I guess I was 40 when I said that someone should please just shoot me in the head if I were still covering the Chesterton Town Council when I turned 45.
I had plans, see. I was going to shake the dust of this sleepy little town off my feet and cover the world. Today Chesterton, tomorrow Chicago. Or L.A. Or D.C. I was going to make it to the big leagues and mix it up on the mean streets of American journalism.
Yes, well. It’s good to dream, as I tell my daughters. But far better to dream wisely. I’ve long since learned that there’s no place like home, and that in coming to Chesterton in July 1997 I’d come home at last.
Let’s be honest, though. I’m well past my expiration date as a beat reporter. Over the years I wrote millions of words of varying quality, from leaden to yeomanlike to a lavishly purple shade of overwrought. I filed thousands of bylined stories and tens of thousands of unattributed ones. I worked thousands of daily deadlines and have high blood pressure to prove it. If I had a dollar for every fender bender I reported, I could buy a new car. If I had a dime for every advertising insert I hand-stuffed in the newspaper’s basement, I could retire.
So here we are, and this is it: the last piece I’ll write for the last issue. Yet, push finally coming to shove right between my shoulder blades, I feel little sadness but instead a profound gratitude. I was lucky enough to be able to do what nearly no one who yearns to write for a living ever does: I wrote for a living.
It is fit and proper, then, that on this occasion I should thank the people who made this rare gift possible.
I want to thank the many colleagues who welcomed me into a dusty, ramshackle newsroom and gave me room to learn. I throttled myself frequently, and years later I’m unable to reread scores of my old stories because, frankly, they’re unreadable. Still, they tolerated my overreaching, and whatever success I can claim as a reporter I owe to their encouragement and guidance. For that, my family thanks theirs from the bottom of our hearts.
I also want to thank the hundreds of people who made my job easier: those who returned my calls, sent reports and emailed when the clock was ticking and I could feel an editor’s hot breath on the back of my neck. They made me accurate. They kept me honest. I want to thank them, too, for making my job fun—more fun than you’d think working every morning against a deadline could possibly be.
Part of my job was talking with people. Maybe the best part was swapping war stories, horror stories and tall tales; gossiping and kibitzing; and talking out of school, always off the record. There are more people than I could ever list. You know who you are, and while sins of omission are as unforgivable as the other kind, I can only ask you to forgive me for omitting you.
Finally, and most of all, I want to thank the readers of Duneland, who invited me into their homes of an evening and trusted me to deliver their news, making me part of a vital ritual. In an easy chair, on the sofa, at the kitchen table, taking that deep cleansing breath at the end of the workday—as October’s winds rustled the leaves or June’s fireflies flickered—at the same moment in hundreds of homes, we were all together in quiet communion with our community.
To read the paper was to share an intimacy, to know—if we happened to think of it at all—that for those few minutes we weren’t alone in our joy or anguish or anger, but partaking of the same with many others, as one.
Thank you, all of you. It’s been the honor and the privilege of my life.