Funny how this works, but I had just gotten back to work today from vacation when Rosie Ennis popped her head into the Fish Bowl and with a very animated whisper said, “I think it’s Tom Grant!”
And it was, Tom Grant, looking every bit like the former KXLY-TV ace reporter and nearly successful mayoral candidate (2003), except for a well-trimmed mustache and beard. I was pleasantly surprised to see him because, when last we spoke, it sure sounded like his visit to Spokane this month was going to overlap with my trip to Hawaii. But, as it turned out, we had time to bother Bonne Beavers, and Breean and then went off to lunch for a chance to trade notes on our lives, families, and our work.
Among many other things Tom and I have in common is that we’re both former clients of the Center for Justice. Our journalism resumés overlap with the Camas Magazine/KXLY-TV joint investigation of River Park Square. We were both born in eastern Washington and, weirdly, we’ve both lived in Augusta, Georgia which is where Tom lives now as editor of the weekly Metrospirit newspaper. I lived in Augusta in 1989 and 1990 while my wife was doing her internship at the Medical College of Georgia.
I’ve written a couple pieces at Camas Magazine about Tom’s story and his sad departure from Spokane. With his wife Mary Ann and other of his friends I was on the sidewalk in front of his old house in Spokane when he drove off in the moving van in 2004 headed, at that time, for Wyoming. Having admired Tom for his brave reporting at KREM-TV even before I met him in person, and having later worked with him on a reporting package that won several national journalism awards, I have nothing but great things to say about him. It’s one thing to have the skills to do top-rate reporting, but Grant is a mensch besides. He’s always been a great guy to have a drink with (today it was just coffee thank you) but he’s also the rare person who defines himself in the ways he works to have constructive conflicts for the public good. By that I mean it’s just part of Tom’s DNA as a journalist to confront and expose injustice. I think he would have made a terrific mayor for Spokane had he won in 2003. Of course, the man who beat him, the late Jim West, did put Spokane on the map, though not in the way any of us would have hoped.
Otherwise, I was late to work today because I decided to ride my bike in even though I had not properly (cough) winterized myself to the new realities of the season. In a near cryogenic state, I caught just the last minutes of our Monday circle, where we all gather and share at the beginning of the week. But as I reached back to remove my backpack I felt something hard. It was an aerated egg-shaped lump of hardened lava I had picked up and stuck in the rear pocket of the pack last Tuesday. It was from a sparsely occupied beach south of Lahaina, near milepost 14 just off route 30, the road to Maalaea and Kihei. 
I know it is somewhat gauche to report on my Maui vacation with anything other than utter humility given that the trip seems to be coinciding with the collapse of the world economy, including lay offs at the Spokesman-Review. So, I’m not asking to be excused from being poorly judged for even bringing it up. I just want you to know the tickets were half-priced because we spent the entire evening of my 50th birthday in 2006 trying to sleep on the floor of the Honolulu airport, to the unrelenting ambiance of ukelele music.
This trip was better. The four of us (my wife, our 15-year-old daughter Audrey and our nine-year-old son, Devin) stayed at a quaint condo fifty yards off the beach at Napili where, for reasons I don’t understand and did not expect, the water was dense both with tropical fish and green sea turtles. I had never seen a green sea turtle in the wild before last week. By the end of the week, we’d seen more than two dozen. We got to swim with them virtually every day and so intimately that, at one point, I had to grab my son’s flipper and pull him back because a 250-plus pound mother turtle had come up behind him to where he very easily could have kicked her in the beak. For the most part, the turtles were in the surf on the south end of Napili Bay but, on Wednesday, Devin found one as we were exploring the deeper waters in the middle of the bay. He was twenty or so feet below us in a cave, but soon levitated up to us in crystalline clear water to join in a friendly little swim. The turtles are now protected because, by the 1970s, hunting had decimated their numbers. So I do understand the turtles that bolted upon seeing us. But most didn’t, and some clearly wanted to swim with us. Why they would trust us so, I have no idea.
I’m sure you can guess that a lot of the travel banter in Hawaii involved hare-brained schemes to move to paradise full-time and toast every sunset with a Blue Hawaiian, or my kid’s favorite drink which is a mixture of pineapple, orange, and guava juice. Devin suggested that I try my hand as a snorkeling instructor. He was adamant that I could do this, to which I tried to explain that there didn’t seem to be a dire need in Maui for more snorkeling teachers. Being the wise nine-year-old that he is, he then added, with a sigh, that he would miss his friends in Spokane.
Finally, I’m blue to report that my office-mate Shallan Dawson has moved on. Shallan’s job was eliminated earlier this month because the grant that funded her position came to an end. Shallan shared the Fish Bowl with me and, apart from being a good sport about putting up with my odd word habits (I literally like to think and write in the dark at times) she was incredibly helpful and patient in teaching me (an aging Mac user) to use the various PC programs that I’ve needed to learn in order to do my job at the Center. Beyond that, she’s just a fine and good-hearted person and I dearly hope and expect that her lamentable absence at the Center becomes a valued (and well compensated) presence elsewhere.
–Tim Connor
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