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.

“Finding My Niche,” my memoir published a year ago, will soon be out of print. Signed copies are still available at Rediscovered Books, 180 N. Eighth Street in downtown Boise, and today I’m going to Barnes & Noble, 1301 N. Milwaukee, near Boise Towne Square Mall, to sign the last of their stock.

If you’ve thought of giving this book (about growing up in a Boise of 35,000 people, playing in the Mystics and what it was like working 40 years at The Idaho Statesman) as a Christmas gift, this could be the last chance. There won’t be another printing, so once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. People tell me it’s a fun read. I hope you’ll consider it, and Merry Christmas!

Tim

 One of my best childhood friends died almost a year ago. It’s a measure of how much we’d drifted apart that I didn’t find out until last week.

  There was, to the best of my knowledge, no obituary, no funeral service. He was just quietly gone.

  We met when we were four years old. My parents had just moved into their dream home in Boise’s still developing North End, now a long established neighborhood. The Hally family lived across the street and two doors down from us. Four-year-old Timmy was the youngest of four brothers.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me on the day we met. 

  “Playing with rocks.”

  Rocks in the gutter of the still unpaved street in front of our house. There were no X Boxes or Flying Orb Balls in those days. Kids played with whatever was at hand.

  “Ok if I play with you?”

  And so, over rocks in a gutter, a friendship was born.

  Another boy our age lived in a house in the next block. It wasn’t long before Bill Molitor, Timmy Hally and I were briefly inseparable.

  Our pastimes were typical for kids of those days – playing baseball and hide and seek, swimming in the municipal pool, making snowmen and snow forts, playing with toy trains, playing marbles in the alley, riding bikes with playing cards clothes-pinned to the frame to chatter deliciously in the spokes …

  Timmy was the unwitting recipient of injuries at the hands of yours truly, as I was reminded in a letter to the editor he once wrote. One of his former classmates sent me a copy of it last week along with the belated news of his passing:

  “I have known Woody since he, his sister and parents moved into our neighborhood at 25th and Lemp streets in the early 1950s,” the letter said. “At first his name was Woody Woodpecker, but his mom asked us not to use that so it became Woody, as I was Timmy. Yuck, I never liked the name Timmy.

  “One thing I will always remember is him hitting me over the head with a baton when we were about nine or 10.”

  What he mercifully failed to mention was that attached to the baton, which I’d found in an alley, was a ball of concrete about the size of a softball. I was behind our garage hitting imaginary villains over the head with it when, with astonishingly bad timing, Timmy walked out the garage door as I lowered the boom. I had no idea he was anywhere around. Luckily, he wasn’t unconscious long enough for me to get into serious trouble.

  In his mother’s opinion, my getting into trouble was overdue. In the not too distant past, I had shot her son with an arrow and almost knocked out his front teeth.

  The arrow incident was an accident. Its intended destination was a paper target tacked to a fence. Just as the arrow was released from my bow, out came Timmy – once again with impeccable timing – from through the aforementioned garage door. It was a kids’ arrow rather than a hunting arrow, but its dull tip still managed to draw blood and outrage the victim’s mother.

  The shuffleboard incident was not an accident. A shuffleboard court pattern was built into the Hallys’ tile floor in their basement. We were playing the game one day when Timmy did something that made me mad enough to toss one of the shuffleboard discs at him. No one was more surprised than I was when it hit him in the mouth, resulting in two loose teeth and inordinate bleeding. If Mrs. Hally had had her way, I’d have been grounded for life.

  Mr. Hally, incidentally, was one of the more interesting people in the  neighborhood. He and Bing Crosby, the famous crooner, were friends as students at Gonzaga University. A picture of them standing beside each other graced the Hallys’ living room. Mr. Hally drove a beautiful, black Buick Roadmaster, easily the coolest car in the neighborhood. He was an engineer who supposedly helped design the beautiful Rainbow Bridge north of Smiths Ferry. I never knew whether that was actually true.

  Timmy and I grew apart during grade school, as childhood friends often tend to do. My birthday was just in time for starting first grade while his was a couple of months later – different classes, different friends. The Hallys moved to Washington State after his sophomore year in high school. We lost contact after that for a number of years.

  One of his classmates, Russ Renk, sent me some life details about my old friend last week. It had been my understanding that he worked for a company that made paper products, but there was no mention of that. He worked for Boeing and later for Loomis, formerly Loomis Fargo, as a vault clerk. He attended Central Washington University for two years and was married for seven years, ending in a divorce.

  In his twilight years he moved back to Idaho and occasionally showed up at places where my band, the Mystics was playing. We’d chat during my breaks; he almost invariably turned the conversations to times past and friends long unseen. Most recently he lived in Payette County, where he spent several years on dialysis.

  His passing makes me the last of the old gang. Bill Molitor died four years ago.

  My great grandson is about the age we were when the three of us were childhood pals. Maybe next summer I’ll take him to the old neighborhood and teach him to play marbles in the alley. It seems as good a way as any for me to honor their memory. 

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 lot of years have passed since my wife and I had a dog, but we feel like we have a dog. This is only natural, considering that a dog is more or less a live-in visitor at our house.

  The dog’s name is Roux. She belongs to our daughter who works long shifts as a paramedic, meaning that more often than not we’re dog-sitting.

  This is a good thing because it’s nice to have a dog, even if it isn’t really ours. 

   It’s also a bad thing because Roux is not without certain faults. Enough faults, in fact, that she reminds me of a dog that belonged to the late humorist Patrick McManus. McManus said his family named the dog Stranger in the faint hope that he was just passing through.

  Our daughter sometimes refers to Roux as “the naughtiest dog ever.” Naughty enough that when she took her on a week’s vacation to the Oregon Coast, I breathed a sigh of relief. A whole week without whining, begging, barking, etc. 

  Roux is a mix of border terrier and several other breeds. A mutt, in other words. Our daughter got her from a rescue group in Lafayette, La. Thus the name. Lafayette is Cajun country, where roux, a thickening agent for sauces used in French cuisine, is almost as ubiquitous as potatoes are here in Idaho.

  If dogs’ IQs could be measured, Roux’s would be through the roof. Her vocabulary is formidable. We aren’t entirely joking in saying that she speaks English.

  Some examples:

  “Go get your busy bee (a stuffed animal).”

  She runs to the dining room and returns with it. 

  “No, not that busy bee. Go get your other busy bee.”

  She returns seconds later with that one.

  “You want to go outside?”

  She runs to the back door, waits for it to be opened, then runs outside and barks like a dog possessed.

  “Open the door.”

  She pushes the door open with her paw.

  “Roux, no barking!”

  She stops barking.

  Temporarily.

  “Roux, stop that barking!”
  “I did stop. (This is her speaking English. Not in actual words, of course, but her meaning through facial expressions and body language is abundantly clear.) Certainly you don’t expect me to stop barking permanently. Life without barking isn’t worth living.”

  Roux understands an impressive number of words and phrases. Among them:  Good night, high five, roll over. Stick ‘em up! Get in the back seat. Want to go for a walk? Where’s your leash?

   Drink, stick, sleep, squirrel, bone, toy, treat, catch, gently …

  And a few I’ve undoubtedly forgotten.

  She is an incorrigible tease. My wife keeps a stash of dog treats in our kitchen for Roux and our daughter’s boyfriend’s dog, Bolt. Instead of wolfing them down, as most dogs would, Roux waits patiently while Bolt wolfs his down. Then she sprawls out on the floor in front of him and does her best to make him jealous by nibbling her treat – ever so slowly – while he watches.

  “Roux, we know what you’re doing. Stop trying to make Bolt jealous!”

  “Who, me? I was just enjoying my treat. It’s not my fault he eats faster than I do.”

  Bolt spent the night at our house recently, a night we won’t soon forget. At 2:30 a.m., he whined to be let out. My wife obliged. Then, panic.

  “Wake up!” she said. “Bolt’s gone.”

  “Wazzat?” I asked, still mostly asleep. 

  “Quick, get up! I let Bolt out and he’s gone. The back gate was open and he took off.”

  We’d been warned repeatedly that “Bolt will bolt,” and the warnings proved to be prophetic. He was indeed gone.

  We must have been a curious sight, traipsing up and down the sidewalk in the wee hours, calling Bolt’s name loud enough for him to hear us but not loud enough to wake up the the neighbors.

  That, at least, was our hope. It would have been more than a little embarrassing for the neighbors to have spotted us in robes and slippers, or in my case somewhat less than that, prowling the neighborhood calling the name of a mechanical fastener. They’d have thought we were nuts. Or at the very least had a few screws loose.

  To our relief – neither of us was looking forward to explaining that we’d lost a prized hunting dog – Bolt trotted into our front yard as if nothing had happened.

  “You probably put him up to this, didn’t you?” I asked Roux.

  No response.

 “You probably knew the gate was open and woke him up so he’d get out.”

  “What if I did? He gets way too much attention around here. Attention that’s rightfully mine. I was part of this family while he was still in bird-dog school.”

  “You ate his dog food today, didn’t you?”

  Again, no response. But the guilty look said it all. 

  I could go on, but a full account of her exploits would fill a book. 

  Still, there’s just something about dogs.

  Even naughty ones.

  Roux got home from the coast yesterday. The first thing she did was jump onto my lap and lick my face. 

  It seemed like a good time to take her for a walk. Dogs do need exercise, after all. 

  And, truth be told, we’d missed her like crazy.

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

  It stopped me in my tracks as while crossing a supermarket parking lot. 

  It was only a car, but it might as well have been a time machine. In the space of a single step, it transported me from the present to my teenage years.

  It was a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, the same color and possibly the same year as one I bought in my senior year of high school. How long had it been since I’d seen one like it? 

  The Karmann Ghia was my second car. My first was a decrepit MG sports car, a ragtop –  emphasis on rags. Its windows were windows in name only, flapping pieces of plastic that never stayed in place and spent most of their time in the trunk. One of the car’s wheels fell off at a stop sign.

  It had a crack in the floor on the passenger’s side, discovered when I drove through a puddle one rainy night and a geyser drenched my girlfriend. We’d been arguing, and she refused to believe that I hadn’t done it on purpose. Her nickname for the car was “the cave,” to which it bore a passing resemblance – close to the ground, uncomfortable, cold, drafty.

  My father warned me me not to buy it. The salesman who sold it to me warned me not to buy it. It cost $400, and another $400 to keep it running for a year.

  Compared to the MG, the Karmann Ghia was a Rolls Royce. 

   “Wow!” the aforementioned girlfriend said when she saw it for the first time. “It’s not a cave. It’s a real car!”

  Karmann Ghias were Volkswagen’s attempt to turn its ubiquitous Beetle into something resembling a sports car. The idea was to take the Beetle’s platform and mechanical parts and dress them up with a sleek new body. Karmann Ghias were lower, wider and longer than Beetles and cost a few hundred dollars more. Fewer than 400,000 of them were ever built.

   Mine was dark red with a white interior. The transmission was a stick shift, four on the floor. (How many teenagers today know what a stick shift is, let alone how to use one?) The instrument cluster consisted of a speedometer and a clock, with a small, circular-shaped gas gauge between them. Simplicity itself. Everything you needed and nothing you didn’t. Digital instruments were yet to be imagined, let alone invented, 

  The speedometer went to 90 mph, about half of the upper speed limit on some contemporary speedometers but more than enough. Like all Volkswagens of the era, the only way it would reach 90 mph would be careening down a steep incline in an almighty tailwind.

  The headlight dimmer switch was on the floor. You pushed the button with your foot to dim the lights, and again to turn on the brights. Switching on the bright lights illuminated a small, blue light on the speedometer.

  The blue light may have been my favorite thing about the car. I’ve always been a sucker for glowing lights on dashboards, once giving my father the cold shoulder for buying a boring Buick instead of an Oldsmobile with a big red jewel light that gleamed mesmerizingly from its dashboard.

  It was the Karmann Ghia that accompanied me on one of the most memorable trips of my teenage life. Feeling restless one night, I succumbed to an irresistible urge to drive to San Francisco.

  “San Francisco! Alone?” my startled parents asked.

  “Late at night? Have you lost your mind?”

  You couldn’t blame them, really. They were rightly concerned about my safety. Most parents would react exactly the same way, probably even more so today.

  Convinced that their son was serious and hadn’t lost his marbles, they reluctantly relented.

  “Have you got enough money?” Dad asked.

  I had, if memory serves, about $40. That wouldn’t pay for an overnight trip to, say, Jordan Valley these days, but it was a different world then. The Karmann Ghia’s gas tank could be filled for about three bucks. A McDonald’s hamburger cost a quarter, and you actually could get a room at a Motel 6 for six dollars.

   Oddly, I remember very little about my time in San Francisco on that trip. I probably went to the beach and Golden Gate Park, maybe Chinatown and Coit Tower, but it’s hard to be certain. What I do remember vividly is the drive itself. 

  There was something immensely satisfying about being 18 and taking a trip by yourself in your own car that you paid for yourself, enjoying the freedom and independence of being on the open road on a starry night. Even the Nevada desert was beautiful in the moonlight.

  The Karmann Ghia hummed along without a hitch, gliding through silent, empty spaces and occasional towns. Even economy cars need to stop for gas now and then, however, and on a lonely stretch of desert with no town anywhere within an hour or so, the needle on fuel gauge was pointing perilously close to empty. The unexpected lights of a gas station in the middle of nowhere couldn’t have been more welcome.

  The station appeared to be open, but no one seemed to be around. No attendant to pump the gas, no one in the office. A peek into a back room revealed the reason why. The attendant had zero interest in pumping gas at that hour. He was otherwise engaged with his girlfriend. I filled the tank myself, quietly left some bills on the office desk and left, wondering about the scene that would have played out if I’d been his boss instead of a customer.

  My companion on that night drive was the friendly blue light on the speedometer. Its steady, dependable glow was reassuring, keeping me company in the long stretches of darkness.

  A new Karmann Ghia in those days cost about $2,300. Mine, used, would have been hundreds less. Today, a restored one like it would sell for more than either of my first two houses cost. 

  I should have hung onto it. The memories alone would have been priceless.

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 difficult to impossible to think of all things we take for granted in our daily lives – until we don’t have them.

  Things like three meals a day. We take them for granted, until we miss one. 

  Or a good night’s sleep. We take it for granted and don’t appreciate how important it is, until a night when we lie awake with insomnia.

  Or the electricity that powers our homes and so many other things. We take it for granted, rarely if ever give it a second thought.

  Until we don’t have it.

  The power went out at our house recently. We figured it would be one of those fleeting outages, power back on before you really miss it, but it stayed off for quite a while. Long enough to realize how much we rely on it.

  “This would be as good a time as any to mow the lawn,” I said to my wife. “There are a lot of other things I want to do but can’t with the power off so I’ll mow the lawn instead.”

  Except for time in the Navy and college, I’ve been mowing lawns regularly since I was a kid. Some of my neighbors who used to mow their lawns have hired a guy who does it in a fraction of the time with a riding mower. One of the few holdouts in the neighborhood, I continue to mow mine not because I enjoy it but because giving it up is a concession to aging that I’m not ready to make.

  That, or maybe it’s just stubbornness.

  So, out to the garage I went to get out the mower. It’s an electric mower, but the battery was charged so it didn’t need power.

  The garage door opener did, however. Without power, it was impossible to open the door to get the mower out of the garage. So much for that idea.

  Wondering how long the power would be out, I picked up the remote to turn on the TV for the noon news. Maybe there would be an update. 

  Duh. No power, no TV.

  “We could call the power company for an update,” my wife suggested.

  “Good idea. Why don’t you do that while I run an errand?”

  Some things ordered from a store downtown had arrived the day before, and with the power out it seemed like a good time to drive down and get them.

  The mower wasn’t the only thing stuck in the garage, of course. I realized this after getting my keys and striding confidently to the car – temporarily rendered useless by the inoperable garage door. 

  Slow learner.

  What to do? Couldn’t mow the lawn, couldn’t watch the news, couldn’t go anywhere in the car. Maybe it would be a good time to catch up with emails.

  Or would have been if my computer had been working properly. Some of the emails that had been there the night before had inexplicably vanished. Quite a few of them, actually. You wouldn’t think the power going out would affect a laptop.

  Or would it? Could it have affected the router? It seemed possible, even likely. Whatever the reason, the laptop had gone on strike.

  Along with most of the clocks in the house.

  Including the sprinkler-system clock. It would have to be reprogrammed, a task that involves resetting the time of day, the time the sprinklers would start in the morning and the time each station needs to run – all while being sandwiched into a minuscule space bordered by two walls, a work bench boxes of books, bags of lawn-care products, bicycles, a kiddy pool and an air compressor. Just thinking about it gives me claustrophobia.

  The power was off an unusually long time. A long time, that is, for this part of Idaho. We’re accustomed to reliable power with infrequent outages, usually of short duration. We take that for granted.

  That’s not the case in many places. At our family’s cabin in Washington State, the power goes out often and for long stretches. Neighbors who live there year-round tell winter tales of wearing coats and huddling under blankets around wood-burning stoves while waiting, sometimes for days, for the power to return.

  We take so many things for granted. Our homes, our health, our families … 

  Until we hear about people who have lost those things in a heartbeat and pray that it doesn’t happen to us.

  The people who lost everything to Hurricane Ian may have taken their homes and lifestyles for granted, even living in a state where hurricanes are regular occurrences.

  People in Ukraine may have taken their lives for granted, until a ruthless dictator turned them upside down.

  The scariest thing to take for granted is our democracy. We thought we’d always have it. We’ve taken it for granted all our lives. Now there are multiple threats against it. 

  You might want to think about that when you vote next month. 

  Maybe we shouldn’t take anything for granted. 

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 downtown Boise icon hasn’t been within almost a mile of downtown Boise for ten years.

  It was charming.

  It made people smile.

  It was admired by Boiseans and visitors alike.

  Can you guess what it was?

  If not, it’s because you’re a newcomer who’s never seen it or it’s been so long since you have seen it that you’ve all but forgotten it.

  It’s Keepsies, the sculpture of kids playing marbles that occupied a place in the Grove public plaza and the hearts of its admirers from 1987 to 2012. It was “temporarily” taken down and moved a decade ago to make way for a construction project. 

  And it still hasn’t returned to where it belongs, to where it should be displayed and enjoyed in one of the city’s most public settings. Its supposedly temporary location has been at the Dick Eardley Senior Center, 690 Robbins Road.

  Eardley was a Boise mayor. The center named for him is in a quiet neighborhood in East Boise. Too quiet, arguably, for a piece of public art that should be in a busier, more public place.

  “It’s in a lovely little quiet square, but there used to be so much traffic and so many more people who saw it at the Grove,” Mary Grandjean said. “Children and old people and everyone in between loved that piece. It speaks to everyone.”

  Grandjean has a personal interest in Keepsies. Her children were the models for the kids in the sculpture. And Ann LaRose, the artist and former Boisean who did the sculpture, is a good friend of hers.

  “It was Ann’s first life-sized sculpture, and she really put her heart and soul into it,” Grandjean said. “That’s why it’s touched so many people and why they respond to it the way they do. I’d love to see it back in the Grove so it can be seen by more of our citizens. It’s truly a jewel.”

   Keepsies may have been LaRose’s first life-sized sculpture, but it’s far from being her last. She sculpted the figures of Esther Simplot and three children at the Esther Simplot Performing Arts Center, a larger than life (nine-foot) statue of College of Idaho Founder William Judson  Boone and a life-sized sculpture of grocery store magnate Joe Albertson and his wife, Kathryn, which graces the headquarters of the Albertson Foundation.

  Her work can be found in public buildings and private homes  around the county. She’s done sculptures for the owner of the Chicago Cubs. Her bust of an admiral and Medal of Honor recipient is the only sculpture by a woman at the U.S. Naval Academy.

  Keepsies remains special for her “because it was my first,” she said. It was the first time I had to think about how I was going to go with my career and not let any negative comments get to me or change my style. I had to remain true to what I wanted to do, and it established my later work. People looked at Keepsies and said, ‘Oh, yes. We want something in that style.’ It was the base that I worked from.”

  Like Grandjean, she’d like to see Keepsies back at the Grove. Its current location at the senior center “isn’t a terrible setting,” she said, “and I’m sure the people there like it. But it’s not where it’s supposed to go. When the city called and told me they wanted to move it and asked if that would be okay, they told me it would be brought back, that it would be temporary.”

  Neither she nor Grandjean – or I, for that matter – could remember what the construction project was that made the city want to move it. Not surprising after ten years.

  Anyone who grew up with them can relate to playing marbles. It was a favorite pastime in the neighborhood of my youth. We’d draw a circle in the dirt of an alley and play for hours. We played keepsies, of course; I kept the marbles I won in a bag with a drawstring and spent hours admiring and polishing my favorites. Those were happy times.

  Do kids still play marbles today? I don’t know. My kids didn’t, but the first place they went when we took them to the Grove was Keepsies. It didn’t matter that they didn’t play marbles. They could relate to the kids playing marbles in the sculpture. 

  Grandjean plans to hand-deliver a letter to Mayor Lauren McLean asking that Keepsies be returned to the Grove.

    In a Facebook post, Grandjean wrote that Keepsies “has been known, loved and treasured by young and old for over three decades.  It represents what we as Idahoans and Boiseans value – childhood, family, community, and the pure joy to be experienced on a summer day with a couple of friends and a bag of marbles.”

   Her post led to dozens of people ‘reaching out to me on Facebook and Instagram. People from all over the U.S. and even Europe – friends and friends of friends … People have come out of the woodwork. They couldn’t believe Keepsies had been moved. They want it back.”

  “It’s nothing against the senior center,” LaRose said. “It’s a nice location for the right piece. They could have a sculpture in both places.” 

  Mayor McLean, if you read this, I hope you’ll look into having Keepsies moved back. It’s part of what made downtown Boise a fun place to go for a long time, and ten years away is more than long enough. It needs to go home.

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.

 Forgetfulness is so common that countless writers have ruminated on it, often humorously. 

  Mark Twain, whose writing and witticisms are anything but forgettable, observed that “When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.”

  That was the only quote I could remember about forgetfulness. So I looked up some others:

  Science fiction-fantasy writer Vera Nazarian wrote that, “The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.”

 One of my favorites:  “My ability to remember song lyrics from the ‘80s far exceeds my ability to remember why I walked into the kitchen.”

  Not sure who came up with that one, but it makes perfect sense. It’s probably happened to you. You confidently stride into a room to do or get something and stop the second you get there, unable to remember what the devil it was.

  I’ve been taking this a step further of late, not just forgetting why I walked into a room but walking into the wrong room altogether. It’s more than a little disconcerting when you recall, while standing slack-jawed in the bathroom, that what you were after was lunch.

  Such behavior isn’t necessarily a function of getting older. Some of us are born forgetful. The missing-shoes story is a perfect example.

  I was preparing to go somewhere – where exactly seems to have escaped  me at the moment – and wherever it was necessitated wearing shoes. Maybe it was a considerable distance away or required walking over rough terrain – the details are a little hazy – but shoes were definitely needed.

  I looked everywhere for those shoes. In closets, under beds, outside on the patio, you name it. It hadn’t been that long since they were on my feet, but it was as if they’d dematerialized. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall where they were. 

  Then I remembered that a little while earlier I’d fixed myself a snack.

  Was it possible?

  No, the very idea was outlandish.

  It was possible. My shoes were in …

  The refrigerator.

  This didn’t happen a few months ago, or even a few years ago. I was a teenager when it happened.

  This was about the time that I started playing in a band. My main instrument has always been the guitar, but for a few years I played a bit of keyboards as well. Our group was setting up to play for a dance in Oregon one night when I realized that I’d forgotten the keyboard. We asked the audience members if any of them had one we could borrow. The result: a child’s toy keyboard that sounded like a cross between a kazoo and a calliope. 

  It was a very long night.

  Forgetfulness can be expensive. A couple of weeks ago, I forgot to turn off the water in the back yard, which has a small fountain that needs to be refilled every week or so. It only takes a few minutes, but I got sidetracked and left the water onall night long. The water bill hasn’t arrived yet. Luckily, my wife is out of town and may never see it. 

  “Forgetting to turn off the water doesn’t mean you’re getting Alzheimers, Dad,” one of my daughters said by way of reassurance. “Anybody could do that.”

  Well, maybe.

  But what about this?

  Regular readers may recall a recent column about a vacation rife with medical emergences involving pets. Roux, our older daughter’s dog, got in a fight with another dog. The results included a scratch on one of her eyes. Three weeks later, we’re still putting antibiotic ointment in it. Max, my wife’s pet lizard, got a lung  infection and had to have injections every other day.

  Anyone who think it’s easy to give a lizard an injection has never had to do it. Max was on full lizard alert the second he saw the needle coming. One person had to hold him while the other did the dirty work. 

  Usually that job falls the aforementioned daughter, who is a paramedic. On one of the days that Max had to have a shot, however, I was the only one available.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I called the vet, He’s going to do it. All you have to do is get the medicine out of the freezer and take Max to the clinic. Be sure to remember to take one of the needles, too.”

  “Of course! What do you think I am, forgetful or something?”

  I made absolutely sure to put both the medicine and the needles in the car. I also put Roux in the car, which wasn’t easy. She’d spent the night at our house and, assuming that I was taking her for her morning walk, bolted out of the garage and down the street. It took some doing, including a doggy-treat bribe, to get her in the car.

  The clinic’s receptionist’s eyes lit up when she saw Roux.

  “She’s so cute!” she gushed. “Would she like to have a treat?”

  This would have been like asking Elvis if he’d like to have a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Roux is the Joe DiMaggio of dogs when it comes to catching treats tossed from impressive distances. She is also a ham. She entertained the receptionist, and just about everyone else at the clinic, by catching treats until the novelty wore off and the applause ebbed.

  “So,” the receptionist said when things returned to normal. “You brought Max’s medicine?”

  “Yes. It’s right here.” 

  “And a needle for the injection?”

  “Right. It’s in this bag.”

  She looked at me expectantly …

  “Did you forget something?”

  “No, I think that’s everything.”

  “Are you sure?” 

  “Sure I’m sure. I gave you the medicine and the needle. What else …”

  Leaping lizards! I had forgotten Max!”

  Who takes everything to the doctor except the patient?

  It would be nice to think there are supplements that would make a person less forgetful, but my doctor says he doesn’t know of any that help much.

  So it looks like I’m stuck with being a modern-day version of the absent-minded professor.

  If this column isn’t in the paper the next time it’s supposed to be, you’ll know why.

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 had all the makings of a memorable vacation. It was the first time my wife and I and all three of our kids had taken a vacation together in many years.

  Our vacations used to provide fodder for columns. The kids invariably got colds, our cars broke down, I got chicken pox … Readers looked forward to our vacations because they made their own vacations look good by comparison.

  Those days are behind us, of course. The kids are grown now, and one of our daughters would be driving us in her recently serviced, high-tech SUV. What could possibly go wrong?  

  Our destination was the family cabin in Washington state. We got up in time to get an early start and were on the road by 7:30. That would put us there by 5:30. Plenty of time to unpack, have dinner and enjoy a relaxing evening. 

  We stopped in Ontario, Ore., for breakfast. We stopped in LaGrande, Ore., for snacks and a bathroom break. We stopped in Boardman, Ore., for lunch. With five of us in the car, the stops took longer than expected. The odds of having dinner and a relaxing evening were steadily shrinking.

  Just out of Baker City, Ore., my wife noticed a problem with Max.  Max, her pet lizard, was accompanying us on the trip, along with Roux, the family dog. (Roux was named at a shelter in Louisiana, where roux, a thickening agent used in sauces, is practically a food group.) 

  Max clearly was in trouble, opening her mouth and gasping for air. This had happened once before. A vet had diagnosed it as a lung infection and prescribed antibiotic injections. Within a few days, Max was her old self.

  “If only this had happened yesterday!” my wife lamented. “I could have taken Max to the vet then and everything would have been fine.”

  Unfortunately, we were several hundred miles from our vet. A Google search yielded veterinary offices in half a dozen Oregon and Washington cities, calls were made to all of them, and all but one either didn’t treat lizards, weren’t taking new patients or were so busy they couldn’t see Max until the following week. 

  The exception was an emergency clinic in Portland.  Not being all that familiar with Portland, I was a bit uneasy about our chances of finding it.

  “No worries. We’ll use Google Maps.”

  This would be the same Google Maps that has steered us wrong on multiple occasions, including one that resulted in driving two hours in the wrong direction on a remote stretch of desert. 

  The woman who answered the phone at the clinic asked us where we were and said it would take about 40 minutes for us to get there. An hour later, we weren’t even close. Google Maps had taken us on a scenic tour of Portland and greater Multnomah County. This included driving over the highest bridge in Portland, with a dizzying view of the Columbia River and the city. Or so I’m told. A lifelong acrophobiac, I had my eyes tightly closed.

  When we finally got there, the clinic looked like Costco during a toilet paper sale. It was jammed to the rafters with customers. There were cats in crates, dogs on leashes, kids crawling on the floor …

  I don’t spend enough time in Portland to know the current fashion trends there, but the clinic’s clientele was, shall we say, colorful – shaved heads, Mohawks, chains, piercings, facial tattoos … 

  We waited. And waited, and waited …

  This did not sit well with Roux. Roux is a dog that craves attention, and Max was getting all of it. She responded by lying down in the car, sulking and playing dead. 

  Roux is smart. So smart she speaks English. Not in actual words, of course, but her expressions and body language speak volumes.

  “You want to go for a walk?” I asked her.

  “ A walk? Do you really think a walk would make up for everyone ignoring me while that stupid lizard gets all the attention?”

  With that she sniffed haughtily, turned her back on me and played dead again. 

  To kill time, I chatted with a lavishly tattooed woman who was there with her bull terrier.

  “What’s wrong with your dog?” I asked her.

  “Swallowed a plum pit.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “My dog swallowed plum pit.”

  Of course. Plums are a staple of any canine diet. 

  “Did the vet get it out?” 

  “We haven’t seen the vet yet. We’ve been here for hours, and they say it will be two more hours.”

  We continued to wait. An hour passed, then another, and another … Midway through the fourth hour, my wife was called to the inner sanctum for a consultation.

  “They want to do blood work, an X-ray and a bronchoscopy,” she reported upon returning.

  “A bronchoscopy on a lizard? They’ve got to be kidding!”

  “They aren’t. The total would be $1,200. I told them to just give Max the same medicine they gave her in Boise last year.”

  Max has been receiving regular injections ever since and seems to be doing better. 

  Roux is another story. When relatives came to visit us at the cabin, she bit their new dog, Louis.

  “Bad dog!” we admonished her. “No treats for you today.”

  “Fine. I’ll just get up after you’re asleep tonight and raid the refrigerator. And if Louis come back I’ll bite him again.”

  Now Roux has an eye infection. That, at least, is the unofficial diagnosis. All of the vets we called were so busy they couldn’t see her.

  Personally, I think she’s faking it.

  We’ll be heading home in a few days, and none too soon.

  I’ve had about all the vacation I can stand.

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.