Forget resolutions.
These four Coloradans have actively charted life-changing — even life-saving — courses for 2008. They have seized both moment and circumstance to move their lives in dynamic new directions.
They are high-profile and low-profile; young and middle-aged; vibrant and ailing. But they share a common thread: They see the coming year through the lens of possibility.
Their aspirations and expectations play out in the public arena and through intensely personal interactions. And unlike short- lived New Year’s vows of more workouts and fewer calories, reducing stress and realigning priorities, their actions carry the opportunity for remarkable change.
All his young life, Taylor Phinney has carried his surname proudly, if a bit like borrowed glory, as “the kid who had parents in the Olympics.”
This year, at 17, the emerging cyclist could carve out his own legend – a sudden, lateblooming legacy that seems destined to find an international stage at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“I want something that stays with me the rest of my life, that sets me apart,” says Phinney, who at a lanky but powerful 6 feet 3 inches tall towers over his parents, former cycling stars Davis Phinney and Connie Carpenter-Phinney.
His mom’s and dad’s stature in the cycling world – each medaled at the 1984 Olympics and owns an imposing international résumé – has been a welcome constant in his rapid rise in the sport.
“They know everything, and I embrace that fact,” says Taylor Phinney, a senior at Boulder High. “It’s cool to have the parents I have.”
For one thing, they let him find his own way.
Taylor grew up playing soccer and liked the friendships that grew out of the team dynamic. It wasn’t until relatively recently – at 15, the same age his dad took up cycling – that he abandoned soccer and gravitated to a sport
where he relied on only himself.
His early success has stunned even his parents.
In August, he blew away the competition at the Junior Road and Track World Championships time trial in Mexico. Two months later, he won his first race on a banked track at the prestigious Elite Track National Championships in Los Angeles.
That vaulted him into consideration for international competition and earned him an invitation to recent World Cup races in Sydney and Beijing to face the best track cyclists in the world.
He finished ninth in Sydney and quickly learned from his mistakes. In early December, he finished fourth in the 4K individual-pursuit competition in Beijing.
Suddenly, the prospect of not only qualifying for the Olympics but medaling loomed large-even though he’s several years younger than most of the competition.
“Every big victory of mine was surprising and unprecedented,” he says. “That’s what I like about being young – I can surprise people. … Eventually, though, the surprises have to stop.”
When he was younger, he’d come across his parents’ medals and put one around his neck, just to see what it felt like. Now, he daydreams about the upcoming Olympics and pictures himself wearing gold.
“I’d totally get that medal and put it on the wall under bulletproof glass,” he says. “Myparents, I don’t think they even know where theirs are.”
-Kevin Simpson
For years, every trip to the mall for Carrol Showalter became an adventure in amateur counseling.
Troubled shoppers took one look at Showalter’s nicely coifed, empty-nester blond hair and her open, former-schoolteacher smile and started bleeding words. An hour later, Showalter would have a newly reassured friend and
a list of errands exactly as long as when she walked in.
In the new year, she’s going professional.
At age 51, Showalter graduated from Denver Seminary in mid-December with a faith-basedcounseling degree and begins 2008 looking for clients, office space and churches that want training.
“There are people out there crying for help,” Showalter said. “And I wanted to know what I was talking about, instead of just saying something.”
With her daughter through college and long gone, Showalter’s next career is one part religious calling and one part scratching the practical itch of idleness. She could – and did – fill the days with volunteering and taking care of a
big house on 5 acres near Franktown. She knows she is lucky to not need work-her husband is in a growing steel business.
“But it’s healthy for me to have income and be part of the economic system,” she said. “Even if it’s just to identify with clients about paying their taxes and insurance and everything else.”
Showalter could never offer counseling apart from her strong faith, which she acquired in high school.
But she is determinedly nondenominational, after being in churches that didn’t ordain women or support her ecumenical approach to life. When pressed, she’s leaning Episcopalian or Presbyterian.
Some of the momentum to counsel others comes from a recent serious illness.
“When I came out of that,” she said, “I needed to redeem that pain and make it count for someone else.”
For now, a Yellow Pages ad and a lead on office space would suffice. She has eight clients she sees at seminary offices and would like to join colleagues at a building near a light-rail stop that’s convenient for needier customers.
Many of the words she speaks to strangers in 2008 will be the same as those she spoke in 2007 or 2006. But she’ll speak them with more confidence.
“Sometimes,” she said, “you just need a soft touch in a hard world.”
-Michael Booth
It’s a safe bet that few of his soon-to-be colleagues expect a bashful Douglas Bruce to arrive at the statehouse Jan. 9. Any who do will likely recognize their folly when the godfather of tax reform rolls up in a car with a “MR TABOR” license plate tacked to its bumper.
But what might take them aback is the irascible Bruce’s determination to test the waters of congeniality as he embarks on his new role.
“I plan to invite every one ofmy99 colleagues to a one-on-one meal – breakfast, lunch or dinner – to get to know them, so they can see I don’t have horns and a tail, and explore possible areas of agreement,” he said.
And while bureaucrats are typically on the receiving end of some of Bruce’s most stinging volleys, he had nothing but praise for Capitol staffers he met this month, calling them universally “courteous, helpful and informed.”
Bruce is widely knownas the author of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. The law of the land for 15 years, TABOR set for Colorado some of the nation’s most restrictive limits on state spending.
To some, the brains behind TABOR is a radical and an extremist. To others, he is a hero and a patriot. To most, he’s a guy who shakes up the system from the outside and doesn’t mince words while doing it.
Only now, he’ll be doing it from the inside.
Despite his three years as an El Paso County commissioner, he’s known to practically nobody as a guy who works within the system.
His own website announces that Bruce “stopped practicing law because the law and the courts need major reforms from the outside.”
But thanks to a series of political moves and shifts, Bruce has been appointed to finish the term of fellow Republican Bill Cadman, representing House District 15. When Bruce comes to Denver next month, his role, his profile and possibly
his influence will change significantly. But Bruce plays down the seeming role reversal.
“I’ve been a county commissioner; I’ve been a precinct committee captain. I’ve worked within the system. The real source of government power is we the people,” Bruce said. Besides, he said, “I’m not an outsider. I’ve been in the Capitol
dozens of times.”
Bruce is not one given to introspection. There are taxes to lower and government to shrink. His New Year’s resolution is “the same one that I make to myself every morning when I awake: ‘What can I do for freedom today?'”
If December’s dust-up over his swearing-in date is any indication, the 2008 model of Colorado’s best-known Hollywood High graduate won’t be entirely new.
Nevertheless, he is holding out a glimmer of hope that amicable relationships could develop in the halls of the government he so disdains.
-Karen Augé
Stars flicker outside the bank of hospital windows as Albert Trujillo settles into a recliner. He’ll spend the next four hours
having his blood cleansed, pint by pint.
Trujillo has been going through dialysis three days a week for nearly 15 months. It keeps him alive. It also keeps him tethered to a whirring machine he has named “Matilda.” One line takes blood from a port in his left arm next to a homemade “El Loco” tattoo. The other line puts it back in without toxins, which a kidney would normally remove.
Long before he landed in the dialysis unit, Trujillo, 53, lived the life of El Loco – “The Crazy.”
He grew up in Grand Junction, the son of a diminutive woman everyone called “Tiny Grandma” and a father remembered as such a hard worker he could shovel out a coal car single-handedly.
Trujillo dropped out of high school when his father died, traveled the country as a cook for fire camps, worked many knee-cramping years as a cement finisher, developed a drinking problem and gave himself hepatitis by injecting drugs. He developed diabetes and high blood pressure that destroyed his kidneys.
But Trujillo said he has been sober for nearly 15 years. Instead of guzzling beer, he now must monitor exactly how much coffee, milk and water he ingests each day. He eats few of the traditional biscochito cookies he bakes
for friends at Christmastime.
He has to forgo the tamales he helps make with a Latino community group that uses the profit from sales to throw an annual Christmas party for the underprivileged.
For him, going without is matter-of-fact: “If you don’t do what you’re supposed to, you’ll have dirt shoveled in your face.”
Trujillo is hoping 2008 will be the year when his cellphone rings, he races to Denver for a transplant, and that all changes.
He is on two lists. One would provide him with a kidney from a cadaver, the other from a live donor. He is one of 1,072 Coloradans waiting.
Three other kidney patients from what he calls his “class” – the dialysis patients who come at the same time – have gotten kidneys in the past year.
Their suddenly empty chairs in the unit bring elation. More than that have died waiting. Trujillo tries not to dwell on those empty spots.
He has a simple post-transplant dream. It’s pinned on the wall of his kitchen-a laminated picture of the Crazy Horse Memorial.
“That’s my wish when I get my kidney,” Trujillo said. “I want to go up there to the Black Hills and see that.”
-By Nancy Lofholm
