Five years of blogs

It began so innocently. I was 17, a senior in high school who was producing his own sports “newspaper.” I was asked to write roundups for the Meridian Star for the Sunday editions about the Sam Dale Conference. 

I did, and like an alcoholic taking his first drink, I was smitten. The words were shots of adrenalin. I remember writing a short story that Fall that used this sentence: He used metaphors like others used a revolver, similes like others used a knife.

Luckily, I wrote that only once. Though over the top, clearly I was in love with the written word like others were ogling cheerleaders. To write one sentence per piece that was clearly mine, something no one had written before was enough of an incentive to keep me going. Still is.

The following spring, I was asked to cover a baseball game. I came into the newspaper, sat down at the typewriter (yes, you read right) and typed for what seemed to be an hour. I wrote five inches. When I was done, they told me to take a message back to someone I didn’t know in the printing room they called the back-shop. I ran. In those days the method of operation still used “hot” type, or metal engraving. I ran into a man carrying a page of those things that would have been transformed by the press into a page in the newspaper.

Such screaming, I heard.

I nearly didn’t make it to another day in the business.

Though some have wished that had been true, here I am, 44 years later, still writing. Five years ago this weekend, I retired from that business, and began writing for pleasure. Like holding grains of salt on a windy day, this is hard, hard to do.

It’s hard, as so many of my friends told me then, to say goodbye to what you had known and, quite frankly, loved for so long, to say goodbye to friends, co-workers, readers. But I did.

Granted, I was been so lucky for these many years. I covered Super Bowls, sat next to Muhammad Ali once, talked with Bear Bryant one on one. In management, I led some of the best sports staffs a manager could have and for 12 straight years they won national awards at three different newspapers.

I was privileged to see some of the best in sports and I was horrified to see some of the worst.

I worked inside, outside, done design and done agate. If it could be done either in sports or news, I took a shot at it. I worked at startup of USA Today, and I wrote some of my best stuff for a couple thousand readers of a local news section.

I looked into the eyes of some of the greatest of this generation and help tell their stories, and I there were times I wrote about junior high athletes who none of us ever heard of again.

But…

         Here’s what I learned.

This was a job. No matter how important I might have thought it to be or how much I loved it or even how much it paid (which was soon a distant somewhat pleasant memory), it was a job. I’m just the next guy, to paraphrase a friend.

It was not life. Mine or anyone else’s. The greatest thing I did in the past few years is demote myself twice for a much greater calling.

But what I did was a job, not glamorous, not something that brought fame. A job.

My life?

Much, much more. I’ve found life in the last 14 years of a 35-year career, found meaning, found direction, found love, actually as full of cliché that might be.

I’ found that helping others wasn’t a chore but a privilege. I found that caring wasn’t an albatross but a dove. I found that loving even those who were hard cases and thought the press was something to be hated wasn’t all that difficult, amazingly, because I found the ultimate love one could find.

And so I went into full-time ministry, full-time into life. The story telling continued in a different venue.

To coin as many clichés as I can, at the end of the day all this will go away. We will be left with paperless newspapers, and we will have tweets and blogs and Facebooks and you name it all. Perhaps as someone once wrote we’ve not even glimpsed the glory to come.

Perhaps the newspaper will silently, like me, slip into that good night. But we will know we were here. The evidence remains. A column here and there stood out, they told me. A story here and there hit the right note, and tears were shed or someone laughed out loud or a couple words resonated and stuck in someone’s mind.

I’ve spilled no hot type engravings lately, just slit a few veins and let the words spill out as Red Smith once said of writing.

God has been good in the five years we’ve spent fully engaged with each other.

It's been a very quick five years of these things. Seems like I wrote the first one just a few minutes ago. I've written about the loss of pets, about the gaining of friends. I've been through and amazing six churches in that time (two at one time, three at another, and the one I'm at now). I've lived in four houses. We've been to Israel, and to Eunice, La. 

And through it all, I've had some loyal readers and a very loving and patient wife.

A final story this morning: I once wrote to novelist Stephen King when I fashioned myself to be a novelist. To my ultimate surprise, he wrote back. His advice: “Writers write. There is no substitution for that. Writers must write. That’s who they are, not what they do.” Maybe it was a form letter, but I’ve never forgotten that. 

After Russian leader Leon Trotsky was mortally wounded by a man who hated him, he supposedly said, “Do not kill this man. He has a story to tell.”

That’s what I have tried to be, I reason, a story teller above all else. With words. With photos. With design. With creative thought. I’ve tried to tell our stories. Or at least the greatest story ever told.

I thank you. I've told myself I would go to 50,000 hits on this site and then stop. That's less than 5,000 to go. We'll see.