Friday, October 29, 2010

A day in the city

I spent Thursday in Portland hanging out with some really good friends. Some are long-time city dwellers like Jason, while others are newbies to the big canyons of concrete, glass and steel.

It was a rainy and damp trip up the I-5 corridor. The perfect drive for contemplating the future. The drizzle melts everything into a boring turn-of-whatever century Dutch landscape, so you can focus on anything other than the scenery.

I found a parking spot on 4th and Couch and walked the half-a-block to my friend Jason's studio. One of dozens of artist dens in an artists' collective building, I could tell his distinctive touch on the wall outside his suite.

Surrounded by SUGs and other collectible plastic figurines and bottles of Schlitz beer, and in a veritable shrine to Apple computers, Jason is about as at home in the city as anyone I've ever met. He fits into the mess of humanity as well as anyone and yet stands out as an artist in a city full of wannabes.

We walked six blocks in a heavy drizzle to The Roxy. It's not great food, but it combines two of our favorite things, breakfast and Steve Buscemi. We've been fans for a long, long time.

He drinks coffee and I drink green tea. We both ordered the Steve Buscemi, a wood chipper's favorite of corned beef hash and fried eggs.

He's disappointed I'm moving to Alaska, and I don't blame him. We've been best friends since fifth grade, and our families have vacationed together in Montana the last few years.

But our conversation runs to other matters and the grittiness of city life in a town known for its roses.

We walked off the Steve Buscemi in a hard drizzle that was trying for rain. Downhill and across Burnside to the south end of the Pearl, a haven for hipsters and artists who are sometimes one in the same.

I told him we'd see them every year still, we hugged and I drove to southwest Portland.

Jordan is a lot younger than me, but we've been friends for many years. He suggest we meet for coffee at 5th and Stark. He suggests we meet in half-an-hour. I don't want to wait that long, so I go on a wild goose chase looking for his apartment off Barbur Boulevard.

We venture back downtown to Stumptown Coffee and sit in low-back chairs and sip on large cups of coffee and tea as the rain falls in earnest outside. These new Portlanders show up one by one and we chat about life in the city. Having all come up in Salem, a mere 45-minutes and a world away south of Portland, we're fascinated by life here.

Anya rides up on her bike and takes off her skater helmet and shakes out her long blond hair as the boys tease her about tire spray.

Jordan sips an Americano while David drinks tea. Jordan check his iPhone while I ask David about the new ink on his wrist.

They are young and in the heartbeat of society. The big city is their playground, their backyard and their workplace.

I'm envious in the tall foyer of Stumptown Coffee. The smells of coffee and leather and maybe a little cigarette smoke and patchouli oil on the dress of the girl who brushes past me. I love the smells and sights and sounds in the big city. The traffic moving by and the way rain coats swish and heels sound on metal grates.

I love the way they relax in too tight clothes and plan their next social interaction. They've been friends for a long, long time, and it reflects in their gracefulness. It's a city dweller's peace in the chaos, and I'm forever hoping to experience it someday myself. I get a taste now and then, but it's in these moments that I live vicariously through their innocence and exploration.

There is nothing like a day in the city. Sure, throw in a visit to Powell's City of Books and a late-afternoon beer at Henry's, and you'd have the perfect day. But a Steve Buscemi and a few cups of green tea and hours of conversation on a rainy day are just as good sometimes.

Tim

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Hitting the reset button at home




Home is a feeling, a state of being.

My mother is the queen of hospitality. After just a few days in her care, all troubles seem to melt away as the good food, fellowship and rest start to brighten one's outlook and revive the soul.

Home is a familiar place where dark troubles in the distance, the great unknowns are reduced to a light drizzle on the windows rather than pelting cold that doubles you over in fear and confusion.

My family is a family of wanderers and virtual vagabonds, resistant to a lax existence tied to place. But we have a home, at least a place of congregation where we've gathered for many years.

In driving up that familiar, deeply sloped driveway lined with pine needles and oak leaves, I am aware of where I am. But its warmth and welcome are experienced only when occupied by the members of my family.

This week my little sister Aimee is traveling the Middle East for work, and though our dinner conversations are alive with stories and fellowship, it's not the same without her sitting at her familiar place at the table. My brother-in-law is away as well, and his conviviality is missed.

I've often thought about how one creates that sense of home. Especially in light of moving my family around as much as we have these last 16 years. My mother, as I've said, does this with an unswerving sense of hospitality and care. My father is the patriarch, the storyteller, the passer on of wisdom. Together, they are the sense of home I most want to emulate.

As places go, our little enclave along Battle Creek Road is not the quaintest old building or the most pristine hillside. The one-and-a-half acres are slightly overgrown, and the tall pines block the view for the most part.

It's a place created and recreated as our family grew. A hillside manor, of sorts, a place we come to gather where the marks of our former existence make us feel welcome but which do not hold a candle to the necessity of having family present. Without the players, this little world would not matter at all. Except to my brother, of course. His penchant for place is perhaps far more developed than the rest of us. His handy work is seen in the jungle-like back yard, where a fish pond and cold-hardy palm trees soak up the rain showers like sponges.

The old tree fort my dad built for us has been replaced by a new tree fort named the Dawn Treader in honor of our love for C.S. Lewis' famed children's books "The Chronicles of Narnia," but mostly because a tree fort in the imaginative state of being a ship is the most fun a kid can have. I think.

Life in our house happens around the dinner table, where we sit close together eating from myriad dishes like a tasty carousel circling in front of us each night. We spend long hours sitting and talking, going from dinner to late-evening tea and cookies through dozens and dozens of conversations.

It has always been this way. Only today there is more laughter and mirth as the house is filled with grandchildren running and playing as we fellowship.

The remnants of our attempts to farm the land are evident in the old chicken coop falling into disrepair, the old goat fences clinging to rotting posts and a rabbit or two eating grass on the lawn. We are not farmers, though I believe we're nostalgic for some trace of it in our history.

My mom travels the world with my father, she is savvy about the bigger picture and can converse about almost any topic with ease. But her pioneer roots are evident in the ceiling-high shelves full of canned goods in the garage. I don't know when she has the time to accomplish these things, but over the last few days we've tasted amazing brined pickles and fresh horse radish as well as dried peppers and other examples of her harvest.

There are many reasons to love the comforts of home. Mine are nearly all found in the individuals who make up my family. But we've carved out a bit of a comfortable Hobbit hole here on this hillside. When we're not adventuring around the world, we gather here and fill it with warmth and the smells of good food and conversation that resounds for me like cathedral bells long after I leave.

In moving to a place that is as far away as moving across the sea somewhere, I feel a sense of loneliness already, and it makes me want to grab up every last moment here as if I won't be back for some time.

Home is the place you come to reset all the settings. As I revive here with all that I love, I realize that this is what I will need to create for the next generation of us. Place is only as good as those who inhabit it.

Tim

Monday, October 25, 2010

The hardest drive

I wrote this in my head as I drove today.

That will have to serve as an apology for what follows.

I sat in the cab of the big U-haul truck and wondered how many emotions had bounced around the interior during the course of its life.

We pulled out of a cold and rainy Missoula at noon. Carson rode shotgun with his leopard gecko Morris. Carson cried for the first twenty minutes or so, especially as we passed through the neighborhood.

My closest friends came by to see us off, and it was all I could do to hold it together to keep thinking about what needed to go in the truck next.

I don't cry much. In fact, I shed tears so infrequently that my wife freaks out a little when it happens. All I wanted to do today was find some quiet place to be alone and think about all I was leaving behind. Instead I fought wind and rain behind the wheel of a big orange and white truck, stacking emotions like clothes in my suitcase.

The cab was a cathedral of sorts. A noisy, bumpy place to try and reflect on the events of the last two months. Carson and I tried to chat off and on, but we were both aware of how easy it would be to totally break down.

Missoula is apparently located in some state of mind people call the last best place. Sometimes I think certain situations are the last best...

Our goodbye get together on Friday served as a last chance to enjoy a beer with good friends. A last best party. Saturday evening was an impromptu last best dinner with a few close friends who had helped us move the detritus of our Missoula existence into that U-haul.

This morning when we were packing, I just wanted to be done and on the road. I knew that if I stopped long enough, all the emotions that have been building up would come pouring out, and that wouldn't be a pretty sight.

And still, in spite of keeping my mind focused on my task like a brain surgeon must, when my friends showed up for one last best goodbye, I felt myself slipping into that familiar pre-cry moistness. I looked the other way instead of making eye contact, and when I'd catch my wife losing it after hugging our neighbors goodbye, I had to start talking to myself out loud to keep from going there.

I wanted to harden all the soft parts and numb anything that felt sharp and uncomfortable. I don't have time to grieve right now. The hum in the cab of the U-haul was cathartic in a way. Like monks chanting. I started to try to match the tenor, but I found myself easing into memories too swiftly when I wasn't focused on something other than everything cascading into whatever pit that is within me that collects whatever fuels those stormy emotions.

Eastern Washington is cathartic too. Something about the way it has been scoured out by the many Glacial Lake Missoula floods stirs up sediment in my soul that keeps me from feeling much. I think about ancient floods and how so much land owes so much to such powerful forces of change outside of its control. I thought about Lewis and Clark and the fact that I've spent much of my life along a big portion of the trail they carved across the country. I thought about adventure and overcoming adversity, but too much thought like that shrinks you next to the giants of the past.

 Somewhere along the way I tried to cap the bottle by making notes about the future. This is what needs to be done by tomorrow. I need to finish this task by Thursday.

Then I got a text message from a friend in Missoula, and my world tilted a little bit, loosening whatever fastener I had tried to seal in those emotions with.

The kids all cried their little hearts out in the morning, and by late afternoon, they just wanted to be somewhere familiar. By the time we rolled into the driveway at grandma and grandpa Akimoffs' place, the kids were onto something new.

The sadness of leaving people you love is a very individual emotion. Everyone suffers something privately. There is no collective feeling that can be understood. For some it's visible, like tear-stained cheeks. For others it's a very personal piece of heart luggage with few visible signs of existence.

Long drives are good for sorting out thoughts and feelings. I've always felt collected after driving. Today was different. I should have let that U-haul-cab cathedral be my confessional, but I'm not quite ready to suffer. I know that will come. Like a good journalist, I like to put off the suffering until right before deadline. Somehow it sharpens the wit and creates beauty.

But my heart still hurts tonight. My longing for what used to be kept me from listening to certain songs I knew I would feel too much.

Ah, I miss you!

Tim

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Hot Springs Eternal

My favorite getaway will always be to a hot springs somewhere. Something about soaking in hot mineral water is embedded deep within me. I almost always ask if there are hot springs whenever I travel somewhere.

Montana isn't what I'd call a hot springs Mecca by any means, but I've found some of my favorite springs within an hour or two of Missoula.

"It's a beautiful day in Paradise." The typical greeting when you call Quinns Hot Spring's Resort is one of my favorites. The web site asks you to check in and make sure the pools are not taken up by overnight guests, so I look forward to their fun greeting whenever we get ready to go.

Seemed appropriate to begin one of the busiest weeks of our lives with a trip to the springs. I find hydro therapy to cause the most relaxed state I believe I can achieve.

The drive to Quinns is one of my favorite Western Montana trips. My daughter and I looked for deer on the summer-baked hillsides and on the backside of the National Bison Range while Cheryl took a nap.

The rolling highway reminds me of driving through parts of Sonoma County, where I first fell in love with hot springs.

My great grandparents owned a small piece of property in the town of Calistoga, which was nothing more than a little hippie enclave at the time. My great grandfather made wine and spent summers at the cottage known as a dacha. My father and his brothers and sister spent summers at Pachita's Hot Springs. And years later, that is where I first fell in love with soaking in hot water.

One of the lasting memories I have of spending some good time with my grandmother before she died was at Nance's Hot Springs in Calistoga. After Pachita's was renamed Indian Springs and transformed into a very high-end exlusive resort, we'd spend more and more time at the lower-end Nance's, and my grandmother reveled in the healing hot waters she had learned to love after almost 50 years in America.

Quinns reminds me of the old Pachita's Hot Springs. It's rustic and unrefined. It's woodsy decor has not yet been stuccofied and palm treed like the California resorts.

Gabbers and I enjoy a soak in the warmer pool at Quinns
The pools are quiet as we arrive. After changing into our swim wear, we heard a lyrical language coming from the far end of the cool pool. My wife smiled at me knowingly as she recognized the Russian words for "more people are coming."

I laughed at her, because no matter what hot springs we visit, we'll almost always find kindred Slavic spirits abounding. Slavs love hot water. Visit Lolo Hot Springs any time of year and you'll hear a beautiful symphony of byelaruskaya spoken as you enter the pool. The same goes for Fairmont Hot Springs near Butte.

We settled into the warmer pool next to two couples wearing knit caps and conversing casually about coming to Montana from Canada. I can follow along with Russian to a point, but when native speakers are speaking to each other, the speed at which they communicate is often too much for me to catch more than a gist of their conversation.

At one point, one of the men moved over into the hottest pool and sank down to his neck, his knit cap looked like a black mushroom on the pool surface. After a few minutes, he stepped over the wall into the cold pool, which felt colder than the air temp, which was 36 degrees when we arrived. He sat in the cold pool up to his neck for about two minutes as his companions discussed how many minutes he should spend in the pool to reap the benefits of hydro therapy. Most Slavs believe that soaking in pools with different temperatures is really good for the circulation.

The method the man used is one of my favorite soaking techniques. I like to start out in the middle warm pool and spend about 5 minutes soaking before moving to the hottest pool for 3 or 4 minutes. When I'm ridiculously hot, I get hop over the wall into the cold pool.

The water is so cold it numbs you instantly, and if you do it quickly enough, you won't feel a whole lot until you are completely submerged. If you're completely still, the cold water won't feel like anything, and your breathing becomes very deep and your oxygenated blood causes your body to rise to the surface.

I like to float in the ice cold water until my breathing normalizes. If I can make a full five minutes, I feel completely refreshed. Once you start to move around, you begin to feel the cold water. Panic sets in, and all you can think about is getting into the warm water again.

After soaking in the cold pool, I ease into the larger warm pool for a brief swim to increase the already beneficial circulation effects. My daughter starts to chase me, and I begin the cycle all over again.

Quinns is not always so quiet and peaceful, but as I sat back and craned my head up to watch the sun come over the jagged hills behind the resort, I couldn't help but be grateful for one last quiet soak.

After a bison burger and a Bloody Mary for lunch, we cruised back to a completely empty set of pools for a few more rounds of hydro therapy. At times I relaxed to the point of falling asleep in the warm pools. A good shot in the cold pool revived me, and when new swimmers showed up, they remarked that I must not have any blood in my system to be able to completely submerse myself in the cold pool.

Knowing that the closest hot springs I can find to Anchorage are in Fairbanks is bit disconcerting. But my plan is find the first Slavic person I can find and ask where closer hot springs are hiding. Slavs always know where to find a good place to soak.

Tim

Monday, October 18, 2010

A sense of place

There will be a lot of lasts this week. This is in fact our last Monday in Missoula. Last kickball game tonight, last flag football game for Carson, final cross country practice for Cole. Next week at this time we'll be in Salem, Oregon meeting up with our trailer that will ship our belongings to Alaska.

Today we are going to take a few hours and go to one of our favorite hot springs. We have a long week of packing our life up into boxes, so I want to spend one last day enjoying the good life of Western Montana.

There are few places like this, and after three years I understand why people carve out a life here despite a poor economic base. The amenities in this region of the Northern Rockies are like nowhere else. Mountains, lakes, rivers, hot springs, national parks and wildlife better than the best zoo are just a few of the reasons people move here.

The adventures we've had here as a family can only probably be rivaled by some time spent in the last frontier, but we won't know that until we have lived it for awhile. Place is the great forgotten character in the story of life. Missoula is a place where people are in touch with that primordial notion of the home pond more than anywhere I've ever visited before.

A sense of place defines Missoula so much that people are willing to make less money in return for living in proximity to places like the Rattlesnake wilderness or the Bitterroot Mountains. People carve a life out of some very meager economic sediment. Many of our friends have multiple jobs or cram their families into tiny apartments in order to live somewhere many call the last best place.

I struggled to see this when I first moved here. In fact, for nearly three years I was frustrated at the idea that anyone should earn less because of some nature tax. I still think the idea is absurd, but I'm less inclined to blame those who choose to reside here in spite of the nature tax.

But I will gladly blame city officials and those leaders of the largest industries, including the university, for continuing to make Missoula Poverty With A View. A nature tax does nothing to improve this city, nor does it keep people away as you might hope. Californians continue to move to Montana every year.

Place is integral to our story. When my grandparents told their story, place was a character that shifted with them. It was a trail through mountain passes, a city in northern China, a refugee camp in the Philippines, a boat sailing across the Pacific Ocean. It was an apartment on Geary Street in San Francisco, and I caught up with their story when place was a lovely little house in Pacifica, California.

For others, place is a still point, like every 4th generation Montanan I've ever met. They are in tune with the fenced parcel of land back to their great grandfathers who homesteaded these parts. For Native Americans, place is a 10,000-year-old continent finally free of ice where they could roam and have their being.

I don't have a strong connection to place. If I did, it would be a cedar-lined ocean shore with thundering surf and a salty nose. That's as close as I can come to identifying with place. I love my parents' wooded home in the Willamette Valley, but it's a stop for me. My birthplace of Santa Rosa, California is one of my favorite places. My grandfathers plowed those grape-seeded hillsides and valleys. Richenau an der Rax is where I think I fell in love with mountains, hiking, skiing and life in a quiet woodland. Pasadena, California is where I learned to love big, ugly, sprawling cities teeming with humanity. Salem, Oregon is where I found my best friend. It is also that which is most familiar to me and therefore that from which I most readily flee. Honolulu, Hawaii is where I fell in love with the crossroads, those cities that blend life from many different pathways.

In Missoula, I fell in love with community. No other city exhibits community the way Missoula does. From weekly gatherings for lunch or dinner in Caras Park to First Friday art walks and community runs along the river, I've never seen a town so aware of its identity. That I could readily talk to the mayor, leading citizens, long timers and newcomers at any point of any day speaks volumes about how tight this city is.

I don't have a sense for what Anchorage will be like. Four days there was not enough to get even a small feeling about it. But I can't wait to find out what I think about it a year from now.

Maybe place moves with me, as it did for my family as they emigrated across the vast Eurasian Steppe. Maybe the cities I've lived in collectively add up to place for me. I don't know. All I really know is that I've yet to find that stretch of cedar-lined coast with roaring waves and salty air.

Tim

Thursday, October 14, 2010

The kids aren't alright

The question I get most often now is: "So what do the kids think about moving to Alaska?" The second most common question is: "How are the kids handling the move?"

Those are fair questions, but as a parent, I find it tough to answer for the kids. So I asked them about how they feel about the move.

My oldest son, Cole, answers that he does not wish to leave Missoula. When pressed for reasons, he'll say that he'll miss his best friend Grant, running cross country and his school friends.

Cole is a focused kid. When he was born, people would remark about how calm he was. As he grew up, we realized we had a little man on our hands and not a toddler. He always prefers to hang out with the adults. He likes to be part of the conversation, and he hates to be left out.

He wants to attend Stanford University, after which he plans to get a master's degree in computer design. His goal is to be the next CEO of Apple Computers. To that end, he works very hard at school and serves on the student council. I sometimes wonder where on earth this kid came from.

Alaska is all right, he says. He's looking forward to the adventure, but he's sad to be leaving all that he put so much energy into these last three years.

As a parent it's sometimes difficult to quantify all that a child has seen and done in the same period of time. I have to learn to value those things that my kids value in order to assess the cost of moving them away.

Our middle child, Carson, is a dreamer who lives inside his imagination at least 10 hours a day. He doesn't vocalize things well, so I can only assume he's struggling with the idea of moving. He's 52-pounds soaking wet, and he dreams of playing football for the Griz, because his best friend Dylan has the same dreams. Carson plays flag football and absolutely lives for the game.

When I've asked him how he feels about moving, he shrugs his shoulders and throws his surfer-length blond hair out of his eyes. "Ummm, I don't know. It will be cool," he says.

That's about as far as I've progressed with him. But I can see other signs of nervousness there. He's struggling with leaving what he's become comfortable with. Carson has huge dreams, but he, more than any of us, needs a firm foundation on which to have those dreams. Unstable ground means he lives more in the here and now, and when you live in the here and now, it's very difficult to fly. I know this, because Carson is me. I was once the very 9-year-old he is. I dreamed the same dreams and lived in my imagination as much as possible.

In some ways, I empathize more with Carson than anyone else, because I see some of this through his eyes. I can remember how he feels, and I feel bad that he can't express himself through what adults consider normal pathways of expression.

Gabrielle is, like most four-year-olds, along for the ride. She doesn't seem to show any anxiety, and she's legitimately excited about some of the things she's heard about. Almost every park in Anchorage has a frozen field for hockey and ice skating. She's excited to see moose in town, and this will be her first airplane ride.

Mostly she just asks questions about those things that affect her day. "Mom, what are we doing today?" I don't think she has a concept of leaving friends behind. She certainly didn't when we moved to Montana three years ago. It bothers me a bit that this move will teach her about the pain of losing friends.

Mostly I tell people that the kids are doing just fine. Fine is a relative term when considering that we're packing up our lives, leaving our own house and moving to the last frontier, a place from which we have to fly to visit family instead of the one-day trips we used to be able to do under cover of darkness so I could drive in peace.

The easiest explanation, and the one I struggle with the most is this: The kids aren't alright.

As the Offspring song says:

Chances thrown, nothing's free
Longing for, used to be
Still it's hard, hard to see
Fragile lives, shattered dreams

But kids are resilient in a way that adults are not. Those shattered dreams change up a little bit. Everyone wants to be a garbage man, an astronaut and a firefighter at some point in their lives. Relocating can push dreams around a bit, like puzzle pieces, but kids are nothing if not masters of putting those puzzle pieces back together. And often as not, they'll get a new picture and a new dream out of the deal.

This is my chance to learn something about rebuilding from those little master craftsman of dreams.

Tim

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The neighbors

We didn't know our neighbors had a kid the first six months we lived here in Missoula. Our middle son kept telling us they had a kid who was the same age. We thought he was talking about his invisible friend.

Then one day we saw him. A portly child walking along the fence. We only noticed him briefly before his parents whisked him inside. We had to apologize to our son for not believing him.

We are no longer tribal. We live close by others without knowing the first thing about them. My wife and I like to go over to our neighbors' houses unannounced, often with a bottle of wine or maybe a loaf of bread in hand. It was this way when we lived in Hawaii.

Northern climates are different. I feel like many people are isolationists living 10-feet away from their neighbors and trying to ignore that fact.

We didn't always have to force the issue though. Within a few weeks of moving to Missoula, we met some of our favorite people in this town. They lived in the cute corner house with the nice landscaping. They had a daughter a little younger than our middle son, and a son the same age as our daughter.

They'd say hi, and we'd say hi, and pretty soon we'd talk or bring a bottle of wine over. We'd talk at school functions and on Saturdays after mowing the lawn. They let us borrow their job stroller, and we let them borrow our child bicycle seat.

I'll never forget the first Christmas season in Missoula. Chris and Valerie, who are both talented pianists, invited us for an evening of Christmas carols with other faculty from the University of Montana school of music. Voice teachers and other musicians filled the room, including the symphony director. Beautiful music and new friendships characterized that night. In the years to come, we would gather at their place to play Guitar Hero with the piano professor, the voice professor and the director of the Missoula symphony. It was surreal fake playing music with three musical geniuses, but they were gracious, and we laughed and jammed until the early hours of the morning.

Chris and I would mountain bike together and catch the latest guy movies with another friend, Creighton. We'd play out what-if scenarios and laugh almost until we cried. At least I did.

As neighbors go, you could not ask for more. As friends go, you won't find better.

Then we moved, and I didn't see Chris and Val as often. We popped in from time to time leaving off as if we just saw each other the night before.

After a year in the new house, I couldn't describe the lady across the street to you. I've only seen her once or twice. The neighbors to either side of us are very nice. She works nights, so we say hi once-in-a-while. He is a U.S. Marine, and we have a beer together every so often and talk about house projects.

But our backdoor neighbors have become like best friends. Walking over unannounced and sitting on our front porches sipping drinks or playing guitars or smoking cigars are just a few of the things I consider bounty from our friendship.

They are the reason we bought a house in this neighborhood. Mike was a co worker whom I didn't know well, but I'd heard through work that he bought a house in a new neighborhood near where we'd both once lived.

As our house was being built, we'd hang out with Mike and Michelle at their place. Theirs having been built several months before ours. We'd dream together of backyard barbecues in summer and our kids playing together across the alley.

Soon summer rolled around, and I'd amble over to Mike's place to get a rake or a broom or just shoot the breeze. It's the idealistic kind of neighbors you see in the movies.

But it's something much more than that too. Mike and Michelle are there in the difficult times. They are friends beyond the common. When we needed someone to take our daughter for the weekend so we could get out of town, Mike never even flinched. When we needed advice, they gave it unselfishly, and when we get together, there is an easiness that is not easily found. Conversation is smooth and the laughter is contagious.

I remember growing up having difficult neighbors. People who just liked to make life hard on my dad. There was no good reason for it, just a plethora of cantankerous people. I always hoped for a good neighbor some day. When we first moved to Missoula, I thought I was going to end up with the same cantankerous people. What I found are neighbors I'd do anything to take with me. People of such quality that they make you want to be more like them.

Good neighbors are hard to find. You can't always pick them. But if you get lucky enough to have good friends to live next to, you have found the best you can expect in life.

Mike and Michelle and Chris and Val, you are some of our favorite people in the world. We feel privileged to have been able to call you neighbors and friends.

Tim

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

"If you've never failed, you've never lived"

Normally I don't go for these motivational videos, but something about all of the individuals in this short clip who failed and yet succeeded really got me.



Enjoy,

Tim

The things you learn when you get laid off

I remember being called into the publisher's office on that last day of August. That sinking feeling of knowing that somebody knows something you don't. The looks on their faces. Sad, but not really sad, more sorry for themselves for having to ruin their day or maybe just the hour, probably.

But then a little ray of hope.

"We're going to let you keep your blog."

"Yeah, it represents all your hard work, your blood sweat and tears."

It's not much of a consolation prize when you're getting laid off, but it's a helluva lot better than a cold, escorted walk to the door.

I remember thinking about it after the clouds of dissolution parted. It wasn't a huge gift, and in reality, no one would be able to pick up after I left it. It's too much of a labor of love. It's something you have to give birth to. You can't adopt a blog very easily.

But after weeks of sending E-mails asking about when I could transfer the blog to my own account, I started to feel like the child who is told there is a surprise in the next room just to remove him from the current room.

I started hearing about the newspaper editor spreading the news that I had somehow relinquished interest in the blog as she recruited new writers for it.

If I have learned anything from my wife in all the long years I've known her, it's that she will fight for justice far more than I will. She has a sense for it that I do not. Perhaps I'm jaded, but I don't believe man's justice is wise, nor do I believe it prevails even when somewhat close to a universal sense of justice.

But with her encouragement, I sent notes out to the far corners of the corporation that formerly employed me seeking justice in the form of an appeal based on something that wasn't in writing, merely the word of two respected co workers.

My appeal was returned today with these words:

"Tim, I have looked into the matter of this blog and your separation from Lee Enterprises.
The Missoulian intends to keep the blog and maintain the content.
As far as receiving an understanding to give you this blog; besides any authority Stacey and Jim may or may not have had to allegedly agree to this; you surrendered any claim when you signed the release of rights and claims and received your severance payment."


I'm not the dunce whose appearance I must often give off. I understood at the outset that giving away corporate property is a big no, no. In fact, I have seen numerous battles over intellectual property like this. I know lawyers who deal specifically in this realm.

I did, however, believe the publisher when she said she would draw up papers regarding the blog if I agreed to sign the release of rights. I generally take people at their word. In this case it might have helped to understand all the legalities, something I'm going to assume neither of us knew very well.

But no matter, this battle is over, and it's time to move on beyond it. To the writers who've inherited my progeny, I wish you the best of luck. When I say it's a labor of love, I mean that completely. You will not love this. You may, in fact, come to hate it.

Justice is better served cold. I do not feel a warmth for it as my wife does. Instead, I'd rather look beyond perceived personal injustices and out toward those places where injustice, if it's a quantifiable thing, occurs to the point of matching those universal laws, those unalienable rights we like to chatter on about.

The rights of indigenous people. The rights of women and children in lawless places. The rights of the press. The rights of the people.

These are worth pursuing when it comes to justice. A silly little blog is hardly worth fighting for. Maybe it's just the principle of the thing. Maybe it's my arch nemesis, a characteristic conservatism that finds personification an an old editor I once worked for. Or in the uphill battles against the old mindset that I fight against on a daily basis. Principles are worked out in the individual. You live by yours, I'll live by mine.

And so my appeal ends, and it's time to move on to the next new thing.

Tim

Monday, October 11, 2010

Mon Ami

My final Mourning Would mens' breakfast on Mount Sentinel
I have had a lot of close friends in my life. Some live far away, and yet we stay in constant contact, while others are on the periphery, and we connect when we can.

Finding a new set of friends at 34 is a tough business. You spend a lot of time at work and the rest of your time with family. There are few opportunities for guys' nights or getting in some workout time with the guys.

But if there is one thing I take away from Missoula, it's the amazing friendships I've made during my time here. These are not throwaway relationships. These are lifelong friends that I won't get to see every day anymore.

I'd like to highlight a few of these.

The first two gentlemen I was privileged enough to get to know in Missoula are journalists, and therefore they hold a special place in my thoughts. The venerable Tristan Scott, reporter extraordinaire and the writer I'd most like to emulate. And Cory Walsh, whose fine news mind and analysis of life I have come to depend on completely. These two took me for a drink on my very first visit to Missoula, and we've had many a conversation over pints or drams of whiskey since.

Another gentlemen from the newspaper that I'd like to highlight is the one and only Michael Lee Moore. "The Other Micheal Moore," as he has come to be known. This southern transplant to Missoula has all the charm and hospitality of his roots intact, and he's become, aside from being a great personal friend to me, a friend of the entire family. My wife and kids adore him. It's not just his willingness to teach us the proper techniques of rock climbing, it's the way he earnestly engages with people.

A number of my Missoula homies have moved on, but we stay in touch. Graham Murtaugh, Bynum Boley, Adam Richards. You guys are not only the tallest friends I've ever had, you're some of the classiest. I miss you guys.

Wylie Carr, I know you're still here, and though we don't connect nearly as often as we should, the adventures I've had with you all over this crazy place will go down in whatever annals these kinds of things go down in, not to mention my notebooks.

Nicky T, I don't see you as often as I'd like to, but you came to represent the finest example of what I consider a Montanan to be. I'm glad I know you buddy. 

But every man has an inner circle. That group of guys that typify his character and in which he finds that rich combination of edification and criticism he needs to grow.

These are not easily found and rarely in one place. I was lucky to have stumbled into a perfect storm of friendships that were honed quickly in small but intense fires. Things like early morning hikes, backcountry camping, hunting, fishing and those refining conversations that are like reading the most illuminating chapter in an illuminating book.

From the first day Jon Lewis was a kindred spirit and yet the polar opposite of me. Quiet and contemplative where I'm loud and all too often obnoxious, he is the reflective nature I still need to develop. He's the listener I would like to be. The richest of friends, he offers an unconditional view of life that one lucky enough to be his friend can sharpen the dullest of tools on. In this sense, I am blessed to be sharper because of him.

Beau McBryde is not the person I would naturally be drawn to. A rugged outdoorsman with a passion for living that I have seen in very few people, Beau extrapolates man knowledge from some well that the majority of men have lost touch with over the years. Beau won't touch digital, his analog nature being more in touch with the natural things. Our friendship was forged over arguments related to his criticism of the industry I worked in. And I am fascinated by him. He knows how to smoke a wild turkey and skin and tan a hide. He has old knowledge that belies his age. He's a man in the way my grandfather was a man, a way of life most have lost touch with. Beau has put me in touch with elements that are some of the rawest ingredients of men, of friendships of life.

The good doctor. Chris Caldwell is, for lack of a better word, a specimen. Physically fit and imposing with a squared off jaw like a movie actor, he's the kind of guy that I couldn't stand in high school. I've always been round and jovial when I longed for tall and lanky. I'm sure there was carry over when we first met, and I assumed his personality would match his looks. What I found was one of the most thoughtful and intelligent people I've ever been privileged to know. What's more is he has that enduring quality, the heart of a child. That unequivocal view of life whereby everything is brighter and more beautiful than another person can imagine. Chris brings this view to friendship, which is sacred to him. I've learned more about myself from Chris than anyone else in my life up to this point.

Mike Lake is one of the nice guys. His reputation at work is that of someone who would bend over backwards to help someone else out. That is a rare quality these days. I came to rely on Mike at work on tough issues that needed a creative solution. But it was a simple lunchtime tradition of hiking to the M on Mount Sentinel that has meant more to me than anything else lately. With work becoming increasingly more stressful, Mike and I would venture up those 13 switchbacks every day talking through our problems, planning our futures, encouraging each other and burning off those work worries. Family, work, sports, it was all fair game on our hikes. We bounced ideas off each other and I'd give anything to be able to work with Mike again and restore that tradition. I don't  know if I'm going to miss Mike as a colleague or neighbor more. But I know that I won't have to miss him as a friend.

There are others of you who impacted me and continue to do so as my days in Missoula wind down. You should each get your own descriptions, but this is a blog, and I should follow the rules.

But these gentlemen have come to quantify friendship for me. These are not suburban friendships or casual in any way. These are guys who come in and out of my life on a daily basis, and if there is anything that terrifies me in this move, it is that I won't have that daily interaction that I've come to rely on.

I've never been one for goodbyes, mostly because I've had to live through too many. Let this serve as a reminder of what we built here over these last years. A rock pile by which to find our way back some day.

Thank you all,

Tim

Friday, October 8, 2010

Leaving the continental United States

The logistics of moving to Alaska are very much like moving to a foreign country. Some people actually refer to Alaska as a foreign country.

My conversation with several shippers yesterday went like this:

"I need to ship the contents of a small three-bedroom house to Alaska. Can you accommodate that?"

"Are you sure you need to move to Alaska?"

"... Yes, it's where my job is at."

"Well, we only ship within the continental United States now sir. We no longer have shipping to Alaska."

"Alaska is part of the North American continent. It's attached to Canada, which was still part of the North American Continent the last time I checked. You can drive there from here."

"That's contiguous United States sir."

"I know, I can access Wikipedia too."

"Well, if you want to move somewhere else, let me know, I think I can help you get a a discount."

And so on and so forth. I actually had several conversations like this. Turns out there are only a handful of people who ship to Alaska any more.

Another conversation:

"Can you describe the contents of your house."

"I've got a dark brown L-shaped couch, a lightly stained bookshelf..."

"No, sir, I meant an inventory of items you'd like to ship to Alaska."

"Oh, well, yes, we have a couch, a book shelf, five mattresses, a futon, two televisions, a lamp and maybe 20 boxes of belongings we'd like to bring."

"Wow, you guys travel light."

"That's the dream. The reality is we'll have twice that."

"Oh, ok, let me give you a dream price and a real price then."

Alaska is so near and yet so far away. It's a short three-hour hop from Seattle by air, a three-day journey by inland passageway via a ferry boat or a five-day drive from Seattle.

There is no cheap way of getting in or out.

I can't even begin to describe how grateful I am for our friends both in Alaska and in Missoula (former Alaskans) who have offered to help us navigate this move. You are all amazing people.

It's 2010. Why don't we have a teleportation device that could work for this kind of move yet? The concept existed when I was a little kid watching Star Trek.

As I type, my wife is packing the house and secretly jabbing daggers in my spine. I hate packing up a house. I like the heavy lifting and putting boxes in the back of a truck. Putting stuff in boxes is so not my forte. I think when I was young I never got one of those balls with squares, triangles and circles cut out and into which you'd try to fit the cut out pieces. I just don't have a good sense of fit.


Tim

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Thirty seven days in the unemployment line

It looks as though I'm going to have to change the name of this blog. I was originally inspired by the government extension of unemployment aid allowing laid off Americans to collect for up to 99 weeks.

My position at the Missoulian newspaper was cut on Monday, September 30. I applied for unemployment immediately, and to date I've received nothing but slips of paper saying my unemployment aid status is pending.

Last night I accepted a job at the new director of digital content at KTUU, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska. Somehow Ninetynineweeks just doesn't seem that appropriate any more. However, I don't want to leave any interested readers hanging, so I'll continue to chronicle the adventure as it progresses.

My wife and I spent a lot of time in Hawaii in the early part of our marriage. Having to move away after we had our first child, we vowed to find a way back some day. Since then, we returned to Oregon, spent time traveling and working in Eastern Europe and ended up in Missoula, Montana, which is not exactly a population center. And now Alaska, with an even lower population than Montana, is our our next destination. Things don't always make sense, but I find that big picture stuff is often a little fuzzy and distal. Probably for a good reason.

I have always loved the ocean, but I have come to love the mountains. Anchorage seems to have both in abundance, which is something very satisfying to me.

Several months ago I was chatting with a friend in Alaska about our various moves since we met several years ago when I was researching a story for a University of Oregon publication. We would eventually end up working together at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon, and we founded the craft beer blog - "Will blog for beer."


On this evening, I was asking about life in Alaska, a place she moved after her husband graduated from law school in Oregon. To my surprise, one of the best print writers I'd ever worked with was now working at a broadcast station.


She took a few minutes to explain that the company was expanding beyond the traditional 5 and 6 p.m. broadcast news to a more web-centric model to provide news digitally in the way Alaskans are increasingly digesting their news.


She told me they were going to begin a search for a digital content director and asked if I was interested in having her forward my resume on to the station president.


I floated the idea past my wife the next day, and I got the reaction I thought I would get. She sort of frowned and cocked her head sideways with that look that says, "You're crazy, and I hope I didn't hear you right."


I let it go and didn't think much more about it until that fateful Monday.


After sort of processing the idea of being laid off and immediately formatting several plans, including grad school, self employment, international job possibilities and cobbling a bunch of local job offers together, I came back to the Alaska job and decided to E-mail my friend to find out if that search was on.


It was, and while figuring out how to navigate the unemployment aid system, I was corresponding with my future boss in Anchorage.


Finally we were invited to travel to Anchorage to meet with the team there and to check things out around town. I've usually done this part of the job interview process myself, but this time Cheryl came with me, as I knew she'd be the hardest sell.
Sunset from downtown Anchorage
Turns out we both loved Anchorage. The sun was just setting as we flew into the city over the tortured ice-bound world of southwest Alaska. I could see a monolithic shadow to the north, something so immense I had to scrunch down in my seat to see the entire mass. This was Denali. The snowless Chugach range framed in the twinkling lights of Anchorage as we landed.


Ocean and mountains. It's like a complete world for me, though neither of us have any illusions about how difficult winters can be up there. We're pretty big fans of the light.


A move to Anchorage is not taken lightly. Not by the prospective employer and not by those seeking a job in that state. So the drawn-out process has been a bit torturous as our funds have shrunk to uncomfortable levels.


To accept the offer last night was rewarding for many reasons, not just the physical need to know that our future is set. It's rewarding to know I'll be able to continue in the job that my journalism career has morphed into. Going from a traditional print reporter to mobile journalist and videographer to online reporter and finally a digital manager is something I didn't expect when I walked across the graduation platform at the University of Oregon, but it's twice the career I planned for and therefore twice as rewarding.


It's nice to know I won't have to wait around for unemployment checks that never come. And searching for jobs is a torturous activity in this day in age. I will not miss it.


Now begins the daunting task of getting ourselves to Alaska. You can drive, but it takes up to five or six days. Shipping items is expensive, as is flying. This blog will likely continue to explore the whimsical nature of family antics, the challenges of moving to America's last frontier and the interesting details of settling in a place that might as well be a million miles away from family for the ease of getting their and back.





Tim

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Try a little perspective

At least two-days worth of growth
So maybe shaving my goatee off was not the best idea when the current rate of change around my house exceeds all of our coin jars and piggy banks put together.

My wife's reaction was harsh. She can't look at me without giggling, and she'll have nothing to do with me until my face grows back, as she puts it.

Change is rough on families. Our middle child, Carson, is feeling so much stress related to the possibility of moving to a completely foreign place, that he made himself sick this last weekend. The other two kids are feeling it too, but they are better about verbalizing their feelings, which in turn helps us process better with them.

Aside from my bad judgment regarding my facial hair, I have been playing the perspective game with my wife and kids the last few weeks. Yes, our situation is bad, but we've got a house over our heads and food in our refrigerator. No, I don't have a job yet, but if we need to go live with grandma and grandpa, I'm sure they'll be fine with that. (that's cool right, mom and dad?)

Nothing does the trick like taking their minds off the bad things and transferring them to good things or even new adventures on the horizon. Playing the there-are-starving-children-in-Africa card has never worked well on my kids, but understanding the complex set of issues around getting laid off has allowed us to communicate things and set goals.

We put the house up for rent this weekend, then my wife and I had a late talk one evening where she expressed sadness at knowing that all her dreams for this place, the color schemes she picked out, the decoration projects for the kids' rooms were all going away. Yes, we'll still own the house, but someone will rent it from us.

I can understand this. She waited a long time for me to get comfortable with the idea of buying a house. Somewhere last year before our closing date, I murmured the term, "watch us buy this place and then I get laid off." Harmless, seemingly innocuous, something everyone says when they buy a house, right?

It's a house, not the house we've always wanted, but it was our own for a little while. Just enough to start to get creative. We actually painted the mud room and made a flagstone patio. still, it's just a house, probably one of several we'll own in our lifetime together.

 Perspective.


I stood talking to a friend after church on Sunday when I felt someone stuff something into my back pocket. I thought it was one of the kids stuffing the church program in like they usually do, but when I walked out to the car I reached back and pulled out a wad of cash. We're not broke yet, but we've felt the pinch of having only a few weeks of expenses left in our bank account. A friend felt our need and blessed us with enough money to pay some remaining bills and provide a little breathing room.

Perspective.

Whenever I'd get the E-mailed goodbye notes from other friends laid off from the journalism field, I'd inevitably get depressed all day after finding out. But a day would pass, and I'd think about their situation less and less. A lot of those feelings came rushing back at me when I was laid off. It's a thin line between having a job and looking for a job.

When a friend was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago, we felt bad. The struggle for hope is something most people can only watch from the sidelines.

Getting laid off is a big hit to one's ego. It's a big hit to one's finances and a hit to family stability. It's a big deal.

Last week doctors gave my friend nine months to live.

Perspective.

Tim

Monday, October 4, 2010

Forcing the Dream Part III

Getting from Missoula, Montana to Jaipur, India is not the easiest of tasks. Start with a $300 ticket to fly out of Missoula, and you'll find yourself searching anything out of Spokane instead.

Itinerary: Spokane to Seattle on Horizon. Seattle to Frankfurt on Scandinavian Airlines, Frankfurt to New Delhi on Scandinavian airlines. Total flight time: 19 hours. New Delhi to Jaipur by automobile. Total trip time: 28 hours.

I was disoriented landing in a strangely foggy and somewhat chilly New Delhi. I found my bags and wandered around the terminal for about 10 minutes to collect my thoughts. I bought a Coke and a candy bar and phoned my friends in Jaipur.

The taxi sent to collect me was delayed in a horrific six-hour traffic jam coming into the city. For anyone unaware of what the Indian freeway system looks like, think about a post-apocalyptic Mardi Gras celebration with tank-like floats painted garrulous schemes of red, yellow, green and orange with green tarps. At most, they travel at a benign 15-20 kilometers per hour.

I was starting to fall asleep in my chair when my driver shook me awake. For a moment I forgot where I was, and the red and white color scheme on the Coke bottle in front of me and crumpled Milky Way wrapper gave me something solid to focus on.

We hopped in a tiny car and drove into what seemed like California coastal fog, a shroud that New Delhi wears something like 70 percent of the time.

Barely 15 kilometers from the airport, we ran into the traffic jam, something that reminded me of the lines at the passenger ferry terminals in Europe where you wait for hours to be loaded onto the big ships that cruise the Baltic Sea.

The taxi driver, who didn't speak any English, tried to communicate that we'd have to wait out the jam and pulled over, turned off the engine and promptly folded his seat back and went sleep.

If you can't beat them, join them.

Sleep sounded good, and although the excitement of being in a completely foreign place was starting to infest my mind, I put my seat back and went to sleep too.  Three hours later I awoke to the sound of a thousand trucks starting. It is not a pleasant sound, in fact it reminds one of the increasing drone of a hoard of angry bees flying in your direction.

I reached over and shook the taxi driver awake, and we inched our way into the slow-crawling line of trucks that make up India's commerce system. On a good day it's a six-hour drive from Delhi to Jaipur. On this day it was more than 10 hours with the delay outside of Delhi.

Once on the road, the darkness did what darkness does best. It lent a very mysterious blanket to a place the imagination couldn't quite conjure up. I found myself trying to stare out in to the field and envision the place, but I couldn't.

We stopped for tea as the sun came up. Thick, illustrious light raked the fields on either side of the road, illuminating farms and villages that might as well have come from a Dr. Suess book for all the familiarity they had to me. Large disks of collected manure sat drying in stacks in front of huts as burning fuel, and colorful saris decorated clotheslines like whimsical pirate ships.

The sweet tea tasted so good in the cool of the morning. We sat in the truck stop and sipped the tea and snacked on something akin to potato chips. The colors and smells began to resonate with me, causing the synapses to fire and begin the recording process.

 The desert region of northwest India offers the most vistas. Big sandy deserts, palm-treed, roadside oasis' and azure reflecting ponds that increase the beauty of long-empty palaces are a few of the eye-candy treasures. And Suessical images of elephants and two-humped dromedaries plodding along freeways are so magical you can't help but smile widely at the sight.

Jaipur is not an oasis. It's a city of three million people on the edge of the desert. An outpost of sorts, the last stronghold of the Rajputs, Jaipur, the Pink City, is a monument to what I imagine life must have been like during the height of Middle Eastern power. A gilded life of finery and luxury unequaled.

We were stopped several times by police men trying to confiscate the taxi for political purposes. If a politician needs a vehicle to get from point a to point b, he has only to have a traffic policeman find a good car and confiscate it for his purposes.

At one such stop we sped off through a tight alley, a feat that reminded me of some such scene in any one of several James Bond films. We slammed into a wedding party, not literally, but suddenly, and soon we were surrounded by drum playing men and women singing dressed in all white.

I looked over my shoulder half expecting a cop to be running after us, but such things are evidently practiced in India all the time.

We arrived at my friends house nearly 36 hours after I left Missoula. I was exhausted and absolutely enthralled with this place.

I had come to Jaipur to teach mobile journalism to a group of media students in the city. My purpose was to teach them storytelling through digital tools like video, blogs and slide shows. In one journey from one place to another, I would have many weeks of teaching materials to relate to the students, not to mention evenings and days spent around the city investigating the rich tapestry of Indian life.

My love for journalism was completely reborn on those dusty, desert streets. Storytelling as art, as life, as science, as the act of creation itself was more real to me in those two weeks in India than it had been up until that point. Sometimes the familiarity of our lives gets in the way of seeing the color and smelling the smells of storyscapes. To be outside of yourself for even a brief period of time, completely immersed in something totally new is an exercise in scraping the scales from our eyes.

Forcing the dream is expensive sometimes. I'm still paying off that trip, but it was the most worthwhile thing I have done for my career. No training, no seminar, no webinar could possibly open my eyes to the quirks of storytelling like my trip to India in the late fall of 2008.

Aside from all the exciting adventures I had in Jaipur, my sister and I were scheduled to stay in the hotel in Mumbai that was attacked by terrorists. Our reservations were for one day after the attacks. Instead of Mumbai, I traveled to Kolkata to visit with my father who was teaching in another Indian city for a week before traveling on to Bangladesh.

While there I filmed segments of video in the Red Light districts to help bring awareness to the plight of Nepalese girls who are trafficked into India. Some are as young as 10, and they are highly sought after for the light color of their skin and their friendly demeanor.

Here it was, the culmination of how far I had dreamed at the time. To travel to a foreign place where injustices occur with alarming regularity and shine a bright light on them was the goal that had driven me thus far in my pursuit of journalism.

After India I would dream new dreams and plan new goals. But forcing the dream along lines that I had never planned has been the evolving nature of a life well lived for me. I will no longer just dream unsustainable dreams. I will dream dreams so big and wide and vast that forcing them will take up the rest of my life.

Tim



Sunday, October 3, 2010

"Fight Club" Refrigerator and watching the neighborhood go by

The question wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary. "Dad, why is there no milk or yogurt in the fridge?" But when I opened up the door spilling light on the contents within, I realized we were like that character in the "Fight Club." We had a fridge full of condiments and not much else. And strange condiments they are, considering my cooking habits. Fermented lemons, Costa Rican pepper sauce,

The truth is we're thinning down the typical grocery budget, and twice in the last week things have looked pretty basic in the Akimoff refrigerator. We're down to the last two weeks of severance money, and we've now received our fourth notice from the state of Montana stating our unemployment benefit status is still pending.

So it's time to pack it up, which is kind of tough not knowing if there is a job out there or not. But we've got a bunch of family just a 10-hour drive away.

The most difficult part was putting the house up for rent just a few weeks shy of a year since we bought it and moved in. I didn't think it would bother me, but after talking to my wife this afternoon, I realized the ridiculousness of it all, and we spent one last warm afternoon sunning on the deck watching the neighborhood go by.

It's strange to have a hard target. A job would be a hard target, but it would be a good thing. I'd know we could make a living. But a hard target driven by a rapidly diminishing severance package is another entity. It's filled with a sense of unknown and maybe a dash of foreboding.

Tonight I'm going to stock the cupboard with cereal and make sure I bring milk and yogurt in from the outside fridge. If for no other reason than to make the next two weeks a little less stressful on little minds.

Tim

Friday, October 1, 2010

Your job and your vocation...your money or your life

A friend of mine who was laid off from another newspaper in the last few months recently told me that after three or four weeks of downtime, he got rather bored and wished to return to work. Vacation, he said, was nice but not fulfilling.

Vocation is the centrifugal part of us all, so integral to who we are that it impacts every aspect of what we do.

"A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls." ~ Sam Keen



A little time away from the rat race of work is nice. It is vacation. It is a chance to clear the mind and refresh the soul.


But anyone for whom their vocation is centrifugally tied into their being will shortly grow tired and restless at not being able to fulfill their purpose. 


This is where I find myself now. 


I love being able to spend entire days watching my daughter perfect her art work next to me at the dining room table and to make creative lunches to share with my wife. I love being able to pick the boys up from school and deliver them to their various sporting activities in the afternoons. Our conversations are alive and I feel more involved with their daily lives than I have in a long time. 

"The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves." ~ Logan P. Smith


But they can sense something is wrong. They can sense the longing in me to return to my vocation. They ask me at dinner if I miss the ugliness of work, those instances where our most basic human issues rise to the surface and cloud our vocation with politicking, greed and envy.


No, I don't miss those issues, but they are part of vocation if your vocation involves others. Mine certainly does. 


Somewhere along the way we choose what we want to do. Or sometimes we are chosen for what we can do. I have worked many jobs in my search for my true vocation. Each one points a finger toward your destination, but the complicated life sometimes interferes and clouds our ability to recognize it.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence." ~ Honore de Balzac



I loved construction and being out of doors and working hard with my hands, developing a strong mind and body. But I always knew it wasn't my vocation. It was something I did to pay bills and pass from one time period into another. 


I was never sorry when I walked away from that into another job. That initial rush of excitement at doing something new can be deceptive too. Sometimes, in a really fun situation, it can last a long, long time. The arrows pointing to your vocation become difficult to discern. 


But when you stumble upon it, as I did in my late twenties, you know you have found what you've been looking for. Work is no longer work, it's the satisfaction of your soul.


More often than not, people have told me they expect me to land on my feet. They've said they always knew I would be all right. They've wished me well and explained that my skill sets would serve me well in my search for new work. 


These people have not found their true vocation. In fact, I suspect that a majority of Americans who have jobs have jobs. I know many of those with whom I most recently worked have jobs and not a vocation. I suspect that is why it was easy for them to cut my position.


And for those who think it's easy to let go of one thing and move into another, it might be easy if it was just a job. But a vocation is deep within you, and severing even the most surface links like a paycheck and benefits is a painful injury to one's soul. 


Tim