Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
Last week, I had lunch in Portland with a friend who has taught at Carroll College in Helena, Montana, for nearly 40 years. In another time, we were colleagues at the long-gone Journal-American newspaper in Bellevue, Washington.
At the end of each school year, Brent drives 11 hours to Portland and spends the better part of three days at Powell’s Books, restocking for summer reading.
“Four-six-six,” he said, recounting the hours each day he spent at the store this year.
I envied his indulgence.
Then he pointed to his wrist, where the faintest tan line suggested a watch used to be.
“Every May I take off my watch and don’t put it on again until I start teaching again in the fall.”
I shook my head in amazement.
Much of my life has been driven by deadlines. You finish one column and the harpies inside start pestering you about the next. “So, what have you done for me lately?” they whine.
Since April 2025, I’ve written two columns a month for Lookout Eugene-Springfield even as I continued to write a weekly Substack column — Heart, Humor & Hope. All while pretending I am easing into “retirement.”
Ha!
I once heard column-writing likened to running across a farmer’s field in front of a combine, the clanky cutter bar hungry for whatever gets in its way.
“Column-writing is really fun,” goes the story, “until you trip just once.”
That’s why this will be my final regular column for Lookout Eugene-Springfield.
At 72, with a weakness for saying “yes,” I’ve realized that if I don’t take off my wristwatch, I’ll allow time to control my life — instead of me controlling time.
In many ways, I’m a victim of my insatiable desire to go, go, go.
I work hard. I play hard. I write columns. I write books. I help others edit and design books. I give an occasional speech. And, frankly, I love it all. I’m privileged to have a passion and the outlets, such as Lookout, with which to share it.
When I’m not working, I golf, sail, hike, travel and hit bookstores, though not with the total immersion that my Montana pal allows himself.
“My life is like a light switch,” I told my wife, Sally, recently. “I’m either ‘on’ or ‘off.’ I need my life to have a dimmer switch that allows me that gradual, incremental, in-between stuff.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve had this thought; it probably won’t be the last. Whenever I tell friends I’m trying to slow down my life, they scoff.
“You can only be happy when you’re busy,” one such friend told me.
“I get it,” I said. “I’m never going to be the guy who goes to coffee with his pals every morning to talk about the Ducks and whether it’s going to rain. But I also would like more flexibility to choose how I spend my time. I would like to wake up on occasion and get to decide what to do rather than know I have six things to do. And I would like to learn the fine art of puttering.”
I almost never putter, which can be defined as, “To move or act without obvious purpose, or to occupy oneself in a leisurely, pleasant manner with minor tasks.”
My mother, who died six years ago, used calligraphy to create art from the following words: “Time is so precious that it is dealt out to us only in the smallest possible fractions — a tiny moment at a time.”
I want more say in how those fractions are spent.
I grew up believing life was meant to be lived to its fullest and time should not be wasted. And there’s goodness in that, particularly when others are your priority.
Last week, I spoke at a bookstore in Sisters. Beforehand, I had dinner with a writer friend, Jane Kirkpatrick, who lives in Redmond. The next day, after a quick round of golf at Black Butte Ranch, I drove northeast through Redmond and Madras and west to Clackamas to watch a grandson play baseball. When learning Brent was going to be in Portland, I suggested we meet for lunch.
It was a bit of a logistical high-wire act in terms of time and place, but Brent loves riding light rail so was happy to take MAX south to meet me. Midway through lunch, I suggested he join me for the baseball game, and he did so.
This is how I like doing life: optimizing opportunities. Just like in baseball: Get players on the bases and find ways for them to score. Go, go, go.
But puttering and people and other passions can’t come out to play if you’re burdened by deadlines, which is how I’ve been feeling lately.
Of course, nobody forced me to say “yes” when the opportunity arose to write for Lookout. But, at times, I allow a subtle pride to convince me I can keep adding to an already packed schedule.
I call it the “Houdini syndrome,” this idea that you can be handcuffed, placed in a crate that’s wrapped with chains and dropped into the East River — and escape.
At times, the to-do list calls my life’s shots, the fast pace exacerbated by me not liking to disappoint people.
That combo — a Houdini complex and a passion to please — is wonderful for accomplishing things but, left unchecked, creates emotional boomerangs. I get hit too often, and Sally experiences friendly fire manifested in her husband’s seemingly incessant click of keyboard keys.
Houdini died in 1912 because he got punched in the gut, his appendix ruptured and, despite pain and a high fever, his pride precluded him from seeing a doctor. He refused to slow down.
I’m tired of trying to be Houdini.
Two weeks ago, my friend Diane Carlson Evans, a Vietnam combat nurse whose book, “Healing Wounds,” I helped write, died of cancer at 79. I have at least three friends with dementia or Alzheimer’s. Life is short.
That’s why I’m leaving Lookout, which has supported me 100% from the get-go. Its editors have been good to work with and have helped make me better. And I continue to support the job they do in providing our community with quality journalism, necessary for a democracy to survive.
But as Neil Young sang: There “comes a time … .” And that time is now.
The night after I made my decision, I was out front after having power-washed my driveway for only the second time in 36 years. I was cleaning some muddy debris along our curb — you could say I was puttering — when a woman down the street walked by.
“You still teaching school or are you retired now?” I asked.
We had a nice five-minute conversation, the kind of conversation that wouldn’t have taken place if I’d been too busy to putter.
A few minutes later, a car pulled up alongside me. Inside was a couple whose daughter had graduated in the same high school class as our older son.
We, too, had a good conversation, focused on two books we’ve read: “Theo of Golden” and “The Correspondent.”
To the west, I noticed puffy white clouds, tinged with pink above the neighbor’s house. Beautiful.
These little moments, I later realized, were actually big moments. The seemingly insignificant is often significant. But they were available to me only because I allowed them to be.
That is the lesson gleaned from my friend Brent: The glory of time isn’t in only the doing of things but in creating opportunities for unexpected, unscheduled delights. And you can’t do that without taking off your wristwatch so deadlines don’t lead your life.
As I attempt to more fully explore this theory in practice, thank you, readers, for understanding — I hope — my “necessary ending.” For indulging me in my feeble pursuit of puttering. And, above all, for reading my Lookout columns.
If I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s that, however we choose to spend the “precious moments,” they’re empty if not shared with others.
