1 916 534-0774. 

  I asked them if they’d get another dog if Daisy isn’t returned.

  “No,” Steven said. “I don’t think we’d be able to handle another dog right away knowing that our Daisy is still out there. We just want some closure. The hardest part is not knowing. Is she lost, out in the cold and dead, or does someone have her? It’s driving me crazy.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him a woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Readers of this column could be forgiven for thinking it’s gone to the dogs.

  A column in September detailed the loss of Roux, a dog loved by every member of the Woodward family. She just went out in the back yard, chose a shady spot to lie down, and died. She was only six and seemingly healthy. A heart attack or heart defect were seen as the likely cause. 

  My wife and I dog-sat Roux several days a week so it felt almost as if she were our dog, but her actual owner was our daughter Andie. A letter from 98-year-old reader Hilda Packard convinced Andie to get a new dog sooner rather than later to ease the pain of losing Roux. My last column was about the new dog, purchased from a rescue group in New Mexico, and asked readers to suggest names for her. 

  Before writing another word, I want to thank readers not only for their suggestions but for sharing their stories. Roux’s struck a chord with dog lovers who also had lost beloved canines and expressed  heartfelt condolences. We’re grateful to every one of them.

  I also want to say up front that the search for a name didn’t turn out quite as expected. More about that later.

  But first, the suggestions. There isn’t space to include them all, but here’s a sampling:

  Several readers – Shaun Byrne, Jim Strait and Eileen Thuesen – suggested the name Ruby. It sounds like Roux but is just different enough to be specific to its new owner.

  Terrie Galloway lives in New Mexico and has two dogs from the same shelter that rescued Roux. Her name suggestions: Toffee, Pretzel and Sasha.

  Kris Lamke wrote to say that she liked the name “Baton. (You are passing the baton.)”

   You never know when you might learn something. Larry Richardson wrote to say that “seeing as how the dog is from New Mexico, a good name might be Zia.”

  Not being from New Mexico and having spent very little time there, I had to look that up. 

  Zia, according to the International Property Watch, is a sun symbol that originally belonged to New Mexico’s Zia indigenous nation and was stolen from it. (Is there anything that wasn’t stolen from indigenous people?) It’s depicted in red on a yellow background on New Mexico’s state flag.

  The symbol, also according to IPW, represents “the four cardinal directions, the four seasons of the year, the four periods of the day (morning, noon, evening and night, and the four seasons of life (childhood, youth, middle age and old age).  The center of the sun symbol stands for life itself.”

  The aforementioned column asking for suggestions was accompanied by a photo of the new dog. Elizabeth Moore thinks she looks like “a Pearl. Needs care, could be a little rough around the edges, but you love them every day.”

  To Mary Gray, the new puppy “looks like a Daisy.”

  Arguably the most unusual name came from Jay Thyfault:  Skoogs.

  Janet Mollerup, “a lifelong, adventurous cook” emailed to say that  because roux is a sauce often used in Cajun cooking (Roux came from a rescue group in Louisiana), it would make sense to name the new dog Gumbo.

  I love that one! It would be my choice from the names suggested, but it’s not my call. It’s Andie’s dog, her call.

  James Glenn also suggested the name Gumbo, adding that “every good gumbo starts with a good roux.” And Nancy Harvey wrote that because roux is a sauce, a good name would be Saucy. 

  Marilyn Shake’s idea was to name the dog Chance, “as in a second chance to fill the hole in your heart” left by Roux’s passing.

  Teri Hoover’s email made me laugh. 

  “Her new name should be “Blessing since you are both blessings to each other. I know it’s corny, but what do expect from an old broad?”

  Lee Byrd’s email also gave me a chuckle:

  “When my wife was very young, she had a dog they called DL. Her father was not that excited about having a dog around so the name DL was short for damn lucky because he got to stay, to the delight of  my wife. Maybe your dog should be called Lucky because she is damn lucky to have ended up in such a good home.”

 Ann Donovan figured that because the new dog’s color is similar to that of a penny, the name of a Beatles song would be fitting:  Penny Lane.

  This brings us to the search not turning out as expected. I’m sorry to report that none of the names readers suggested – as good as many of them were – was the one chosen.

  The one who inadvertently came up with the new name was none other than … Paul McCartney. The ah-ha moment came while Andie was watching a documentary about the Beatles. Something clicked when she heard the opening line to one of their songs: 

  “Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner, but he knew it couldn’t last.”

  And so, thanks to Sir Paul, the new dog’s name is Jojo.

  My choice would have been Gumbo, but as mentioned earlier, not my dog.

  Again, to those who took the time to suggest names, thank you. I didn’t expect such an overwhelming response and was touched by it.

  That said, I promise not to write about dogs for a while.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Are there any roads or intersections in Boise that aren’t a) closed, b) torn up or c) gone?

  Of course there are. It just doesn’t seem that way when you’re trying to reach a destination more distant than, say, your front porch. 

  I’ve lived in Boise virtually all my life and can’t recall another time when so much roadwork was being done. It seems that no matter where you go, you run into signs warning of roadwork, actual roadwork and/or roads doing passably good imitations of bomb craters. 

  If you live in East Boise, plan on taking extra time to go anywhere west of, well, East Boise. That’s because two of the main streets in the East End – Warm Springs and State Street – are closed. They’ve been closed for weeks. I have more than a passing familiarity with this because I live in the East Boise and for weeks have been late for virtually everything west of there.

  And occasionally east of there. A couple of weeks ago, some friends who live east of my neighborhood planned to meet me for coffee. A logical spot to meet would have been The Trolley House, a cozy little restaurant on Warm Springs Avenue.

  I say “would have been” because The Trolley House was closed. Instead, we decided to meet at the Warm Springs Golf Course clubhouse. The decision made, I confidently drove up Walnut to Warm Springs, something I’ve done almost every day for years.

  What greeted me, however, wasn’t the traffic that makes you wait forever to get onto Warm Springs ever since Harris Ranch was built. People coming from Harris Ranch or other locations east of Walnut have to wait for oncoming traffic to make left turns onto Walnut, meaning that those of us wanting to get onto Warm Springs have to wait forever.

  That wasn’t the case on this particular morning, though. Instead of the usual, annoying traffic, the problem was even worse. Barricades had been erected and, just in case you were tempted to try to slip around them, heavy equipment had blocked the road completely. Short of abandoning your car and walking, there was no way to get onto Warm Springs. 

  My friends, meanwhile were enjoying their coffee at the golf course clubhouse and wondering where I was. When I called to explain, one of them suggested abandoning my car and using a bicycle.

  Barring that, he suggested a circuitous alternative route that, if I understood him correctly, would have put me somewhere in the vicinity of Tablerock. It sounded like a recipe for getting lost, something I’m extraordinarily good at doing. We never did meet for coffee, agreeing instead to postpone until Warm Springs is open again – whenever that is – or choose a different meeting place.

  There’s no guarantee, of course, that a different place would be accessible. So many roads are closed that you never know what’s accessible and what isn’t. I passed no fewer than nine roadwork, road-closed and detour signs on Front Street alone last week.

  Have you tried to drive down Mallard Drive, off of Park Center, lately? Mallard happens to be the street that leads to a clinic where I get allergy shots. It’s gone. Not the clinic, the street. Completely gone – sidewalks and all. It looks like a bomb went off there. You can’t even walk around the crater.

  “How do I get to the clinic on the other side of the blast zone?” I asked a workman.

  He thought about it for a few seconds and suggested backtracking a couple of blocks, parking my car at a business on the opposite side of what was left of the street and walking. This involved walking past the back side of the business, through a park and a marsh and across a rather large parking lot. Bottom line:  15 minutes late for the allergy shot.

  That isn’t the only crater in town. Another one has closed the street where a member of a band I play in lives. His home is where we rehearse. The street where his house is located looks like a scene from “Casualties of War.” He was told that it would be closed for two years.

  Parts of Warm Springs Avenue and State Street have been closed for weeks. This, of course, has meant multiple detours. You have to wonder how long it will be before the people doing the work run out of detour signs.

  To find out the reasons for all the roadwork and when at least some of it might be finished, I contacted the Ada County Highway District and was surprised to learn that ACHD isn’t doing most of the projects. Most, according to ACHD public information officer Rachel Bjornestad, are “utility improvements and/or work related to new development.”

  In the downtown area, she added, “a lot of the utilities are old and need repairs or replacement even without the new development. The Capital City Development Corporation also has several projects in the downtown Boise area, including Eleventh Street and the Linen Blocks projects.”

  When will it end?

  ‘We have seen this level of activity, especially in the downtown core, for the last two to three years and expect to see it continue.  As one project finishes, there is another waiting in the wings.”

  No end in sight, in other words. 

  It looks like my friend may have been right when he suggested an alternative to driving.

  It might be time to drag out the bicycle.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at  woodwardcolumn@gmail.com. 

Matthew Hartz is a champion fiddle player with scores of fiddling trophies from competitions around the country. So you might expect him to have scores of books, records, posters and other fiddling oddments.

  You’d be wrong.

  It’s not exaggerating to say that Hartz is a world-class musician. He’s won the Grand Masters Fiddle Contest at the Grand Ole Opry three times. He’s won the World Fiddling Championship in Texas and recently became a member of the multiple Grammy-winning roots group Asleep at the Wheel, playing venues throughout the U.S. and as far away as Switzerland.

  But his other passion – the one you wouldn’t expect – has nothing to do with fiddling. 

  He’s a diehard, lifelong Beach Boys fan. 

  With the Beach Boys memorabilia to prove it – enough Beach Boys memorabilia to fill three rooms.

  “I’ve been collecting it my whole life,” he said. “Some of it dates back to my childhood.”

  Hartz, 54, became a Beach Boys fan when he was three years old.

  “I was raised on Dixieland jazz and Simon Garfunkel. Those were my Dad’s records. But Mom was a Beach Boys fan.

  “I didn’t understand their music because I was just a little kid, but there was something so resonant about it that just stuck with me. It was so enveloping. I’m a Beatles and Rolling Stones fan, too, but it doesn’t go to that depth. I appreciate it all, but nothing as much as the Beach Boys.”

  He was such an avid Beach Boys fans that his older cousins brought him programs and photographs whenever they attended a Beach Boys concert. 

  A Boisean since he was 16, Hartz grew up in Blackfoot and Pocatello and has been playing music virtually all his life. His father started him on banjo and guitar, which he still plays, and, when he was eight, gave him a violin.

  “He said I could probably use it to play in the school orchestra. I joined the school orchestra at Syringa Elementary School in Pocatello, then got some private lessons and did classical competitions. Then one night Mom and Dad took me to an old time fiddle contest.”

  The contest changed his life. He was in third grade then and has been playing old time fiddle music ever since. He started small, playing at rest homes, never dreaming that one day he’d be knocking them dead at the Grand Ole Opry.

  As much as he loved fiddling, his love of the Beach Boys music never dimmed. He refers to the three rooms that house his Beach Boys collection as a “sanctuary.” Each room is dedicated to a specific era of the group’s long career – an early 1960s room, a late 1960s room and a 1970s-and-beyond room. Expecting to see records, photos and a modest assortment of other Beach Boys memorabilia, I was amazed at the scope of what he’s assembled.

  In addition to scores of records and photos, he has a Carl Wilson signature Rickenbacker 12-string guitar. (For those unfamiliar with them, three of the Beach Boys’ original members were brothers – Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.)

  He has replicas of the Pendleton shirts the group wore for photos on two of their early albums. 

  He has a surfboard signed by Brian Wilson, who wrote virtually all of the Beach Boys songs and according to Rolling Stone is the 12th greatest songwriter of all time. (Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and John Lennon are the top three.)

  He has dozens of books about the Beach Boys.

  He has the set list from one of their concerts.

  He has a picture he drew of the Beach Boys – when he was seven.

  And a whole lot more.

  Hartz has seen the Beach Boys in person about half a dozen times. At an age when most Boys his age are excited to go to a movie or a ball game, he’d attended two Beach Boys concerts. His first was in in Salt Lake City. He was ten and living in Pocatello then.

  He knows things about Beach Boys concerts that happened before he was born, including one I attended at Boise High School in 1963.

  Or so I thought. 

  “It wasn’t ’63,” he said. “It was in ’64. That was during the time when the Beach Boys were touring and everyone thinks of as the classic Beach Boys tour with everybody, including Brian. What most people don’t know was that it only lasted eight months.”

  A troubled genius, Brian Wilson stopped touring in 1964 after having a nervous breakdown. He resumed touring much later in his life, though, with a large band and multiple backup singers. I was fortunate enough to attend one of their concerts. Wilson was in his 70s then and showing his age. He couldn’t hit the high falsetto notes he once sang so effortlessly –  but the backup singers could. And he sang and played everything else perfectly. It was a great show.

  Occasionally the Beach Boys’ influence shows up in Hartz’s fiddle music.

  “It’s there, no matter what kind of music, even when I’m with Asleep at the Wheel. There are guys that are hip enough to ask about a note choice I play that other people wouldn’t play, like ‘Wow, how come you used that?’ like in the context of the blues. It makes it a softer sound to use to shape a passage.”

  To hear him discuss the Beach Boys’ music, check out the In My Beach Boys Room podcast, hosted by his Harts and his friend and manger Adam Schreiner. 

  Given the myriad items in his “sanctuary,” it’s surprising to learn that he only started it a short time ago.

    “I’ve been collecting my whole life, but it’s just been two years since I started putting it on display in these rooms,” he said. “And this isn’t all of it.”

  He had to be kidding.

  He wasn’t.

  “It’s not all out yet. Some of it is still put away. It’s sort of a work in progress.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  It’s been a tough few months for aging pop stars.

  Since November, we’ve lost Jeff Beck, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, David Crosby, David Lindley, Tina Turner, Robbie Robertson, and Jimmy Buffett. 

  For those of us who grew up with them, their deaths were personal. We bought their recordings, watched them on television, went to their concerts. We read about them, felt as if in a small way we knew them. With the exception of Tina Turner, I’ve played music by every one of them in my group, the Mystics.

  Speaking of the group, the loss of so many of our musical heroes put me in mind of departed musicians I worked with and knew well, all of them good friends. Musicians tend to be memorable characters, in a colorfully offbeat sort of way, and now seems as good a time as any to reminisce about them.

  Bassist John Hynes was a success story with a shaky beginning. Given a choice between a date with the prettiest girl in our high school and a case of beer, he’d have taken the beer every time. There were a couple of nights when he drank so much of it that he fell down on stage, his bass guitar sounding like an exploding meteorite when it hit the floor.

  John drove a souped-up, bright orange Chevy hot rod with what some suspected to be a rocket engine. If you were a passenger when he floored it, you felt the skin on your face stretch like Silly Putty. The  car was known to every cop in town. And when it came to cops, John was spectacularly unlucky. He once threw a beer can out his car window at a stoplight and it landed on the hood of a police car!

  So much for the shaky beginnings. He was, after all, only a teenager then. He married his high school sweetheart, went to work on the green chain at a sawmill and earned one promotion after another. He and his wife raised two sons and returned to Boise when he retired from his last job – supervising some 400 employees at multiple sawmills. He also was active in his church, which surprised me. Maybe beer was served there.

  Our keyboard player in those days was a boy named Vance Shirley, the youngest member of the group and the one usually conned into doing what none of the rest of us wanted to do. When a rival band broke into the ballroom where we played and took some of our equipment, it was Vance who was nominated to return the favor at their dance hall. The rest of us waited nervously in the alley while he tried to squeeze into one of its windows.

  And got stuck – half in the window, half out. This was his predicament when a police car entered the alley. Its headlights illuminated all of us except the would-be burglar, who was just out of their beams. The driver of the car was the late Vern Bisterfeldt, who went on to become an Ada County commissioner and Boise city councilman. Vern occasionally patrolled our dances.

  “What are you guys doing in the alley?” he asked us.

  “We’re waiting to get into the Rocking Castle for a rehearsal.”

 “You guys don’t play at the Rocking Castle. You play next door, at the Fiesta Ballroom.”

  “Uh … Well, yeah, we do. But we’re doing a special gig at the Rocking Castle.”

  “I see. Well, have a good rehearsal boys.”

  “We will, Vern. See you later.”

  His patrol car moved a few feet, then stopped.

  “By the way,” he said. “What are Vance’s legs doing sticking out of  the window?”

  He not only had seen Vance in the darkened part of the alley, he had recognized him by his stubby legs. Whatever we made up to wriggle out of that tight spot is long forgotten, but it must have worked because none of us went to jail for breaking and entering. Sadly, the only thing extracted from the dance hall that night was Vance. We never did get our equipment back.

 Tom Burke wasn’t an actual member of the band; he was our sound man. We knew he’d be a good fit when we learned that he owned  every Steely Dan album ever recorded – on vinyl. We were all hard-core Steely Dan junkies. Tom was a good sound man, but the thing I remember best about him was his garden.

  His vegetable garden was a thing of beauty. It was huge, row upon row of meticulously tended plants. His tomatoes, “tomaters” as he called them, were his pride and joy. If there are better tomatoes, I’ve never tasted them. Not long after he died, his property was sold and his garden plowed under to build a new house, which in my fond imaginings is infested with tomato worms.

  Russ Martin was one of a kind. Beard, long hair, natty dresser,  magnetic personality. Women flocked to him the way adolescent girls flock to Taylor Swift concerts. He was smart, funny, impossible not to like.

  And one of the most scatter-brained people I’ve ever known.

  Some examples:

  The two of us had been looking forward for weeks to attending a concert in Seattle. We were on the plane waiting to take off when he said something astounding, even for him.

  “You know that Robben Ford concert we’re going to tomorrow night, May 16th?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “I got the date wrong. It was actually on April 16th.” 

  His sense of direction was all but non-existent. When we were leaving to play in New Meadows, he asked if it was before or after Mountain Home. 

  After playing one winter night at the Trail Creek Lodge north of Sun Valley, he turned the wrong way to go back to Boise, drove white-knuckled on the icy highway over Galena Summit and was rescued by a state police officer who found him a place to spend the night in Stanley, possibly saving him from freezing to death. 

  We used to box him in so he wouldn’t get lost – one of us driving ahead of him, another behind him.

  He’d still get lost. 

  En route to North Idaho, he missed a turn at New Meadows and drove all the way to Weiser – 60 miles in the wrong direction. He was so late we had to start playing without him.

  Like many musicians, he was an unforgettable character. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone.

  Or that any of them are gone. Some were younger than I was. The moral, if there is one, is that we should make the most of the time we have. Life is short and time is precious. In a way, it’s all we have.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  How do I tell you about Roux?

  I could tell you that she was the smartest dog I’ve ever known.

  I could tell you that she she practically spoke English.

  I could tell you how crazy we all were about her and that we  thought she was the best dog ever, of the many dogs our family has owned. But you still wouldn’t know her or how we felt about her. 

  Or how we’re feeling now.

  Our daughter Andie got her from a border terrier rescue group in  Louisiana. They’d named here there, after the sauce-thickener  often used in Cajun cooking.

  She was a puppy then, and at first glance not a lovely sight. Andie had had her flown up from Louisiana. She still had a lot of black puppy fur mixed in with the blonde, had been in a crate all day and looked more than a little bedraggled. We wondered whether Andie had made a good choice.

  It didn’t take long to realize that she couldn’t have made a better one.

  How smart was Roux?

  I wasn’t kidding in saying that she practically spoke English. A partial list of the words in her vocabulary included “walk, leash, drink, treat, sit, busy bee (the name for her stuffed-animal toys) catch, high five, shake, roll over, squirrel, gently (take the treat gently instead of snapping at it), stick, bye bye and some I’ve undoubtedly forgotten.

  If you told her to go from the front of the car to the back seat, she understood and complied. If you told her not to bark, she didn’t. If you told her to fetch one of her toys (she had a large box of them) and corrected her by saying she’d gotten the wrong one, she’d run back and return with the right one. 

  She learned tricks almost effortlessly. She did all the usual ones – sit, shake, lie down, roll over and others – but the most impressive involved a two-part command. Upon hearing the words “stick ‘em up,” she’d stand on her back paws with her front paws raised above her head, as a person would if confronted by an armed assailant. Then, hearing the word “bang,” she’d fall down and play dead.

  Technically, she was Andie’s dog. But because her job requires her to work lots of 12- and 24-hour shifts, my wife and I dog-sat Roux multiple days a week. It felt like she was our dog. 

  It fell to me most evenings to take her for her walk. Borrowing one of the late Patrick McManus’s lines, I enjoyed telling her as we walked that a dog like her should live a thousand years. She’d look up at me as if she understood, and agreed wholeheartedly.

  I took her for a walk the night before she died, never dreaming it would be our last walk. Her death was so sudden, so wholly unexpected. It would have been one thing if she’d been old or sick, but she was only six and seemingly in good health. 

  She seemed entirely normal that day. She sat at the table as usual, begging for a handout during breakfast. She was a polite beggar, never aggressive or pushy; she’d just look up at you with those soulful brown eyes and the scrap of bacon or bit of toast were a forgone conclusion. 

  Late that morning, she whined to be let outside. Again, entirely normal.

  We let her out; she ran around the yard barking, as usual. Running while barking was one of her greatest pleasures.

  A few minutes later, she wanted to be let out again. More running, more barking.

  Then, a third time. That wasn’t usual.

  “You were just out. You want to go out again?”

  She did. 

  This time, she walked to the side of the yard and lay down in a shady spot.

  “That’s funny,” I told Sheila, my wife. “She’s lying in the shade. Usually she likes to lie in the sun.”

  “Maybe she’s just hot.”

  “Yeah … maybe so.”

  Not long afterwards – Sheila, had left for an appointment – I went to let Roux back in the house. She was still lying in exactly the same spot, in exactly the same position.

  “Roux! Time to come in.”

  Nothing.

  I think it was then that I knew. Nothing can describe the sinking feeling. I went to her, petted her and knew beyond doubt. The dog we had loved more than any other was gone. 

  In telling her countless times that a dog like her should live a thousand years, it was because I half hoped she would outlive me. We’ve lost so many dogs during our lives. You can only go through that so many times.

  She should have had another seven or eight years. A vet said that when young, seemingly healthy dogs die suddenly, it’s often because of a heart attack or other major organ failure. It certainly wasn’t because of lack of care, or lack of love.

  I called Sheila to tell her what happened, then carried Roux into the house and held her in my lap until Sheila got home. She took it hard – crying, screaming, hyperventilating. Andie’s reaction was similar. Her cries and shrieks were so loud and heart-rending that one of the neighbors thought a child had been hit by a car.

  I did my best to remain stoic, then excused myself and went to look for some Kleenex. 

  So many Roux memories. But the one that never fails to choke me up was of her riding beside me in the car and putting her head on my shoulder. As a lover would. Roux loved everyone. And everyone who knew her well, and even some who didn’t,  loved her. Andie’s been getting calls from friends as far away as Connecticut, friends telling her how sorry they are and what a great dog Roux was. 

  I don’t think we felt this bad when we lost parents or siblings. Maybe that’s because pets are such a fundamental part of our daily lives. They sleep with us, get up with us, follow us around all day, provide unconditional love no matter what. Not many people do that. Maybe that’s why it’s so painful when we lose them.

  You could say that Roux was just a dog, that it wasn’t like losing a human member of the family. And you’d be absolutely right. It would be worse losing a spouse or a child.

  But she was a member of the family, and she was almost human. She was our companion, our unfailing friend, our most beloved pet ever.

  We’ll get through this. It will just take time, probably quite a bit of time. There may or may not be other dogs – at this point I’d say probably not – but there will never be another dog like Roux. And there will always be a hole in our hearts.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Boise has changed so much there are times when I hardly recognize it.

 There have even been times when, because it’s changed so much, I’ve gotten lost in my hometown. New buildings, new streets and roads, new everything.

  The Boise of today is a vibrant, up-and-coming city. It has more businesses, more opportunities, more things to do than we once would have thought possible. What many who moved here or grew up here in, say, the last 20 or 30 years don’t realize, however, is that in a different way it was a pretty vibrant place before then.

  A recent email from groupupdates@facebook.com reminded me of this. Titled “Remembering Boise When,” it contained scores of photos of Boise institutions long gone but fondly remembered:

  The first was Manley’s Cafe. Manley’s, on Federal Way, is affectionately remembered for gigantic portions of food. Steaks or a serving of prime rib covered a plate – and then some. Pie a’la mode was a quarter of a pie with a pint of ice cream.

  A photo of the long-departed downtown railroad yard on Front Street evoked memories of evenings spent there with my parents and sister, watching the trains come and go. Boise was a much smaller city then. We entertained ourselves with the limited options available.

  I’d all but forgotten what the airport used to look like then, a small terminal building with the tower attached and no ugly parking garages blocking the view of it as you approached. It had a wonderful restaurant on the second floor where you could watch the planes take off and land. 

  A photo of the C.C. Anderson’s store brought equally pleasant memories. Later the Bon Marche, it was a three story building at Tenth and Idaho. Mr. Anderson, dressed to the nines, roamed the store handing out candy to children. The store’s Empire Room, a mezzanine-level restaurant, served some of the best burgers in town.

  “Remembering Boise When” was replete with photos of gone eateries. In addition to the aforementioned Manley’s Cafe, they included The Torch, Murray’s Drive-in, the Crow Inn and the Howdy Pardner. 

   The Torch, in the same building that now houses a strip joint of the same name, was best known for the finger steaks invented by its owner, Milo Bybee. It stayed open late and was frequented by musicians who played till midnight or 1 a.m. I know that because I was one of them. 

  Murray’s was a classic drive-in, with carhops on roller skates. The Crow Inn was locally famous for serving buckets of clams. The Howdy Pardner’s claim to fame was a disk jockey in a booth on the roof. Customers watched the deejay play their favorite records while enjoying their burgers and shakes.

  One of the Remembering-Boise posts asked whether anyone remembered the name of the Spanish Mission-style restaurant “that sat off of Hill Road?”

  That would be Hill House. Its cinnamon rolls were legendary; its fried chicken was arguably the best in town.

  A picture of the Hip Sing Association building, the last structure in Boise’s Chinatown, recalled my first and worst day on the local government beat. The building was being demolished, it’s last tenant gone to live with relatives in California. I insensitively described his former quarters as messy (the living room housed a towering stack of empty tuna fish cans) and got hate mail about it for weeks.

  The photos continued:  the 1969 Oxford Hotel Fire, a parade honoring the Boise Braves minor league baseball team, the Fun Spot amusement park, the old Grand Central Store …

  Boise’s population at the time most of the photos were taken was about 15 percent of what it is now. It didn’t have a university, a regional medical center, a performing arts center or many other things we now take for granted.

   That said, it was still a pretty great place to grow up.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  As a journalist I’ve interviewed hundreds of people – and none more impressive than a man who has devoted his life to helping the poorest of the poor.

  Fr. Rick Frechette spent his early years as a Catholic priest in Baltimore, Mexico and Honduras. His life changed when he was sent to Haiti, where he and another priest opened an orphanage. He’s been there ever since, remaining even when crime and economic political chaos were so rampant that his superiors suggested he leave.

  As he put it, “What kind of shepherd would leave when the wolf comes?”

  He’s been in Haiti for 36 years now, working to help the poor and suffering. Ssuffering which has seldom if ever been as bad as it is now. 

  Father Rick, as nearly everyone calls him, has visited Idaho a number of times through his association with Saint (cq) Alphonsus Foundation’s Project Haiti. I was fortunate enough to interview him and learn his story during two of those visits.

  Early in his time in Haiti, he decided he couldn’t do enough for the people there as a priest. Enrolling at a college in New York City and studying by candlelight during intermittent visits to Haiti, he became a medical doctor. He’s been caring for Haitians’ medical and spiritual needs ever since. 

  Haiti can’t see to get a break. Cyclones, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and now a descent into pervasive terrorism. A CNN story early this month reported the following:

  “Warring gangs in Port-au-Prince have visited terror in the city’s vital port city with rape, torture and killing as they vie for territorial control. Thousands of Haitians have fled their homes, gathering in makeshift encampments across the sprawling capital.”

  Father Rick has “never lived through a crisis in our 36 years in Haiti that compares to the chaos, violence, economic collapse and social devastation we are living now.”

  He’s been on the front lines of the chaos, which surprises no one who knows him. He has been on the front lines of unrest in Haiti for decades, providing medical treatment for the wounded, removing bodies from the streets, risking his life time and again.

  After initially being reported by major news outlets, the crisis in Haiti faded from the news cycle and has been largely forgotten here in the U.S. Father Rick’s letters, forwarded to me by Project Haiti’s Jill Aldape, provide a grim picture of the island nation’s continuing  nightmare.

  “We cannot get surgeons to come to our area,” he wrote. “It is a red zone. … We cannot even keep the competent people we already have, since many are fleeing Haiti to raise their families in a safer country. 

  “ … We are facing the worst crisis we have ever faced, and the consequences are not only the disintegration of a nation and all the institutions that constitute civilization, but the people are floundering in a tsunami of despair.”

  The following is an excerpt from a letter he wrote to some U.N. advisors:

  “The mantra from the worldwide community is ‘Haitian solutions to Haitian problems.’ This pacifies the world’s collective consciousness. Even I like the sound of it, the logic to it. The mantra puts everyone to sleep as far as any hope from abroad is concerned. But the gangs are ruthless and unopposed, raping and butchering women, cutting the heads off of children.

  “… Haiti is abandoned. That is the reality.”

  His letters aren’t easy to read. We want to turn away, which is precisely what we shouldn’t do. If he and others can face the atrocities in person and try to help the victims, we should at least be able to read about them. And do what we can to help from afar. More on that at the end of this column.

  Continuing with his letter, “The gangs attack each other by terrorizing each others’ populations. They gain territory by terrorizing, burning, raping, killing families in neighborhoods already dirt poor.”

  The Haitian police, he wrote, “have not even timidly shown themselves to be the solution to ‘the Haitian problem.’”

  When calls for help in a particularly hard hit area went unheeded, he and his assistants “tried to get there for the sake of the vulnerable and the wounded, but there was no way to get there past the blocked roads. And the gangs were shooting at anyone trying to get there or get away from there by boat.”

  He says he is is not yet a victim, but believes “that it is inevitable sooner or later.”

  That would be a tragedy. If anyone I’ve ever met is qualified for sainthood, it’s this remarkable man who has devoted his life to helping the destitute and downtrodden. But the violence has such a profound effect that even he is struggling to remain faithful to his vows, to his core beliefs.

  “I am a priest of 43 years and prefer pacifist solutions, turning the other cheek and forgiving 70 times 70, but I would kill with my bare hands anyone I saw approach a child to beat or rape or cut off the head. 

  “As a 70-year old man, I would still be more than game for that fight, a last stand. This is a confession of something I know is dreadfully wrong and is far from turning the other cheek. … If there is a cheek to turn, I  stand some chance I will turn mine if and when my turn comes. But I will not allow a child’s other cheek to plunge to the ground after a swipe of a machete.”

  It was all I could do to watch a two-minute video of a man whose face was virtually cut in half by a machete. For Haitians, it’s not a video. It’s what they’re living with every day.

  A lasting truce would put an end to it, but unless and until that happens nothing is likely to stop the violence. We can help its victims, though. Project Haiti has a proven track record of helping Father Rick and others ease the suffering in Haiti. We can’t go to Haiti to help – the State Department has ordered U.S. citizens to leave the country and issued its highest level advisory against going there – but donating to Project Haiti can make a difference.

  Donations, Aldape says, will help Father Rick “distribute food,   relocate people to safer areas … I can assure everyone that donations will help him help others breathe easier, whether it means in medicine, in shelter, in nourishment, in safety and in prayer.”

  Online donations may be made by clicking on https://donate.saintalphonsus.org/ProjectHaiti-Donate. Checks may be mailed to Saint Alphonsus Project Haiti, Attn: Jill Aldape, 1055 N. Curtis Road, Boise, ID 83706.

  We’re so lucky in this country. Americans living now have never experienced a war in our homeland. We’re one of the 20 most prosperous nations in the world. Most of us, at least here in Idaho, live in safe neighborhoods. We have access to wholesome food, reliable transportation, good medical care.

  And we have never experienced anything remotely like what is happening in Haiti. Donations, large or small, are the least we can do.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  In the aftermath of guitarist Jeff Beck’s death earlier this year, a friend brought over a DVD in which Beck talked about his favorite guitars. One – the rarest in his collection – recalled an incident that remains painful decades after it happened.

  For those unfamiliar with him, Beck was one of the world’s great blues and rock and roll guitarists. No less a guitarist than Eric Clapton said he watched him perform and had no idea how he played some of the things he did.

  The rare guitar in his collection was a 1954 Fender Stratocaster. Stratocasters, along with Gibson Les Pauls, have been the most popular electric guitars in the world for years. Millions have been sold since 1954, the year Fender began producing them.

  On the DVD, Beck said that he was lucky to get one. If Jeff Beck, one of the best and most famous guitarists in the world, was lucky to get one, what would the odds be of an average Joe being that lucky?

  Enter average Joe, a.k.a. yours truly. I actually owned one of these rare instruments. How I got it, and how it got away from me, are tales you don’t have to be a guitarist to appreciate.

  The first tale began with a desire to have a backup guitar. I only had one guitar at the time, and figured it would make sense to have a second  onstage if the first broke a string, got knocked over and damaged or otherwise was out of action.

  But what sort of guitar? After ruminating on it for a while, I decided not only on the sort of guitar but a specific guitar. It had been years since I’d heard it, but the memory of how great it sounded was indelible.

  In the early days of rock and roll, one of the most popular bands in Boise was a group called Dick Cates and the Chessmen. They played to sold-out audiences on Friday nights at the long defunct Miramar Ballroom on Fairview Avenue.

  Cates was the lead singer and a big reason for the group’s popularity. When he was born, the gods reached down and touched his vocal cords. People used to compare his voice with that of the late Roy Orbison, who had an impressive string of hit records and was known for the range and quality of his distinctive voice. I was far from being alone in thinking that  Cates’s voice was every bit as good. He should have been famous.

  The Chessmen’s guitar player was a man named Darrell Francke. Two things invariably wowed me at a Chessmen’s gig:  Cates’s voice and the sound of Francke’s guitar – a 1954 Stratocaster. There was just something about the tone of those early guitars that newer ones seem to lack.

  Not having heard anything about Francke in years, I had little hope of tracking him down but made some calls and got lucky. He was living in Jordan Valley, Ore., and had a listed number. I gave him a call.

  “Darrell?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Tim Woodward. You probably don’t remember me, but I used to come to a lot of your dances.”

  My expectation did not go unfulfilled. He didn’t remember me in the slightest.

  “I’m calling about that old Strat you used to play. You wouldn’t still happen to have that, would you?”

  “I do,” he replied. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about selling it.”

  I was at his house in Jordan Valley two hours later. The guitar definitely looked its age, but it sounded just fine. We agreed on a price of $300.

  On the way home with it, I noticed the serial number: 0935. The 935th Stratocaster made – out of millions.

  It’s hard to believe now, but neither I nor any of the musicians or guitar makers who saw it had any idea how much it was worth.

  Fast forward a few years. When a friend of a friend saw the guitar, he said I should send it to his friend Howard in Los Angeles. 

  “He can get you top dollar for it.”

  Itching to buy a new guitar by then, I sent it to Howard. A week or so later, my phone rang.

 “You (expletive deleted)!”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Howard in L.A. You didn’t tell me the neck on this guitar was  refinished or that it had new frets installed.”

  “That was because some of the old frets were practically falling out. The guy who did it thought it made sense to refinish the neck at the same time.”

  “Big mistake! Collectors want everything original. Anything new or altered from the original lowers the value.”

  “Fine. Send it back to me.”

  Instead, he sent me a check for $900.

  I called him back.

  “I don’t want your $900. Send me back my guitar.”

  “It’s too late. It’s already in Japan.”

  Sold, no doubt, to a collector.

  God knows what Howard got for it, but three guitars like the one that cost me $300 currently are advertised online. The least expensive asking price is $40,000. The most expensive, for one in mint condition, is $250,000. 

  Such stories abound – the rare stamp used to mail a letter, the classic car unwittingly sold as a junker, the priceless antique sold for a few bucks at a yard sale.

  That does absolutely nothing, however, to ease the pain of selling a guitar worth five figures for $900.

  Or to change my feelings about Howard.

  He’ll probably never read this, and for all I know he may not even be alive now. But if he is alive and he sees this, I hope he feels at least a twinge of remorse.

  And if not, may he ship an expensive instrument on trust someday to someone just like himself.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him a woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

We all have things we put off doing. We put them off for a few hours, a few days, a few  weeks …

  My wife and I put off cleaning our attic for 35 years.

  There were good reasons for this. Its contents were conveniently out of the way, happily out of mind. The attic is frostbite cold in the winter, hotter than the hubs of hell in the summer.

  It’s also hard to get to. A new attic ladder, installed to make it easier, actually made it harder. The new ladder is narrow, poorly designed, precarious. There was no way we could climb it without risking a fall.

  Still, it was time. It had been so long since we put most of the things in the attic after building the house that we’d forgotten most of what was up there. We could have left the job for the kids to do after we’re gone, but we’d rather have them remember us without grimacing. The stuff had to be taken down and dealt with before any more years passed.

  Even If I could climb the ladder without coming to a hard landing on the concrete floor and potentially a trip to the E.R, I’m getting too old to be tottering around in the dark on the tops of ceiling joists. Someone young and strong would be needed to bring the stuff down. We were only too happy to hire a friend’s grandsons. It took them half a day to finish.

    We had no idea what treasures were lurking in those dimly lit recesses, entombed in decades of dust. 

  Some of what the boys brought down was junk. Some was destined for the Good Will. And some were reminders of times long ago, experiences all but forgotten.

  One of the oldest was a flier for a St. Patrick’s Day dance with “Live Music by the Playboys.” The Playboys were my first band. Its leader was Ron Shannon, son of the late Velma Morrison. I’d have been about 15 then. The dance was in the Cascade High School gym. I have absolutely no memory of it.

  Another relic from the hoary past was a Civil Defense Preparedness card. Its instructions included, among other things, warnings to equip your family shelter with a two-week supply of “food, water, first aid kit and battery radio.” 

  This was what we lived with in those days. Paranoia about the Russians bombing us was rampant. People dug shelters in their back yards. A community shelter in the Highlands exists to this day. Happily, it was often used as a dance hall, never as a refuge from a nuclear attack.

  Four Bogus Basin ski lift tickets recalled teenage winters when skiing was an obsession. I skied every weekend, every day of the Christmas break. 

  Multiple receipts from the Orange Grove Drum and Guitar Shop were early evidence of a lifelong obsession. Two, both from 1969 and both for $150, were for guitars – a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul. Either, in pristine condition, would be worth four to five figures now. 

 Four Boise Aviation, Inc., receipts were for flying lessons. I was 20 years old and besotted with the idea of becoming a dashing airline pilot. Jet jockeys returning from Vietnam dashed that hope by getting virtually all the jobs. All I got was a private pilot’s license.

  Some documents change our lives.  Documents like the torn and faded one ordering me to report to the U.S. Naval Training Center in San Diego and from there to the U.S. Naval Base in Charleston, S.C. for further assignment to the Naval Communications Training Center in Pensacola, Fla.

  The orders on that tattered piece of paper would take me from my lifelong Idaho home to a new life as a low-level spy in faraway  places. The last would be Germany, to intercept radio transmissions of the Polish, East German and Russian navies.

  The attic’s keepsakes were many and varied. There were pictures of old friends, old girlfriends, a newspaper clipping with a photo of a friend who made a cello in his high school woodworking class. He went on to play bass with Paul Revere and the Raiders.

  The oddest item? The Official 1984 Price Guide to Beer Cans.

  No, as a matter of fact, I have no idea why it was up there.  

  Most of these things were in lacquered wooden boxes. The smaller of the two had “Jazzmaster $” carved on the lid and had once contained savings for my first good guitar. My parents made up the difference between the savings and the price of the guitar and surprised me with it on Christmas morning. It’s still one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever received.

  The larger box had strips of paper with names of minerals in a youthful scrawl taped to the bottom – gold, iron ore, turquoise, crystal … My father and I collected them from abandoned mines in the town of his birth, Cripple Creek, Colo. I’d have been seven or eight at the time.

  A banker’s box contained scores of my old columns; another box was filled with letters. Letters from my parents when I was in the Navy. Letters from my wife when we were newlyweds and she was spending a semester student teaching in Washington state.

  The oddments from the attic spoke of many chapters – a young boy exploring with his father, a teenager in a rock group, a student pilot, a sailor, a journalist … 

  Sometimes, in down moments, we feel as if we haven’t done much with the time we’re given. It can take a revelatory experience, perhaps something as mundane as cleaning out an attic, to make us realize how full our lives have been.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  A recent story in The Idaho Statesman revisited stuntman Evel Knievel’s 1974 attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon. The story noted that Knievel’s “legend lives on,” but stopped short of calling him a hero. 

 I was part of a team assigned to cover the jump for The Statesman. I was a Statesman reporter at the time. 

  The jump was the biggest thing to happen in Idaho in years. Thousands of people from every part of the country were there for it, and that didn’t include the legion of print and broadcast journalists from newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television networks.

Celebrities reportedly included Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Dustin Hoffman and Ali McGraw.

  The jump site is several miles east of Twin Falls. Every motel room in Twin Falls and nearby cities had been booked weeks in advance. The Statesman sent half a dozen reporters and photographers to cover the jump. My job was to cover the story from the south rim of the canyon, the site of a huge, earthen ramp from which Knievel’s steam-powered “Sky Cycle” (actually a rocket) would blast off for the opposite rim of the canyon.

  Jim Poore, the paper’s sports editor, would view the launch from the bottom of the canyon, which surprisingly turned out to be the best possible location. A reporter whose name I’ve forgotten would be waiting on the canyon’s north rim for Knievel to touch down. Photographers were assigned to all three locations. 

  Nothing could have prepared me for the spectacle on the south rim. According to one report, 30,000 people were there, occupying the fields around the jump site. Most had been there for days. It was an ongoing party –  alcohol, drugs, nudity, you name it. Barring egregious violations of the law, police officers pretty much turned the other way. There was little they could do among so many. 

  As the time for the jump neared, hundreds of Knievel’s fans converged around the earthen ramp, hoping for an up close and personal encounter with him. When at last he appeared, he obliged them by slugging a cameraman.

   The jump itself, as has been widely reported, was infamously known as “the big fizzle.” The Skycycle/rocket went pretty much straight up and straight down, landing in the bottom of the canyon a few feet from the river. Poore, who wasn’t happy about having been stationed there, ended up with the best seat in the house, and the best story.

  It was another story altogether from my vantage point on the rim of the canyon. A strip of land closest to the rim was cordoned off for Knievel’s crew, guests, celebrities and media people. Law enforcement officers were stationed every few feet between them and the rest of the crowd. I was roughly ten feet from the edge of the canyon.

  Those on the other side of the barrier formed by police officers weren’t happy about being denied the best view. Many had been partying for days and, drunk, stoned or both, decided it would be a good idea to push their way to the rim for a better view. It may or may not have occurred to them in their addled condition that this would involve pushing those of us closest to the rim over the edge.

  It’s an understatement to say that it was scary. The law officers did their best, but they were no match for the crush of bodies moving us ever closer to the canyon rim, and a 500-foot fall.

  Suddenly the momentum shifted. Badly needed assistance for the overmatched law officers came from an unexpected source: the Hells Angels.

  Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this is not an unequivocal endorsement of the Hells Angels. They are involved, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, in murder, drug trafficking and other criminal activities. Angels they decidedly are not.

   But on a September day in 1974, their actions earned the undying gratitude of scores of people, this one included. I was a scant few feet from the canyon’s edge when they began knocking heads and pushing back the crowd. If not for them, I might not have been here to write this now. 

  Knievel made a lot of money that day, a little under $3 million according to the New York Times.

  The Hells Angels didn’t make a lot of money, but they may have saved a lot of lives.

  As a stuntman, Knievel deserves to be called legendary. It took a lot of courage to do some of the things he did. Most of us wouldn’t dream of doing them. You wouldn’t have gotten me on that Skycycle for a date with Raquel Welch and all the money in the world. 

  But a hero? There wasn’t much that was heroic about the Big Fizzle. It was a disappointment to just about everyone who witnessed it. 

  There were heroes there that day, though. They may well have saved my life. And for that I am forever grateful to the unlikely heroes of the Snake River Canyon jump – an outlaw motorcycle gang.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted the following Mondays on woodwardblog.com. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 How long had it been since I’d visited my country relatives?

  Twenty years?

  Thirty years?

  Longer?

  Not that they minded, of course. They’ve all been dead longer than that.

  My country relatives were my Great Grandmother Susie, my Great Aunt and Uncle Amy and Adolph and my Uncle Weldon.

  Every year on Memorial Day, I put flowers on the graves of my parents at Boise’s Morris Hill Cemetery. This year, having done that, I decided to do something different a few days after Memorial Day and pay overdue respects to the country relatives buried in the Star Cemetery.

  It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I didn’t think to bring flowers, and it had been so long since my last visit that I’d forgotten how to get there (Thank you, Google Maps). The cemetery even looked different, larger and with fewer trees than I remembered.

  No cemetery workers were around to help with directions; it took a lot of tromping around in a hot sun to find all the graves. The first was Grandma Susie’s. 

  Susan Marguerite McCoy Cuddy Chandler was born 18 days before Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, officially ending the Civil War. According to family lore, she came west from her native Iowa in a covered wagon.

  One of my earliest memories of her is of Thanksgiving dinner at her home in Notus, a town of about 500, northwest of Caldwell. It allegedly was named by a railroad official’s daughter who thought Notus was a Native American word for “it’s all right.” It was all right with Grandma Susie, who with her last husband, Harry Chandler, lived there for many years.

  She outlived three husbands and all but one of her children but remained positive and jovial right to the end, dying in 1956 at age 91. My most vivid memory of her is of her long hair catching fire in the toaster during one of her visits to our home in Boise. She thought it was so funny that she laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. Her sense of humor undoubtedly helped her deal with the tragedies of her life. 

  One of the things that made the Thanksgiving dinner in Notus memorable was the main course – roast goose instead of turkey. Harry, who also is buried in the Star Cemetery, probably shot the goose. 

  The following year, they came to our house for Thanksgiving. That dinner was memorable in a different way. Harry slumped over at the table and was carried upstairs, where he died of a heart attack. He was a nice man who wore three-piece suits and a gold pocket watch on a chain when they came to visit. He invariably brought me a pocketful of pennies.

  The only one of my great grandmother’s children to outlive her was my Aunt Amy Schneckloth, who with her husband, Adolph, and one of her sons, Weldon, lived on a farm between Star and Middleton. All three are buried in the Star Cemetery. My overdue visit there was a chance to catch up, at least with Aunt Amy. Uncle Adolph and Uncle Weldon were old-school farmers, strong, silent types about as talkative as the Sphinx.

  It was easy to imagine Aunt Amy greeting me in her kindly but bustling, business-like fashion. Her appearance was such that she could have come straight out of the “Wizard of Oz.” Baggy, mid-calf dresses with high collars and rolled-up sleeves, nylons with seams down the back, black, low-heeled work shoes and an ever-present apron. She’d have made a first-rate Aunty Em.

  The Memorial Day feast at the Schneckloth farm was one never to be forgotten, even these many, long years later. Wooden picnic tables in the back yard all but overflowed with salads, bowls of quivering, fruit-filled Jell-O, potato salad, homemade Parker House Rolls fresh from the oven in the wood-fired Monarch Stove, homemade pies and homemade ice cream and, the piece de resistance, Aunt Amy’s famous fried chicken.

  Preparation of the chicken was, shall we say, indelicate by today’s standards. No chicken from Albertsons or M&W for Aunt Amy. The main course began with me catching chickens in the barnyard. From the depths of her apron, she produced a beat-up hatchet and lopped off their heads. Plucked and cleaned, they were off to the kitchen, where she worked her magic. The result – oiled, sprinkled with flour and spices and fried to perfection – was, in memory at least, the best fried chicken ever.

  Uncle Adolph is buried next to her, Uncle Weldon not far away. The only times I ever saw them in anything but work shirts and bib overalls was when they drove their ancient Austin sedan to our house for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. They invariably wore suits that were old-fashioned even then, set off by colorful, hand-painted ties. They always left early, ostensibly to get home in time to milk the cows, but it’s a good bet that they also were itching to get out of the suits and back into their overalls.

  My visit to the Star Cemetery brought a profusion of memories, mixed with a dash of guilt. It had been far too long since I’d paid my respects to those good people.

  Next year I won’t wait until after Memorial Day to do that. I’ll go at a  proper time, before Memorial Day.

  And bring flowers.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at  woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Quick, do you know what a skoolie is?

  I didn’t, either.

  Skoolies, for readers unfamiliar with them, are school buses that have been converted into motor homes.

  They are, according to a website about such things, “an example of upcycling at its best. Upcycling is the art of taking something that can no longer be used for its original purpose and transforming it for a different use.

  “Once renovated, skoolies essentially become a cross between an RV and a tiny house on wheels. Like RVs, they don’t require a separate towing vehicle. The conversion process … makes them look and feel more like a tiny home on wheels.”

  So why is this a subject of this column?

  Because my granddaughter and her husband have spent the last year turning an old school bus into a skoolie. I saw them off recently on what I’ve come to call The Great Adventure, something I considered doing at their age but didn’t and still regret it. More about that later. 

  They left from our house for their adventure and, if all goes well, will be gone for about a year. Saying goodbye to them was bittersweet. I’m happy for them and, truth be told, am also a tad envious. While they’re free-wheeling it around the country on The Great Adventure, I’ll be home mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, cleaning the garage …

  The adventurers sold their house, which they’d remodeled, and bought their new home, the skoolie, in Missouri. They found one there that they liked and was in their price range and drove it back to Idaho. It was just an old school bus then, with bench seats that once accommodated elementary school students now in college or the work force.

  My grandaughter’s name is Kelsie. Her husband, Christian, is one of those people who can build or fix just about anything, and she’s become a skilled handywoman herself. They spent a year gutting the bus and building a new interior. It has a living room and a tiny kitchen, a bedroom and a tiny bathroom. It has a TV projector and roll-down screen. All the comforts of home.

  Much of it is solar powered. It’s as much a home on wheels as many RVs are, and on the inside an attractive home at that. On the outside, it still looks like, well, a school bus.

  The Great Adventure was a far cry from what we expected they’d be doing now. Kelsie graduated from BSU with a teaching degree, and Christian can do anything from rebuilding a car engine to building a house. We figured he’d have a jack-of-all-trades business and she’d be an elementary school teacher by now. Instead, they’re criss-crossing America in a blue bus.

  They’re in New Mexico now and plan to be in New England in time to catch the fall colors. From there they’ll head south, chasing the warm weather. Kelsie will do some online teaching en route; Christian hopes to land some handyman jobs.

  Their adventure put me in mind of one I envisioned, albeit on a much smaller scale, when I was their age. I’d finished two years of junior college and had spent several summers working for my father’s and and uncle’s business, installing lawn-sprinkling systems. It was hot, hard work, most of it on the end of a shovel, and I wanted to spend a summer traveling before leaving for active duty in the Navy.

  My vehicle of choice was, or would have been, a motorcycle. That I didn’t own a motorcycle and had never driven one were irrelevant. I had money from the sprinkler company job and playing in a band. I could buy a motorcycle and learn to drive it. How hard could it be?

   The idea was to drive the motorcycle, preferably a souped-up, glamorous looking one Like Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando would have owned, from Idaho to the east coast and back. I envisioned myself tooling across the plains and along the coastlines at breathtaking speed, free-wheeling without a care in the world. 

  The reality, of course, most likely would have been far different – driving rains and howling winds, breakdowns in godforsaken places and, worst case scenario, an accident that would have changed my life.

  Or ended it.

  Many years later, I came close to buying a scooter that a friend was selling. I had my checkbook out to pay him for it when he said the words that changed my mind:

  “Just remember that you’re invisible and everybody’s trying to kill you.”

  I didn’t buy the scooter and never did go on the motorcycle trip across the county. Instead I spent most of that summer digging ditches for the sprinkler company and, in August, left for the Navy.

  You hear it said that when they reach the end of their lives, most people don’t regret things they did. They regret the things they didn’t do. Decades later, I still wish I’d have taken that motorcycle ride. 

  Kelsie and Christian have been on the road for about a month now. I’ll be calling them for occasional updates (while trying not to be too much of a pest), imagining things they might encounter along the way, and envying them the experience.

  Their Great Adventure is my motorcycle ride. I’ll be living it by proxy, through them. And for them, the ones who are actually living it, here’s hoping it’s everything they dreamed it would be.

Tim Woodward’s column runs every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

Some months are just no good. Right from the start, with apologies to Murphy’s Law, everything that can go wrong does.

  That’s the way April has been at the Woodward residence. The month started, as readers of this column may remember, with a late-night visit to a veterinary clinic. We were dog-sitting Roux, our older daughter’s dog, when she (the dog, not our daughter) jumped onto the kitchen table when no one was looking and ate a shocking amount of freshly baked brownies.

  Chocolate, as most dog owners know, can be deadly for dogs. We arrived at the clinic just after midnight. Three hours and $400 later, the crisis had passed and Roux was cleared to go home. 

  This was on April 2. The month – and the challenges it would bring – was just getting underway.

  The day after the brownie fiasco, my prescription glasses broke. I was putting them them on when part of the frame snapped off. This was a relatively minor annoyance; a helpful technician had my glasses fixed in no time. The hardest part was driving to the clinic on Eagle Road, which was doing a passably good imitation of an L.A. freeway during rush hour.

  Next, the router that delivers wi-fi to our house broke. It’s amazing how much we rely on wi-fi. Without it, we couldn’t get or answer emails, use Google, shop online, etc. The guy who installed the new router spent two hours at our house drilling holes, running wires and fending off Roux, who’s a good watchdog when she isn’t sleeping or eating brownies.

  The old router was a black box. The new one looks a little like a blunt-nosed rocket ship with a green light in the middle. I half expect it to transmit a message from Flash Gordon or Ming the Merciless. It cost $150. The service call was another $150.

  This brings us to the amplifier fiasco. I sold a guitar amplifier online to a buyer in Texas. I’d always used Fed-Ex to ship gear, but the buyer insisted on UPS. Several days after shipping the amp, he emailed to say he had “horrible news.”

  The horrible news was that the amplifier I had spent hours obsessively packing to prevent damage had been damaged. The buyer’s email included a picture of the box. It looked like it had been dropped from a height, run over by a fork lift or hit with a battering ram. The amplifier’s new owner reported that when he turned it on, he saw a flash of light, followed by a puff of smoke. Never good signs.

  I contacted the head of the company that made the amp to ask if he knew a capable repair person near where the buyer lived. He did, but the buyer wasn’t interested in a repair. He wanted a refund. Bottom line: He’s sending the broken amp back to me and I’m refunding his money. So much for obsessively packing to prevent damage.

  The second week of April was when our granddaughter Kelsie and  her husband, Christian, installed new flooring on the second floor of our house, replacing threadbare carpet that had been there since she was a toddler.

  The job necessitated moving furniture from bedroom to bedroom to get it out of the way. This meant that the bedrooms where the furniture was being kept were all but inaccessible. I squeezed and wiggled like a contortionist to get to a dresser drawer with a checkbook I needed, only to learn that the drawer was under several hundred pounds of other drawers. I still haven’t found that checkbook.

  Midway through the flooring project, the hot water heater broke.

  The first clue that something was wrong was a diminished flow of water from the kitchen faucet. It wouldn’t get hot, either. The water heater at our house is in the furnace room, which is in the finished basement. When I opened the door to the furnace room, the  nature of the problem was all too apparent.

  The water heater didn’t just stop heating; it was doing a highly  successful imitation of an open floodgate. Its bottom had completely rusted out. Rising water had covered the furnace room floor and gone under the walls to an adjoining bathroom and the family room.

  Instant panic.

  “Call Christian and Kelsie!” my wife shouted.

  The family handyman and handywoman had just left for the day and weren’t far away. Christian shut off the valve that supplied water to the tank (it was hidden by a heating duct; I didn’t even know it existed), and we used every old towel in the house to mop up the water.

  The next day, we bought a new hot water heater. Christian had it installed in no time, and, for now at least, the mishaps seem to have passed.

  In some ways, we were lucky. The online company I sold the guitar amplifier through will pay for me to get it fixed. The new floors look great, and the water-heater leak could have been much worse. If it had happened in the middle of the night, an entire floor of the house would have flooded. And if Christian hadn’t been around to shut off the water, it might have flooded anyway. We’re fortunate to have someone in the family who can build or fix just about anything.

  That said, no one is happier than we are that April is hours from being over. May will never be more welcome. 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  Much has been written about former Gov. Phil Batt since his passing on March 4. He was praised as a human rights advocate, for his role in removing nuclear waste from Idaho, for his fairness, decency  and much more.

  One of my favorite memories of him, however, is of his music.

  My introduction to the late governor was unorthodox, to say the least. He was a state senator at the time; I was a fledgling columnist assigned to do color stories about the legislature. I’d just seated myself in the gallery overlooking the Senate when Batt and then state senator Jim Risch spotted me, stuck out their tongues, put their thumbs in their ears and wiggled their fingers.

  It could have been taken as an insult, but it was done in good humor. They both laughed afterward, as I did. And in years to come I got to know the former state senator, lieutenant governor and governor for the good man he was.

  A good man and a good musician and song writer. He was quoted as saying that playing the clarinet was “one of the most enjoyable parts of my life. I think music is magic.” 

   I heard him play his clarinet a few times and thought he played well, but what absolutely knocked me out was a song he wrote about Idaho. Hearing it for the first time at a grade school choir performance, my first thought was that it would make a great Idaho state song. 

  The official state song, of course, is “And Here We Have Idaho.” Originally composed more than a century ago, its melody and lyrics may have been fine for their time but seem dated at best by contemporary standards.

  These are the lyrics to the chorus, the one part of the song most of us can remember: 

  And here we have Idaho
  Winning her way to fame
  Silver and gold in the sunlight blaze
  And romance lies in her name
  Singing, we’re singing of you
  Ah, proudly too
  All our lives through, we’ll go
  Singing, singing of you,
  Singing of Idaho.

  Really? Winning our way to fame? And have you ever known anyone who spends his or her whole life through singing of Idaho?

  Compare that with the chorus of Batt’s Idaho song:

  Idaho, Idaho

  Where the winds of love and friendship always blow

  There’s a freedom in the sky

  And I’ll live here till I die

  Idaho, Idaho, Idaho

  Short and to the point. Like Batt himself.

  Reading the lyrics doesn’t do justice to the song, though. Its melody is catchy, charming. To truly appreciate it, you have to hear it sung.  Here’s a link you can use to do that: 

 It was performed in the Statehouse rotunda during a service honoring the late governor on March 9. Boisean Margaret Lawrence directed the choir that day, as she did many times with Batt playing his clarinet, including the first time I heard the song, in 2008 at Jackson Elementary School. It was the last choir performance at the school, which was closing after 48 years.

  Lawrence called the late governor’s song “a snapshot into Idaho’s history. It’s timeless in that respect. It touches on Chief Joseph, the sourdoughs in mining, farming. It’s an Idaho history lesson for children and adults also.”

  The chorus, she added, is “one of those joyful moments in life when you get to sing with gusto. Children love it and when I have invited adults to join in, they too have proven its melodic accessibility by the exuberance in which they perform – loud and proud.”

   With due respect, the same can’t be said for “And Here We Have Idaho,” which was written in 1915 and adopted as our state song in 1931. People don’t write or sing songs like that any more. We don’t drive Model T’s any more, either. Batt’s accessible melody and moving lyrics would comprise a state song we could sing loud and proud.

  Changing state songs isn’t without precedent. Oregon and Mississippi both changed lyrics that were considered racist in their state songs.

  Colorado, while not scrapping “Where the Columbines Grow,” added John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” as a second state song.

  Legislators in W. Virginia have tried to make Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” that state’s official state song. They haven’t succeeded yet, but time and public sentiment may be on their side. Adopted as West Virginia University’s theme song, it has been played to rousing applause before every home football game for decades.

  What better way to honor a governor that virtually everyone liked and admired – I never heard anyone say a bad word about him – than to make his song our official state song? It would be an improvement on what we have now, and generations of Idahoans would actually enjoy singing it.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.

 I went shopping for a stocking cap the other day and found a  language barrier instead. 

  Not the language barrier you experience in a foreign country where don’t speak the language; the barrier I have in mind is the generational language barrier.

  Yes there is such a thing.

  The setting was the Boise State University book store, where I went to shop for the cap.

  If you’re scratching your head after reading the last two words of that sentence, I rest my case about the language barrier.

  After wandering the aisles without success, I asked for help from a sales clerk, who, judging by her youthful appearance may have been  a BSU student.

  “Hello. Can you tell me where the stocking caps are?”

  Silence.

  I repeated the question.

  More silence. Her eyes weren’t exactly glazed over, but it was clear that we were nowhere close to communicating.

  “You know, stocking caps! Like you wear in the winter when it’s cold or snowing.”

  Now her eyes were glazing over.

  “Do you not know what a stocking cap is?”

  Judging by her bewildered expression, she didn’t have a clue.

  “You know, stocking caps! You put them on your head and pull them down over your ears to keep your ears warm. Some of them have fuzzy little balls on top.”

  The clouds lifted, the light dawned. 

 “You mean beanies!”

  “Beanies?”

  “Yes, beanies. They’re right over here.”

  She led the way to a display of stocking caps, now apparently known to pretty much everyone of a certain age as beanies. I thanked her, bought one and wore it home.

  Curious, I checked the site where America shops for its take on beanies vs. stocking caps. Amazon listed 60 individual entries for stocking caps, 67 for beanies.

  The initial lack of communication with the young woman at the book store got me to thinking about other words subject to the generational language barrier. People my age, for example, use all sorts of expressions that not only have fallen out of favor with younger people, but are so outdated that young people have little or no idea what they mean.

  Bread, for example. When we were their age, we referred to money as bread. The term was universal enough that an album cover by a band of the same name featured its members’ photos on dollar bills.

  Now bread is just, well … bread.

  Drag was a noun for something that was boring or depressing. It still means that to baby boomers. To younger folks, it’s limited to its original meaning, to pull something with force or difficulty, as in dragging yourself to school or work on a Monday morning.

  Gas was a noun for something that was fun or exciting:

  “That Grateful Dead concert was a gas, man!”

  Now gas is just something you put in your car.

  Cats were cool guys, often musicians. To anyone under, say, 40, the usage is pretty much limited to felines.

  And there’s no point in even talking about “groovy,” a term so dated that not even geezers in their 70s or 80s use it any more.

  Unless they’re hopeless squares, another dated term that would leave 20-somethings scratching their heads.

  It works the other way, too, of course. Twenty-somethings use expressions that leave older generations scratching their heads. To learn what some of them were, I asked one of my twenty-something granddaughters.

  “What made you want to know?” she asked.

  “Something funny that happened at the BSU book store. I was shopping for a stocking cap, and the sales person didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “What was it you were shopping for?”

  “A stocking cap.”

  Silence.

  “… What’s that?”

  I explained it to her.

  “Oh! You mean a beanie!”

  With that she offered some expressions currently in fashion.

  “Threads,” I was pleased to learn, is still used to mean clothes.

  The hip (does anybody still say that?) word for shoes is “kicks.” 

   My grandkids and their friends often refer to things as being “sick.”This initially baffled me because it seemed to make no sense at all. They described a litter of puppies, for example, as being really sick. I wondered why no one had called a vet – until it was explained that in their world, “sick” is the equivalent of “cool.”

  Cool, of course,  has been around since Elvis’s heyday and apparently is still in somewhat universal usage.

  “Sus,” in youthful usage, is short for suspicious.

  A “simp” is a weak, emotional man who tries overly hard to impress women. 

  “Cap,” according to my granddaughter, means lying to sound cool. Or, if you prefer, to sound sick. 

  There undoubtedly are more, but she couldn’t think of any offhand, which is just as well. It’s time to wrap this up. I need to put on my beanie and take the dog for a walk.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  I buttoned my shirt this morning for the first time in two weeks. 

  Last week I drove for the first time, and I’m almost to the point that I can go up stairs without grasping the banister for dear life.

  Going down stairs is another matter.

  The event that led to these minor accomplishments: shoulder surgery.

  It was my second shoulder surgery in less than a year, which doesn’t seem fair. It wasn’t as if I was in a car accident, fell or otherwise injured myself. Both shoulders just started hurting for no obvious reason.

  The most likely explanation, according to the doctors, is that they were old injuries that caught up with me. I played a lot of baseball as a kid, some football in high school, skied a lot as a teenager and have played a fair amount of tennis. Sports injuries that seem to heal when you’re young can come back to haunt you later in life.

  Or maybe it was just some stupid accident. Like the time I got up in the dark on the wrong side of the bed, tripped over a guitar and fell on it, snapping its neck neatly in half. That’s probably more characteristic.

  The first surgery, in March, was a piece of cake. Hardly any pain and a mere two weeks in a sling. How much different, I naïvely thought, could another shoulder operation be?

  Answer: Night and day different. 

 The first operation was a relatively simple procedure to fix torn cartilage. The second was multiple procedures for multiple problems . I won’t bore you with the details except to say that it was a lot more involved, with a significantly longer recovery time.

  The worst part of shoulder surgery isn’t the surgery itself. You’re unconscious for it, and they give you a nerve block so you don’t feel any pain for several days afterwards. They also give you some high octane pain pills to use after the nerve block wears off. The worst part, without a close second, is the sling you have to wear after the surgery.

  The sling has what’s called an abduction pillow. The part with your arm in it is attached with Velcro to the outside edge of the pillow. Your arm is separated from your from body by about six inches and sticks straight out, as if you were reaching to shake hands with someone. You wear this night and day for as long as the doctor says, in my case six weeks.

  The sling is about as easy as a straitjacket to put on without help. One of my physical therapists laughed when I told her I was thinking of burning it when the six weeks were up.

  “You have no idea how many people I’ve heard say that,” she said.

   Unlike my first surgery, this operation was on the right shoulder. I had almost no appreciation of all that this would entail. Like 85 to 90 percent of the world’s population, I am right-handed. This has proved to be a continuing and – continually infuriating – problem.

  You have no idea how much you rely on your dominant hand until you can’t use it anymore. My first clue to what the next six weeks would be like came the first time I brushed my teeth after the operation. If you’re right-handed, it’s insanely awkward to brush your teeth with your left hand.

  Flossing your teeth with one hand? Forget it. 

  Putting on socks with the wrong hand is about as easy as typing wearing mittens. The same is true of putting on pants, shirts, coats, etc. Things you normally do in seconds without thinking about them are laborious, time-consuming, painful. It takes me half an hour just to get dressed in the morning. 

  Typing is a challenge at best. I’ve been typing ever since high school and normally type about 60 words a minute with pretty good accuracy. Now it’s strictly hunt and peck. 

  A five-minute shower takes 15 minutes, with the ever-present risk of slipping and further injuring yourself. 

  Eating with a spoon using the wrong hand is clumsiness personified. I’ve spilled more cereal and soup and dropped more things since the surgery than I did in the previous year.

  All of these pale, however, in comparison with trying to sleep. Injured shoulders hurt most when lying down. Bottom line: you can’t lie down. You have to sleep, if you want to call it that, sitting upright on a couch or a recliner. Add wearing a bulky sling and abduction pillow to that and you have a recipe for insomnia. There are nights when I could be mistaken for a character in “Night of the Living Dead.”

  No complaints, though. Yes, it’s been a bit of a grind. But it also has given me a better understanding of what those who permanently have lost an arm or leg go through every day of their lives. Compared with that, this is nothing. 

  Nor is any of what I’ve written meant to reflect negatively on my doctors or their co-workers. I have only good things to say about my surgeon, Dr. Michael Curtin, and his staff at the St. Luke’s Sports Medicine clinic. Ditto for Dr. Kurt Nilsson at SLSM, whose care bought me some pain-free years before the surgery, and for Physician’s Assistant Kati Johnson, Physical Therapist Jami Garver, and all the other good folks at the clinic who have helped in so many ways. They deserve medals just for putting up with all my questions.

  But not for much longer. Today is Day 30 of the six weeks in a sling.

  No more trying to sleep sitting up after that.

  No more dropping and spilling everything thing from pills to pillows with the left hand.

  No more clinging to banisters, taking forever to get dressed or shrieking four-letter words in the middle of the night because the sling has come loose, the blankets have slipped off of the couch onto the floor and you have to wrestle with whether to be up for the rest of the night or take a sleeping pill.

  Thirty days down, twelve to go.

  But who’s counting?

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.  

 Christmas at the Woodward household lasts until March.

  That, give or take, used to be when the last pine needle from the Christmas tree was swept or vacuumed up, officially ending the season for another year.

  The staying power of those pine needles defied belief. Those on the floor around the tree were swept up and banished to the trash several times during the holidays. A supposedly “final” sweeping and vacuuming took place after the tree was taken down and left at the curb to be composted.

  “That should do it,” I naively would say. “I think we’ve got them all.”

  We didn’t, of course. Pine needles would continue to pop up for weeks afterwards.  The tenacity of those pine needles was nothing short of astonishing.

  A few days after taking down the tree, putting away the decorations and cleaning up the pine needles (supposedly all of them), more would be spotted lurking in a  corner or communing with a baseboard. Get those up and more would surface in another part of the room. I’m not exaggerating in saying that it was March before the last of them finally were gone.

  This happened every Christmas until three years ago, when we ended our longstanding practice of buying real Christmas trees and settled on an artificial one.

  It was a long time coming. For years, artificial trees looked, to quote The Old Man in “A Christmas Story,” like they were made of “green pipe cleaners.” They got a little better every year, though. When we saw one in a store that looked almost real enough to be real, we succumbed and went artificial.

  And never looked back. No more perusing Christmas tree lots, no more sawing off the bottom of the trunk and soaking it overnight in a bucket of water to keep the needles from drying out, no more wrestling the tree through the front door. And, best of all, no more pine needles with half lives measured in months.

  All was well until this Christmas. That was when we discovered –  reminiscent of Orange is the New Black – that glitter is the new pine needles.

  No one who gathered at our house to unwrap gifts on Christmas Eve could remember so many presents that were wrapped using ribbon with glitter on it. Either glitter ribbon is enjoying a sudden surge in popularity or by sheer coincidence nearly everyone used it to wrap the packages that were under our tree this Christmas.

  It wasn’t just the ribbon, either. Some of the wrapping paper and even some of the gift bags were decorated with glitter.

  And the cards! At the moment, I am looking at a sizable pile of Christmas cards received from relatives, friends and acquaintances,  and just under half of them are literally dripping with shiny, sparkly, superfluous glitter. (The stuff isn’t really necessary, you know. The cards would look just fine without it.)

  No one thought much about all this until Christmas day. Cleanup with the Christmas Eve festivities still underway was limited to hastily putting wrappings in recycling bags and forgetting about them till the next morning.

  That’s when the profusion of glitter became all too apparent.

  “Look at this! There’s glitter everywhere.”

  “I’ve never seen so much glitter.”

  “It’s even outside on the porch.”

  Glitter was under the tree, on the rug, the couch, the chairs, the coffee table, the stereo cabinet. It was as if it had fallen from the sky in a bomb-glitter cyclone.

  We swept, vacuumed, dusted.

  “There. I think we’ve got it all.”

  We didn’t.

  In the days to come, glitter continued to turn up in one unlikely place after another.

  It was on the carpets and other floors, despite repeated vacuumings and sweepings.

  It was on the steps, the sidewalks.

  It was in the garage, in the cars.

  It was on our clothes, in the laundry, even in the beds.

  This continued to be the case for days – even weeks – after Christmas.

  How was this possible? Call me crazy, but I think the stuff was breeding.

  With glitter seemingly everywhere around the house, I wanted to learn more about it and discovered that it isn’t merely annoying when you can’t seem to get rid of it, it’s terrible for the environment.

  Much of the glitter used in everything from cards and wrappings to makeup is made of microplastic. Microplastics aren’t biodegradable. They last for thousands of years. They sink through the soil of landfills into groundwater and oceans. Birds and fish can die from consuming them. 

  There is such a thing, however, as biodegradable glitter, safe for animals and the planet. If you’re determined to use glitter in your makeup, wrappings or craft work, you can find it at https://www.todayglitter.com. 

  Other than that, it’s best to try to avoid using glitter at all. You’ll be helping the environment.

  And saving yourself a lot of cleaning up.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodward column@gmail.com.

 Some of my most cherished memories are of the Christmases of my youth, spent with family in our home of many years on Lemp Street in Boise’s North End. 

  Christmas was the best time of the year: decorating the tree with my mother and sister, Christmas music on the stereo, snow falling in the yellow glow of the old-fashioned streetlight. Dad in the kitchen whipping up Tom and Jerrys, everyone feeling merry.

  More than any other time of year, Christmas was a time for family. That included relatives we seldom saw at other times. Remembering them seems appropriate today, a day when families make memories remembered for life.

  Everyone’s favorite was Grandmother Susie. Susan Marquarett McCoy was easily the most interesting and beloved of my grandparents. She was my great grandmother, actually; all but three of my grandparents died before I was born. 

  Grandma Susie was born in 1865 – the year the Civil War ended – in Iowa. Family lore had it that she came west in a covered wagon. Grandma Susie had had many last names – Marquarett, McCoy, Black, Cuddy, Chandler – having outlived all of her husbands.

  She was a jolly old soul, despite having known more than her share of sorrows. Her last husband, who brought me pennies when they came to visit, had the uncommonly bad timing to die at our house in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. She also had a son who died. Despite her losses, she somehow remained positive, even jovial. 

 Grandma Susie didn’t come for the day on Christmas; she’d come and stay with us for a week or more. A week warmed by her marvelous cooking and baking – she had worked professionally as a cook – and by her good humor and genial disposition. We cherished  her visits.

  Relatives who came only on Christmas Day included Uncle Wayne and Aunt Helen, who lived in a rural area of Ada County, and Aunt Amy and Uncle Adolph, who lived on a hardscrabble farm near Star.

   Aunt Helen grew up in the mining town of Cripple Creek, Colo. She could tell the difference between gold and pyrite (fool’s gold) or silver and galena without batting an eye. She and Uncle Wayne had an adopted daughter, Barbara, who with my sister adored playing “Chopsticks” on the piano. Everyone else would have preferred Christmas music, but it was all they knew how to play. 

  Uncle Wayne was an Oklahoma native and part Native American. The most interesting things about him to my youthful way of thinking were that he was a master carpenter and had once been the foreman of a mine in Peru. Uncle Wayne was a self-styled banana connoisseur. He said you hadn’t really tasted a banana until you’d had one freshly picked from the bunch, as he claimed to have done often in Peru. For store-bought bananas he had nothing but disdain.

  Uncle Adolph and Aunt Amy were lifelong farmers. They arrived for Christmas dinner in their ancient Austin, arguably the ugliest car in Idaho, with their son Weldon.

  Weldon rarely strung more than half a dozen words together. He and Uncle Adolph wore bib overalls 364 days a year, but on Christmas they’d show up in dress shirts, old-fashioned suits and and gaudy hand-painted ties. It was their one chance to dress up, and they made the most of it. 

   Aunt Amy, who reminded me of Aunty Em in the Wizard of Oz, would be decked out in her best – a calf length dress, nylons with seams down the back and a hat with a veil. Seemingly from another time and possibly planet, they always left early to be home in time to milk the cows. We didn’t exchange gifts with the Star relatives. They couldn’t afford to do that, but their company was enough.

  Mom went all out for Christmas dinner – baked ham with clove and pineapple garnishes, Parker House rolls, a casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy and her signature mincemeat pie, all served on China used only at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Dad would light a fire in the fireplace, a feat attempted but once or twice a year, with universal trepidation. He was never sure whether the fireplace vent  was open or closed. A roomful of smoke was an ever present  possibility. 

  All those people are gone now, but they’re fondly remembered  these many years later. I mention them today because there are few times when being with family, and reminiscing about absent loved ones, seems more fitting than during the holidays.

  Our family, like most families, has had its share of spats and rifts, some worse than others. My late sister barely spoke to me the last eight years of her life and refused all invitations to join us for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  A more recent rift had several members of the family barely speaking. Happily, that seems mostly to have been set aside, at least for now. We were together last night for Christmas Eve and will be together again today for Christmas dinner. My hope for you, readers, is that your family puts aside whatever grievances you’ve had and that you spend today enjoying one another’s company.

  Other timely Christmas wishes:

  That after almost three years and with effective vaccinations easily available, the pandemic will at last begin to fade.

  That we will be more tolerant of other viewpoints and our country will become less divided.

  That Putin’s war will end soon and there will be peace in Ukraine.

  “Peace on earth, good will toward men.”

  Isn’t that what today is supposed to be all about?

  Merry Christmas to you all.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.