Columbus and the Valley

Action Nashville

As I looked around the Nashville, Tenn. rooms, buses and sidewalks we inhabited yesterday, something struck me: We are an interesting group. From twenty-somethings to those with white hair on the fringes of their pates like me. Among us are bankers, insurance people, journalists, public servants, politicians, public relations professionals, arts mavens, real estate folks, retailers, shopkeepers, restauranteurs — you get the idea. We’re a walking, intellectually-seething microcosm of of Greater Columbus, Georgia, all willing to give up three full days of our business lives and even willing to pay for the opportunity to do it.

This is exactly what a Chicago attorney, Paul P. Harris, was aiming for when on February 23, 1905 his passion for bringing together the best and brightest of his day resulted in the creation of the Rotary Club of Chicago. Today, the 1.2 million-member organization has, among many other things, effectively wiped polio from the map. They’ve done it by carefully selecting a multidisciplinary group of thinkers and problem solvers to bring to bear their minds and energy to solve the problems of the day.

Back to Nashville. Yesterday, we sat in groups while the people responsible for implementing and successfully delivering Nashville’s stellar growth and reputation were paraded before us to tell their stories of their best practices. The Nashville of today was birthed from a Wall Street Journal article many years ago that basically said Nashville didn’t have what it took to be a great Southern city. A series of meetings from a wide swath of the Nashvillians of that day decided they were going to do something about that sad WSJ commentary. Now, six five-year plans later, Nashville is at or near the top in every indicator category and couldn’t possibly be doing more to hone her shiny Music City moniker. So far, the people who have addressed us have all hit on the same talking points. This jewel of a city has been carefully constructed by thoughtful, engaged citizens whose plans are being manifested in what we are seeing on this trip.

During the past few weeks, I have been fortunate to have attended discussions about the creation of a minimum grid of roads and paths to connect the neighborhoods of Columbus. One of the slides NYC’s Gehl Studios showed compared Columbus’ growth over the past few decades with cities like Huntsville, Ala., Savannah, Ga., Athens, Ga. and a couple of others I can’t recall as I sit here in my hotel room at 5 a.m. writing this post. Columbus’ trend line is flat among a sea of rising lines representing these other cities.

Then yesterday, during Bill Murphy’s presentation about the Columbus Chamber’s Regional Prosperity Initiative, there was that shocking statistic: Columbus’s net jobs gain over the past 35 years is ZERO. Look around. We’ve got Aflac, TSYS, Synovus and all the power those huge corporations have brought to our city. Yet, and despite of all the fabulous strides we’ve made on the riverfront, all the streetscape renovations, all the retail, new restaurants that have come online, we haven’t made any headway in 35 years!

What is or are the reasons? Is it poverty? Is it our tax structure? That we’re not on a major interstate highway? Have we been spending too much time trying to lure the wrong business entities? Is a great local retailer on Broadway worth more than we think to our local economy? Is that honking, huge big-box retailer spewing smoke and mirrors that make us think they’re more important to our city than they really are?

The high-energy buzz that I have around me on this trip to Nashville says this group and the spinoffs that will occur when we get back home tells me this group wants to know the answers to these and other questions. I’m so excited to be a part of it. #iclcnashville #iclc2015

 

 

Cruise Ship Freaks Provided Vacation Laughs

I’ve been sitting on this post for a few weeks until I could speak to Michael Holbrook, the owner of Columbus Travel Agency. I wanted to make sure that the things I was planning to say in this post about people who travel on cruise ships wasn’t going to cause him any grief. I finally got to talk to Michael at Rotary last week and he laughed at some of these stories, so I’m in the clear.

If you’ve read my Facebook page, you know that Jill and I have just returned from 8 glorious days on Water Island, USVI. Water Island has lots of homes, but no hotels, no bars, no restaurants and no grocery stores. In fact, no stores at all. Probably like St. John was 4o years ago. Water Island is a short 10 minute ferry ride from St. Thomas, its much bigger big sister island to the north.

What Water Island does have, though, is beautiful beaches. Our beach, Honeymoon Beach, was a three-minute ride in a golf cart from Casa Blanca, the home where we stayed. Honeymoon Beach is one of the pretties places I have ever seen. We would get down to the beach on most mornings and stake our claim of one of the thatched tiki huts. The hut would provide some relief from the sun and a great vantage point to watch the daily arrival and departure of the beach excursions from a couple of cruise ships.

Turns out Carnival Cruise Lines is a good name, because most of the people who arrived on our beach, usually from about 3 to 5 p.m. for dinner and play looked like carnival workers. I nicknamed them the Carnies. Most of the ones we talked to were from Canada, the upper midwest or some other very cold place. They were either copier paper white or lobster red. Almost all of them had ridiculous tattoos and many of them sported some type of spacer, stud or bar stuck in various places on their skin.

One afternoon we were in our place on our beach and the Kon Tiki, which looked like a floating mobile home, blasting AC/DC “Give it Up,” and covered with these Carnie freaks floated in and tied up. One member of the steaming pile of humanity that limped off the boat and gathered just to the east and south of us was one of the most unusual people I have ever seen.

It had short hair, sported a women’s swimsuit that was cut obscenely down to below its navel. There were no breasts to speak of, and on further inspection as my eyes made their way down (I really was trying to determine the sex of this creature) I was shocked to find an enormous package right where the package usually goes. I looked a little closer and honestly, I couldn’t tell if these were man-parts or a stuff sack full of stomach that had no other place to go. We watched it for about an hour and a half and as it lumbered back onto the floating trailer, we still couldn’t tell if its name should be Bubba or Barbara.

Another afternoon, a group of six flopped down with their food at a picnic table less than 10 feet from our little tiki paradise. I hadn’t looked at them yet, when we were serenaded by an apparent belching contest. As I snap hooked my head in their direction, I discovered it was the three women who were having a burp-off on Honeymoon Beach. I know their mothers would have been proud of them!

The only good thing about giving up the tranquility of our beach each day for an short time was that we got to know the guy who was in charge of the Carnies. Every day when they left, he gave us all the beer that they didn’t drink. It literally rained Coors Light as they were pulling out. That was pretty cool.

Just to further explain just how great Honeymoon Beach is, one afternoon a sexy go-fast boat beached just to the south of where we were encamped. A camera crew and a dozen or so heavily tattooed, pierced, but much better looking people hit the beach. They were filming MTV’s Real World, which, this season is coming to you hot off the beaches of the USVI. One of the kids had some quarter-sized glass spacers in his earlobes. Don’t you know those ears are going to be looking mighty good when he hits 60 — if he doesn’t die of some sexually transmitted disease before that.

What are these people thinking? My God, they are disgusting! I thought several times during the week, what must be going through their minds as they looked into the mirror in their cramped ($600, including airfare) room aboard the cruise ship du jour and said to themselves, “Man/woman/it, you are fine! I think I’ll wear this to the beach today.” This floating freak show was the source of so many laughs during the week. The only tears I shed during the week were tears of laughter. It sure felt good.

Thank you cruise ship freaks!

In my conversation with Michael Holbrook, I determined that there are some extremely high end, classy cruise vacations that can be had for a pretty penny. None of those ships came to our island.

A Very Special Arbor Day

This day has been a gift. One of those full circle days. I got to wake up next to a great woman, kiss her goodbye and head off to do something for the greater good. I hit Ruth Ann’s for breakfast and stopped by the office to pick up a camera. Dozens of us gathered at Dinglewood Park across the street from Will Barnes’ fabulous office to plant trees in the spaces left vacant by a tornado that went through this part of town a couple of years ago.

Girl Scouts, Rotarians, Trees Columbus staffers and some folks from the Columbus Scholars program planted a Yoshino cherry, some weeping willows, Shumard oaks, loblolly pines and a couple of other species I don’t remember. The crowd gathered up toward the back of a pickup truck and Dorothy and Ashley from Tree Columbus and Chris from the Georgia Forestry Commission took turns standing on the tailgate preaching to the “green” assembly.

Everyone pitched in and we got all the trees in the ground. It was quite an event and I think everyone left there with a great sense of accomplishment. It was a beautiful day. Many of the people who left the Dinglewood Park planting project headed on over to Lakebottom for the city’s official Arbor Day event. I hooked up with Jeff Hudson and after we collected a few trees, we left for Uptown for lunch. Today is Jeff’s birthday. If you know him, make sure you Facebook him a birthday greeting.

I planted all five of the trees I took home and did a few more chores around the house. It felt good to do some manual labor today to be around so many people I like. I’m still smiling.

Just Like an Angry Badger

Yes, I know. I know you need to hear from me. I was sitting at “my” Rotary table on Wednesday of this week and talking to fellow cancer survivor Larry Sanders. He asked me how I was doing and I told him that I feel great and that if anything bad was going on, I was blissfully ignorant of it. We agreed that sometimes that is a good thing, although please understand that I am on guard like an angry badger when it comes to my condition. But, damn, it is good just to be alive and going about the business of living!

Now I know why some of the most creative people have led tortured lives. When I’m the most afraid, when I’m wigged out of my mind is when I write. I know you know what I’m talking about because the feedback I get tells the story. So, just know this: If I’m writing hard and heavy there’s a better than average likelihood that I’m freaked out about something. So, don’t wish that on me, people! I promise to do a better job of posting here. I have been spending some time over the past couple of weeks working on some facebook stuff and soon you’ll see the fruits of my labor.

In the meantime, I’m going to see Dr. Pippas this coming Monday, the 24th. I’m hoping we’ll talk about more frequent scans for a while and setting up a Zometa infusion to protect my bones from further invasion by Mr. C. Unless I hear something to the contrary, I am feeling good and hopeful about this year.

Please make plans to support the American Cancer Society Crystal Ball on March 19, 2011 at the RiverMill Event Center, where I will be this year’s honoree.

Five Million Words Escaped Me

Women supposedly speak about 20,000 words per day, a number that is exactly 13,000 more words than the average man speaks during that same day. That means around about 160,000 words are spoken in our office each day by the eight women who are here every day. Another 80,000 are spoken by four other women who are close to me, but are not office mates. So, how in the hell did 12 women speaking a total of 240,000 words per day over a three-week period (which would yield just over 5 million words) keep one single word from getting to me about the fantastically sweet surprise that they, in cahoots with you, delivered to me at lunchtime today.

I knew this was not going to be a typical office lunch today for two reasons: It seemed to be planned days in advance and Rick McKnight, organist and Kiddie clothier extraordinaire, Betsy Covington and Ellen Brooks from the Community Foundation of the Chattahoochee Valley and Cyndy Cerbin from the National Infantry Museum were present. We took advantage of this glorious blue-bird-sky day to have lunch outside on the Houlihan’s patio under two large umbrellas. We ordered drinks and food and eloquent Betsy called us to order. She really did! She does that at Rotary every Wednesday and she’s quite good at it.

She said that the assembled group (Julie Chandler, Callie Sprague, Jenn Apffel, Cyndy Cerbin, Ellen Brooks, Rick McKnight, Betsy Covington, Marquette McKnight, Shelley Dean, Helena Coates) had been talking about the concerns I had blogged about — the one about going for treatment at Emory where I wouldn’t be among friends. My greatest fear has been going outside the comfort zone, surrounded by my friends/healthcare professionals here in Columbus. Betsy continued by saying that the group at the table, with some help from our computer consultant, Gerrit DeWitt, had initiated a three-week campaign to gather my army of supporters to send messages of encouragement to be placed in a journal and signatures on a T-shirt so that anyone who saw me coming at Emory would know I was there along with what Sherrie Watkins called my “traveling Verizon network.”

Betsy handed me a gift bag that contained the fruits of all this labor. First, a colorful T-shirt that says “I am strong, hell of a writer, amazing, beloved, mighty warrior, determined, heroic, courageous, prepared for battle, foul-mouthed follower of God! Secondly, a cd from Rick containing an organ-accompanied choral rendition of the poem “Fight the Good Fight.” And, a journal with photographs, handwritten messages and printed emails from dozens of my friends and regular readers of this blog. I’m speechless — but I have managed to cobble this post together to say thanks to these wonderful friends who joined Jill and me for lunch today and the hundreds of others, like you, who read this blog and are following us on our journey.

I expected this post to be the one that let all of you know about my next trip to Emory to set up the SRS, but I am still waiting to hear about the consultation between Drs. Stapleford and Hadjapanayis about the viability of SRS as a treatment for this spinal metastasis of my kidney cancer. Honestly, I know they’re busy up there, but going into a weekend with questions unanswered just sucks. My blood pressure has responded with a predictable upward trend line that I’m beating back into submission with a new medication.

This post is a big ol’ thank you for the This-is-Your-Life moment I had at your hands at lunch today. If this is a taste of what next March 19 at the American Cancer Society’s 2011 Crystal Ball is going to be like, I’m not sure I can take it. People, let me tell you, I’m smiling like Woodstock right now. Getting to feel the love of all the people who love you while you’re still alive and kicking is impossibly wonderful. I’m moved beyond words and Jill and I are most thankful for this gesture of kindness and support.

I’ll post again as soon as I get the call I’m so anxiously awaiting.