Love What You Do

Like most members of my generation, I love irony. I especially love it when it occurs in real life, but not so much when it happens to me.

The last thing I wrote as an employed newspaper journalist was a column on the subject of how I enjoyed my job as an editor and reporter. Before the edition of the paper in which the column lived had even hit the streets, I was out of a job.

In the months prior to my pink slip, I had to reduce the staff of our little newspaper, which required me to cover sports for the little community newspaper which I had run for nine years. Throughout my career, I was more or less a news guy – I hadn’t ever covered sports. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Sports writing allows more leeway in your prose and the kids I was covering were fun and appreciative.

Overall, that last column was okay, but it wasn’t even close to my best work. I’d rushed its writing because I had to hurry putting the paper to bed before the meeting I had with my boss. It was sent and the pages done, then I hurried upstairs to learn that “some changes are being made.”

Within 24 hours, I had cleaned out my office, packing a newspaper career into a couple of cardboard boxes. I didn’t even get a chance to write a column saying goodbye. I didn’t get a farewell lunch or a sheet cake in the break room.

That the column I had written every week for the better part of a decade would no longer be published wasn’t that big of a deal. I was tired of it anyway and had tried to stop doing it years before. My old boss, Dave, would not let me bury it. It was the voice of the newspaper and an important part of the publication, he’d said. I’m not sure about that, but it’s always nice to be flattered.

If you had read that weekly column of mine, you would know that it focused on just about everything, and you always write what you know. That meant stories about my kids making their way through elementary, middle and high school. It was about the people I encountered and the things I read in the news. It was about how I loved my wife and how our marriage was a partnership.

It wasn’t long after getting laid off that my marriage dissolved. It pretty much goes without saying that 2017 was a pretty crappy year for me.

Over the years, I had written about 450 columns and about half of them I collected into two books, which you can buy on Amazon if you so desire. After the turmoil that had occurred in my life, I found myself hating those little stories about my life because, I believed, they were the words of a blind man.

In the years that have followed, I never stopped writing, but I didn’t share much of the little output I was producing. There are simply some things one chooses not to share with the world, and for several years, I didn’t.

The thing about going through trauma in your life is that time softens a lot of blows and self-reflection has a tendency to put things into perspective. I had found a sweet spot, I suppose, landing on my feet and landing a pretty decent job paying more than I ever made in newspapers. The boys and I rearranged our lives in the home and everything turned out okay. Something was missing, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Several months ago, I found myself looking for something to read. One of the things I enjoy about lunch is sitting down in a quiet place and reading while I eat. That day, I had finished a book on my Kindle and had nothing in the queue. Leafing through my Kindle library were copies of the column books. I called one up and began reading. I enjoyed them immensely. (What kind of writer doesn’t enjoy his own work?)

I have only vague recollections of what I had written, but when I read those little stories they brought back memories of a time in which our family was young and about how we lived our lives. In a sense, the collections are a memoir of my life while I was the newspaper editor of a community newspaper in central New Mexico.

It made me remember, to an extent, who I am. Those columns, along with the two books I’m currently writing, reminded me what I really enjoy. My current employer has little use for this kind of writing, and the writing I do these days falls along the lines of stuff you read only if you have to read it.

So, here I am, back doing what I enjoy doing and sharing it again with the world. If you like what you read, please share. If you don’t, there is no need to comment at all. If you are a copy editor and see a mistake, I apologize and offer you a job that doesn’t pay. If are a newspaper editor and would like to run these essays in your publication, drop me a line and we can work something out.

R