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Tad Bartimus' column Among Friends is syndicated and distributed by United Media every Wednesday. Scroll down to see the titles for 2010, and click on any of these to read the entire column. You can also receive a printer-friendly version or email the column to a friend by using the links at the bottom of each column. Enjoy!
No. 649 - Among Friends
September 1, 2010
I don't live in paradise, but some days I can see it from here.
I woke up to a Genesis morning of gold-rimmed clouds pushing a dawn squall off the ocean and onto my metal roof. Nature's alarm clock was brief. The pounding ended as the gray curtain swept onward into the tropical rain forest behind the house and slammed into the volcano, making the waterfalls run.
No. 648 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) Acts
August 25, 2010
It's hard to track down old friends these days because so many have left, changed or lost their old jobs and moved on to new phone numbers and e-mail addresses as they reinvent themselves to roll with life's punches.
It happened to my dad in his 50s. A World War II fighter pilot, he flew Air Force planes for nearly 30 years, then retired and took a prestigious civil service job. A round of cutbacks suddenly eliminated it and, with two kids in college and a wife already working to make ends meet, my dad swallowed his pride and took an assistant manager's job at the commissary to pay tuition and keep food on the table.
No. 647 No News Is Bad News
August 18, 2010
Outraged residents of Bell, Calif., were stunned to learn their mayor, city manager, most city council members, police chief and other top officials were squandering their tax money with high six-figure salaries in a town of fewer than 40,000 residents. It was the voters' fault they weren't holding their public officials accountable, but blame and shame for such lax oversight should also be shared with every journalist in southern California's media-saturated market, save two.
Los Angeles Times reporters Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives were investigating possible malfeasance in a neighboring town when they discovered Bell officials paying themselves exorbitant salaries. The journalists used the California Public Records Act to expose them; otherwise, they would still be abusing the public trust in the Los Angeles suburb where one in six residents lives below the poverty line.
No. 646 You Must Remember This
August 11, 2010
One friend is losing his memory, another is overwhelmed by cancer. The way we behave toward each of them and their caregivers is strikingly different.
When we find out that a loved one has terminal cancer, we are there, casseroles in hand, for the duration. We hear that a friend has early onset dementia and we express our deepest sympathy. Then, not knowing what else to do, we distance ourselves from the otherwise-healthy person whose illness may take years to claim its increasingly confused victim.
No. 645 DIY Publishing: A Return to Tradition
August 4, 2010
Hooray for Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad electronic books, they're the future of reading. Now, pass me that sand-spattered paperback with the dog-eared corners so I can get lost again in a great story told by a gifted author.
A love of books is the single unbroken thread in my life. My memory begins with holding a book; my greatest pleasure still is reading one. I begin and end my days that way, and if it's a page-turner, I will stick with it until I fall asleep on top of it. I have been that way since I was a disobedient child with a flashlight under the covers, losing myself in Wonderland, riding the Black Stallion on a desert island, flying with Tinkerbell.
No. 644 Show Them the Money
July 28, 2010
I study their untroubled young faces -- some alert and intent, most skeptical, a few curious. The class of 2011 is settling into its first week of its last year of public education. Most of the two dozen teens fidgeting in front of me have been coming to this familiar Hana School complex since kindergarten, enjoying its predictable but limited academic life in an isolated, rural atmosphere. Except for new electronic learning aids such as computers, these kids are having the same educational experience their parents had in the same place a generation ago.
No. 643 Love Triumphs
July 21, 2010
If anyone has cause to be cynical about marriage it is Chelsea Clinton. And yet she will wed her longtime beau in a bower of flowers on the last day of July, pledging to honor, cherish and protect him while forsaking all others for the rest of her life.
It is a chance more than 4 million Americans take every year. Perennially, statistics claim that one out of two of those marriages will fail. Clinton, 30, and Marc Mezvinsky, 32, are willing to risk it, testimony to some inexplicable faith they have in their own wisdom, experience and durability.
No. 642 Brad Pitt Shaves Beard, Sexy Again
July 14, 2010
It's the silly season, when Old Media gatekeepers -- they of the dwindling paychecks but multiple-week vacation perks -- leave "news" gathering to the office B Team and freelance thumb tweeters to churn out summer hiatus content the Swedes call rotmadadshistorians, or "rotting mouth stories."
The term "silly season" has long been used to describe the hot mid-June to late August holiday season, and was legitimized as a proper time frame in the second edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable at the end of the 19th century. In North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the silly season is recognized as the traditional period when courts and governments decamp to various countrysides, mountain retreats and beaches, leaving a "serious news" vacuum to be filled with frivolous, tasteless and usually entertaining fluff.
No. 641 Friends for Life
July 7, 2010
For much of my life, I have had a friend who can fix most everything with a phone call.
I'd never met a genuine daughter of the Old South until Cheree and I landed in the same reporting class my last semester in college. Our professor, a newspaperman of the old school who barked and glowered as he tossed down thunderbolts, later justified making our lives miserable by saying he thought we'd set our professional sights too low, so he raised them for us. Striving to live up to the wise old tyrant's expectations, we bonded for life.
No. 640 Were All Oil Industry
June 30, 2010
Eager to make the most of the Saturday morning, we hauled out the smelly power washer, attached its rubber tentacles and fired it up. I'd just managed to inadvertently scrub the polish off my toenails when its initial roar, gasoline stink and blue smoke suddenly stopped. After an idle winter, the old workhorse was out of oil.
"An easy fix," said the handyman husband. In less than five minutes, he again jerked the cord and the machine sprang to life, then instantly became a monstrous mutation of its normal self. It took several seconds for me to shout: "Turn it off, it's spraying oil everywhere!"
No. 639 Savor America the Beautiful
June 23, 2010
It's July, a whole month of potential Independence Days offering up the tantalizing promise of fun in the high summer sun. But is anybody even looking out the window, let alone running out to play?
Nope. Not at home, at the office, in the car or on the airplane. Too busy. Too much to do. Too behind. Always behind. Work's too important to slow down, not even while we're suspended in time and space, traveling from one over-committed day to another across the blue planet.
No. 638 Too Much Knowledge is Too Much Power
June 16, 2010
That old chestnut "knowledge is power" was first used four centuries ago by English courtier Sir Francis Bacon in his 1597 treatise on "Religious Meditations, of Heresies." The familiar aphorism now has taken on new and ominous global overtones amid debates over Facebook's privacy policies and Google's data collecting for its Street View program.
My father insisted on the World War II "loose lips sink ships" attitude in our family. "You kids are in the business of getting information, not giving it," he warned, drumming into us that whatever happened inside our house was nobody else's business. It wasn't that we had something to hide; it was that dad valued privacy, and mom abhorred "airing dirty laundry in public," so we were raised to keep our mouths shut about our personal lives. Calling attention to ourselves was considered gouche.
No. 637 Cinderellas Father
June 9, 2010
Ideally, every child believes Daddy can do anything.
"I woke up this morning and I'm shaving," President Barack Obama told reporters at a press conference three weeks into the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis, "and Malia knocks on my bathroom door ... she peeks in her head and says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"
No. 636 Love and War
June 2, 2010
After eating our chef's candied figs, Swiss chard pie and homemade vanilla yogurt, he was entertaining us with stories about his three years in Japan with the U.S. Navy when I asked him, in the context of repealing "don't ask, don't tell," if being a gay serviceman in the 1970s was a problem.
"Are you kidding?" he laughed in amazement. "When I was in boot camp and undergoing a background check... an investigator accused me of being homosexual. I said 'What is that based on?' He said he thought I had a very feminine manner of speaking. I just laughed at him and said, 'Well, that's the way I talk.'
No. 635 Operator No. 5013
May 26, 2010
"I can't breathe!"
Fighting my way out of a deep sleep, I saw my husband standing up, holding his chest and gasping. Then he moaned and flung himself back onto the bed, rolling back and forth on the sheets and choking out "Pain! Pain!" I punched 911 and said, "Hang on!"
No. 634 A Holiday for Grief
May 19, 2010
Grief is always with us, lurking in the wings to claim center stage when terrible things smother us in sorrow.
Memorial Day is a holiday set aside for socially acceptable public mourning, a time to hang out the flag in memory of lost patriots, take flowers to graves containing the origins of our DNA, and talk to one another about pain and loss without being hustled or hassled to "move on" or "find closure," as if grief has a fixed beginning and end.
No. 633 Good Luck, Graduates!
May 12, 2010
Congratulations, graduates, on launching yourselves into the thrilling, terrifying unknown you've craved since hormones kicked in during middle school. Deadlines, pop quizzes, big games, grade points, homecomings and cafeteria mac-and-cheese are so yesterday. Today it's one piece of paper, a funny hat and a clean getaway.
Don't let the old farts tell you how tough it is in this world of hard knocks and hard choices. Before you slip on a banana peel, take advantage of this golden moment to hang out with your friends, thank your teachers and indulge your parents. You will have many more good times, but none as carefree as this, when you still believe you can do anything.
No. 632 Greed Wins Again
May 5, 2010
I have seen, smelled and been smeared by Big Oil.
On a gloriously golden March morning in 1989, I reached down to touch the first greasy, iridescent tide of Exxon Valdez oil lapping onto the pristine, rocky coast of Prince William Sound in the Gulf of Alaska. Two days after the off-course super tanker's bottom was ripped open by a reef, the gagging stench of fuel invaded my heavy parka and winter socks, saturated my skin and hair, assaulted my throat, burned the inside of my nose, and triggered a headache that lingered long after I returned home from reporting the catastrophe for The Associated Press. Because everything I wore became contaminated with oil, I would change only my underwear for the next three weeks and ultimately burn all my clothes in a funeral pyre.
No. 631 Mother of the Year
April 28, 2010
For a month, Vicki Richards went to the post office every day barely daring to hope a yellow package notice would be in her box. After all, what were the odds of having two children sprinkled with fairy dust? Her daughter Lipoa already was going to college on a full scholarship from Bill and Melinda Gates; it was too much to believe Tevi would get one, too.
By Monday, April 19, Richards had decided the March 20 letter from the Gates folks telling Tevi he was a finalist had been merely a prelude to disappointment. On her lunch break, Richards turned the mailbox key, pulled forth a handful of bills, and a yellow slip fell out. Running to the counter, she thrust the notice at postmaster Joey Zarate.
No. 630 The Good American
April 21, 2010
Too many of us these days -- especially in Congress -- want to knock down, stonewall and stalemate instead of build up, negotiate and move ahead.
"There will be no cooperation (from Republicans) for the rest of the year," said 2008's GOP presidential loser Sen. John McCain of Arizona following passage of the Obama administration's health care reform legislation. With money tight, jobs scarce and fear afoot in the land, we are too busy giving each other the raspberry to remember we live in a nation founded on idealism, built on can-do, and preserved with courage and perseverance.
No. 629 Dog Wars Part Two
April 14, 2010
A pack of roaming pit bulls is a fearsome sight; being its sleeping victim is worse.
Our 12-year-old cattle dog was dozing in the late afternoon sun, just out of sight in the yard, when the dogs pounced. The same gang of three had invaded her territory and pinned her down twice before, but she was rescued by Dean the first time and me the second. We told the trespassing dogs' owners to keep their dogs at home, but they ignored us.
No. 628 Dog Wars Part One
April 7, 2010
Neighbors wage war over dogs every day. Some have nuisance complaints -- poop on the sidewalk, tunnels in flower gardens, garbage raids -- but when disfigurement and death-by-dog result in blood, bandages and bodies, lawyers and lawmen take quarrels into the courts, and pet owners take sides in the neighborhood.
Dog bites occur every 75 seconds and injure more than 1,000 Americans every day, according to DogsBite.org, a Seattle-based Web site founded by Colleen Lynn after she was severely injured by a pit bull while jogging in 2007. The graphic designer was unable to work for months after the attacking canine punctured her right arm seven times, then broke it while dragging her off the sidewalk. The dog later was euthanized.
No. 627 Tigers Stripes
March 31, 2010
A short attention span and a lost list sent me through grocery store checkouts three times last weekend, forcing me to run a gauntlet of braying headlines about women whose men have done 'em wrong: ELIZABETH EDWARDS: How Much Can She Take? SANDRA BULLOCK: Will She Adopt Jesse James' Kids? JENNY SANFORD: Divorce Details Sealed to Protect Kids.
This "good wife scorned" trifecta splashed across tabloid covers included a portrait of the ailing Edwards and inset pictures of her husband's lover and new daughter; best-actress winner Bullock at the Oscars with biker husband James and inset snaps of a colorfully tattooed woman claiming to be his girlfriend; and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's now ex-wife in divorce court testifying about her husband's affair with his Argentine "soulmate."
No. 626 Whats in it for me?
March 24, 2010
As the U.S. House shouted through its final hours of a bitter 14-month debate on health care reform, I was sitting under a soggy tent with my neighbors listening to insurance and benefit specialists tick off terrible things that could happen to me as an old, sick person living on a fixed income in the richest nation on earth.
Organized by our local medical clinic, the forum was, coincidentally, held on the last day of the last-gasp struggle between House Republicans and Democrats over the centerpiece of Barack Obama's "change we can believe in" promises to make health care accessible and affordable to every citizen. The invited experts from around the state emphasized that their fact sheets and promotional handouts were based on laws still in force prior to the House vote in Washington, and said they probably didn't have answers to most questions about the complex reform bill.
No. 625 Every Woman Makes History
March 17, 2010
While President Barack Obama takes the long view in trying to overhaul his predecessor's No Child Left Behind law, kids in my town are taking the short view about their uncertain futures after graduation day.
Teachers, parents, administrators and students seldom agree on anything, but ours are united by having the feds declare our school a failure based solely on a tunnel-vision curriculum, one-size-fits-all testing and the presumption that "if it works in Texas it will work anywhere." We've been dealt an arrogant and patronizing blow our community doesn't deserve.
No. 624 Every Woman Makes History
March 10, 2010
Seven days into Women's History Month and on the eve of International Women's Day, Barbra Streisand spoke for all women whose groundbreaking achievements are long ignored when she tactfully said, "Well, the time has come," and handed Hollywood veteran Kathryn Bigelow her best director Oscar.
What Streisand -- who knows firsthand -- surely meant was, "It is way past time a woman movie director is recognized and rewarded for her hard work and talent." It's sad to realize that Bigelow is only the fourth woman in the Academy Awards' 82-year history to earn a nomination, following behind Sofia Coppola for "Lost in Translation" in 2003, Jane Campion for "The Piano" in 1993 and Lina Wertmuller for "Seven Beauties" in 1975.
No. 623 No Sell by Date for Streep
March 3, 2010
A line of dialogue from the 1996 film "First Wives Club" rattles around in my head, growing louder with each birthday. Three old friends who've been tossed aside by their husbands for younger women are commiserating, and one of them, a middle-aged actress played by Goldie Hawn, laments that women's movie roles fall into three categories -- babe, district attorney and "Driving Miss Daisy."
Fourteen years after that line resonated with every female moviegoer over 30, there is a new category: Meryl Streep.
No. 622 Feeling Good for a Change
February 24, 2010
Kick off your shoes, pass the popcorn, and feel good about the good ol' U.S. of A. Watching our athletes put America's best face forward at the Vancouver Olympics gives us reason to cheer for ourselves again after months of discouraging news from as far away as Afghanistan and as close as our mailboxes.
If you're like me, you're fed up with deadlocked politicians (a pox on all their microphones), Wall Streeters (a pox on all their bonuses), Tiger Woods (he's already been poxed), reality television, Tea Baggers, pundits, Sarah Palin and all the other Chicken Littles yelling, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
No. 621 Couch Potato No More
February 17, 2010
The same week first lady Michelle Obama launched her "Let's Move" initiative to banish childhood obesity within a generation, Americans sat down to watch Super Bowl XLIV and the Olympics' opening ceremonies -- the two best events of the year to justify being a couch potato surrounded by junk food.
At my house we were prepared: a 12-pack each of beer and soda; pretzels, tortilla chips, sesame crackers, cashews, peanuts, and some sort of air-filled "healthy veggie" puffs; guacamole, French onion and hummus dips; meat balls; hot wings, enchiladas and lemon bars for supper.
No. 620 Friends of the Heart
February 10, 2010
Valentine's Day isn't just about flowers, candy and cards to and from those we love and those who love us. It's also a time to inventory friendships -- which ones are genuine, which are false, how to keep the ones we treasure and gracefully move beyond those that may be toxic or simply moribund.
No. 619 Candy Crowley Cinderella at 61
February 3, 2010
She isn't young, she isn't blonde, and she isn't a wire coat hanger for her clothes, but after paying her dues for nearly 40 years as one of America's best journalists, CNN's Candy Crowley is about to become a star.
With the sexagenarian's promotion from chief political correspondent to anchor of her network's Sunday morning "State of the Union" program, the crash you hear is the last pane falling from TV news' glass ceiling.
No. 618 Thumb Suckers
January 27, 2010
The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children ages 8 to 18 use electronic gadgets an average of seven and a half hours a day, a result that shocked its authors and ought to scare multitasking moms and dads into a serious re-evaluation of their parenting.
Cruise any mall. Most 'tweens and teens are walking head down and hunched over as they thumb expensive smart phones, downloading and transmitting text messages, reading e-mail, surfing the 'net and simultaneously listening to music. During most of their waking hours, their world is the width of a cell phone screen and the depth of the latest LOL text.
No. 617 Haiti: A Chance to Get it Right
January 20, 2010
Miracles have ended for earthquake victims still buried in the near total destruction of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. In the tumultuous days just after the Jan. 12 temblor, an estimated 1,800 rescuers from around the globe arrived with search dogs and heavy equipment to try and free untold thousands trapped in collapsed concrete and steel. A few survivors were saved, but as frustrating days passed, hope gave way to reality.
No. 616 Our First Anniversary with Obama
January 13, 2010
A year into his presidency, voters who elected Barack Obama have discovered, as all besotted lovers do, that the Prince Charming who wooed them with hope and won them with promises can't always keep them after marriage.
Obama won because he promised change. Change from political deadlock, change from business as usual, change from secretive government. On inauguration day, millions of us wept with happiness at the unlimited possibilities ahead. If this young African-American man could take on the establishment and capture the most powerful office in the world, surely he could straighten out our national mess.
No. 615 Be It Resolved
January 6, 2010
A week into 2010, I overheard my friend remind his dinner companion to "Keep your New Year's resolution, my dear."
I couldn't help myself. "What is your resolution?" I asked the woman, 99 percent certain it had to do with dieting, since that's always my resolution.
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