This point in our review coincidentally comes on the cusp another job relocation and has me curious about whether you’re somehow fascinated by the staccato pace of the entries or are instead questioning the bigger picture, specifically alternative ways my career and life could have gone from here.
The newspaper industry was notorious for requiring young talent to slave away in small settings like Binghamton (which wasn’t so small in retrospect) and Fostoria (which definitely was small), training grounds where we had to “pay our dues” in moving up to more respectable – and better paying – metropolitan dailies. It was something like minor league teams in baseball. A variation on that was moving up into management on papers in medium-sized markets, meaning the majority of papers across America.
Returning to the spiralbound notebooks had me trying to envision myself continuing at each place rather than moving onward or away. Would I have actually been satisfied as managing editor in a modest city, attending my kids’ softball games or being active in Kiwanis or Rotary community service? Something within me obviously yearned for more.
Or, had the Wall Street Journal followed up on its interest in me just before graduation, would the big city life of Dallas or Detroit or some other bureau have ultimately led to a life as rich, in its own quirky way, as the one I wound up with? There would have been no yoga with its reconnecting me to my body and fitness, no Society of Friends (Quaker), probably no poetry, either – things that are so much of who I am today.
There are also the questions of why I didn’t pursue an academic path or become a lawyer or find some other profession. The best I can come up with was that I had “ink in my blood,” or at least was addicted to writing and publishing. The route I sought beyond journalism was book publication. Other posts here at the Red Barn carry on in that vein. So be it.
In Fostoria, I really had no support system beyond my new girlfriend slash eventual bride, distilled here as Kat, and her family. Beyond that, those of us in the newsroom weren’t paid enough to be part of the community, especially on the six-day week the absentee owner had us working. Let me extend that to all employers of minimum-wage labor; they impoverish a community, period.
Now I am wondering how I would have grown had I become familiar with one of the town’s churches besides St. Wendelin’s or maybe taught yoga at the Y rather than in my loft. Meaning other circles where I might have discovered a deeper level of the community. Or even the community theater, no matter its taste for conventional fare.
Despite my negative portrayal of the town in my journals, something others confirmed over the years, there were some bright lights all the same.
Joe Dell, whose family owned and operated the corner restaurant where I met Kat, was one. He found a niche and he and his wife and brother and sister-in-law flourished within it despite the brutal hours.
As were my landlords, Judge John and Kathleen Bender, whose son Thomas Guernsey Bender, as I later learned, pursued many of the Asian awarenesses I was but applying them to architecture, ultimately in Oregon.
I’ve already touched on the insightful librarian, Dan, whose last name I’ve lost, someone I would definitely hold up as a paragon of selfless public service, no matter the cost. The library’s board, for that matter, should be included.
Nor should you rely on the earlier entries of Kat for her full portrait. She was often sparkling, very funny, original, a “stone fox” in the view of a friend of a close friend to whom I had sent a photo. There are good reasons I married her.
In this review, I’m sensing so much that I wasn’t aware of or at least didn’t inscribe. If I had stayed longer?
Yet much of the negative observation of the people and place as poisoned may be more prescient than I’ve been giving credit: Think of Trumpian acceptance across the Midwest in places that economically were dead-ends, even before the hostile corporate vultures who swooped in to raid healthy small-town businesses as Brian Alexander details in Glass House: the 1% economy and the shattering of an all-American town. (A book I highly recommend.)
I wanted symphony and opera and, well, something more akin to respect and power. I mean, had I settled somewhere and had the resources, I might have taken splurges in New York or San Francisco or Chicago to indulge in those.
Yet as I review these journals, for the last time intact before incinerating them, I am struck both by a sense of inevitability in their seemingly unlikely episodes and by wonder that I survived at all.
The path wasn’t one I would have charted, yet each stage provided unique lessons in my evolving awareness.
Jnana's Red Barn 