This was going to be just another collection of posts from my blog. Then toward the end of July, I wrote a post that I called “What I Came to Say,” and I decided that would make a good title for the book and a decent opening salvo.
And then I decided to put my face on the front cover for the first time.
And then I chose to make the book’s subtitle, “Making the most of the time that’s left.”
Those decisions changed the trajectory of the book.
If I’m going to produce a book called What I Came to Say, what would I say in it?
What was I put on this Earth to learn and pass along?
And what would I say realizing I only have so much time remaining, or as my late wife Carol Jean (“Red”) used to say, “I only have so many gardens left”?
Those questions made me re-examine every post I had chosen for the collection to date, and it got me thinking about what else needed to be in the book. I wrote and added the posts “Pay with cash” and “The venerable 5 W’s.” All told, it has come out just shy of 47,000 words, more than twice the size of my previous collections, and I still have things to say, but this will do for now.
My plan is to have What I Came to Say available for your Christmas gifting pleasure no late than Dec. 1. I know, I know, “Man plans, God laughs,” but I’ll do my best.
Time heals all wounds, they say, and this wound must be healing, because I mis-remembered the anniversary. It was 10 years ago yesterday, Oct. 25, not today when I intended to write about it, that my tenure in the favorite job of my life came to a gently brutal end.
In July 2002 I was given the opportunity to become editor of the Door County Advocate, a venerated then-140-year-old institution, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it. I was happily ensconced as an editor of the late and lamented Green Bay News-Chronicle. But Red and I drove up to Sturgeon Bay that Saturday to look around the community and perhaps visit the offices.
It is a beautiful tourist city on the water with an old-fashioned bustling downtown, and we were charmed, as almost everyone who visits is. We found the newspaper office, which was closed, but next to the entrance was a bronzed replica of the very first front page from March 22, 1862.
Red and I saw that date and looked at each other in astonishment. You may be aware that I, too, was born on March 22, a few years later.
“Do you think it’s a sign?” she asked.
I sat in the editor’s chair on the second floor for the first time on Aug. 1, 2002. Except for a three-year gap when I was made opinion editor of the surviving Green Bay newspaper, that office was my home away from home for the next 14 years. It was the best job I was ever privileged to hold.
The Wisconsin Newspaper Association chose us as the best non-daily newspaper in the state in 2004 and 2014, and our stalwart crew racked up a roomful of other awards in the intervening years as well. Held by the family of founder Joseph Harris for more than a century, the Advocate was sold in the late 1980s to another family man, Frank Wood, who endeavored to maintain the Harrises’ legacy as best he could. It felt more like a stewardship than a job.
Wood spent a great deal of time demonizing the corporation to which he eventually sold most of his little empire of community papers. I vowed never to work for that company, but then one July morning Wood informed us that company had been our employer since midnight the night before. I’m a little ashamed to admit I never spoke to Wood again.
The chain turned out to be not as bad an employer as we had been told to expect, until one day it was. As the newspaper industry began to die of self-inflicted wounds, the layoffs finally began to affect the Advocate, and that Tuesday morning in October 2016, it was my turn for the ax to fall.
Just a financial decision, times are tough all over, no reflection on the quality of your work, don’t you know, said the dead-eyed corporate drone, as we signed and processed the severance package. I was thankful the rest of the news staff was spared, although I should have realized they would be almost all gone, too, within two or three years.
Like all newspapers the Advocate is now a shadow of its former self, its name almost all that’s left of the legacy. Not even the office remains, converted into “the Advocate Apartments.” An upstart independent paper has become the community voice we could have been still, had the corporation left us alone, but at least the community has that — most places where newspapers die, they are replaced by nothing.
I am still in Door County, in the house Red and I built 14 years ago, and I hope to live here for the rest of my years. Anyone who has spent any time here in God’s country will understand why. The sadness lingers, but mostly I’m a bit shocked that 10 years have gone by already. It seems like a long time and another world ago.
I believe in a God of love. How else to explain cardinals, blue jays, robins, goldfinches, golden retrievers, echinacea, sunflowers, lilacs, daisies, fall colors, spring daffodils, gentle breezes and roaring waves crashing into a beach? Sunsets and sunrises?
It’s a beautiful world, and very often you don’t have to look far and wide to find the beauty. God paints the sky in broad strokes, and he fine-tunes the butterfly with intricate detail.
There is too much of the artist in nature for any other explanation: A loving God designed it all.
