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Sometimes I'm not always sure what to write about.
This week, it's a no-brainer.
It's good-bye.
I'm retiring, starting that "l-o-n-g weekend" that so many of my already retired family and friends and husband have been enjoying for many moons and joke that some day, one day, not to worry, Janice, it'll arrive for you, too.
Such a life change of a routine so very familiar and rewarding, though, brings with it a free fall of emotions happy and sad -- a surreal assessment of, did this newspaper life all really happen during the past more than four decades and is this really happening now?
I'm not going to be driving into downtown Steubenville to the Herald-Star office where I've learned so much and met so many people I never otherwise would have crossed paths with, come to appreciate and identify as friends?
Am I really writing in this space one final time with feeling, making like Carol Burnett, tugging at an ear lobe and singing, "I'm so glad we had this time together…."?
Well, yes to all of that.
When I started at the newspaper in the tail end of 1979, I did so with strict marching orders from my father, a faithful, longtime subscriber known to rattle and snap the pages of the Herald-Star as he held it and read it daily. "Go down there and straighten those people out!!" he instructed me.
In retrospect, I never imagined it would have taken all these years, dad. Ha, ha! (I'll let you all decide if the mission has been successfully completed or if work remains to be done.)
Last weekend I gathered with some of my newspaper colleagues -- more past than present ones. We were together for a memorial service for the late John Phillips, who was the sports editor for many years before he moved over to the copy desk and then on to other newspaper positions.
John was one of many personalities who earned a paycheck here and became part of my newspaper family.
As you'd expect, we shared newsroom stories and memories of those people and events during our time together at the bereavement dinner and had some group photos taken for posterity before we parted ways.
They are photos in which, go figure, we all look slightly different than we once did.
Cleaning out my desk in the newsroom unleashed more memories as I emptied out drawers jammed full of clippings of stories from through the years and columns, not to mention pictures of newspaper people and events.
In the mix was a reminder or two of things I'll never live down, one of which I shared with the Steubenville Kiwanis Club on Tuesday at the last meeting I would be attending. They are one service organization of people I have always enjoyed being around and promoting.
I prefaced my story with the lesson that what we think we heard isn't necessarily the same thing as what was actually said.
In the early years of my work here, the newsroom was an especially busy, noisy, productive place as reporters, photographers and copy desk workers, composing room employees and the pressroom gang worked together to produce the daily issue.
Reporters -- myself included -- would be writing stories from meetings we'd covered the night before in addition to any breaking news at hand. And we pitched in to help take obituaries being called in by area funeral homes.
One of the first obituaries I took dictation for was that of a Catholic gentleman who had died.
The undertaker gave me all the pertinent information, ending with the funeral service information -- that a Mass of Christian Burial would be celebrated.
Being raised Methodist, I had no idea what that even meant but wrote what I believed to be true and what I thought I had heard over the phone -- that there would be a Massive Christian Burial.
We all know our Catholic friends do everything big, I told the Kiwanis audience with a chuckle at the memory -- big dinners, big families, big exits, right?
Fortunately, that did not get in the newspaper that way but it gave quite the laugh to then-City Editor Marian Houser as she read the obituary I had written and then shared the green reporter's wrong interpretation of an end-of-life event with then-Editor Tom Waller, who hired me.
I never started out to work at a newspaper really, but through it all, it never occurred to me that I could quit and go do something else.
Really? I'm not a quitter.
Whether I liked newspaper work all the time or not, I stuck it out, year after year, from covering different beats, initially Hancock County where as a 21-year-old I tried to make sense of everything that was so very foreign to me, from police reports and courthouse rounds to city and county government and school board meetings.
I recall being advised back then to remember to "pick up arraignments" at the courthouse, which at the time sounded like instructions to swing by the dry cleaners and collect clean clothes.
Do what??
My Toronto beat of many years, covering the Gem City, helped me grow and build some reporting confidence that kept me at the paper. It cemented my conviction to continue being a part of this draining, time-consuming, often inconvenient, adrenaline-rush, no-two-days-the-same adventure of reporting on local news and being an unofficial observer and recorder of local history.
The community editor role I assumed nearly 13 years ago has been one that I have especially enjoyed.
There are so many positive people and events and organizations in this area, and I have felt privileged to share that information and stories with the reading public.
And as for this weekly column space that began way back when -- when Tom Waller suggested during a dry-idea Hancock County week that I write about the cat that I had just taken in -- I never would have imagined that it would establish the reading relationship it did with people I know and people I don't.
I've had strangers (but not for long) who've approached me in the grocery store to tell me this column is the first thing they read -- after obits and scanning grocery store supplements, of course. Pretty high praise in my book.
I can't say farewell without thanking my newspaper family -- here, elsewhere and gone on to glory -- and my family members who have lived in ongoing fear of being mentioned in these column spaces.
And then there's my Better Half -- broad-shouldered, supportive, topic-sanctioning, ever the rock and source of love and encouragement.
Honestly, Better Half is a tad worried that I'll have a meltdown or two in the weeks to come, but I'll rebound and that might be all the more frightening for him. I've told him our retired lives will now become like a Dr. Seuss book -- Oh the places we'll go, the things we will do, you're gonna' love it, and if not, boo-hoo!
The minister's eulogy for John Phillips was ironically timely as he mentioned how every exit is an entrance. So true that is with retirement at hand.
As we get older and get more of a drone's view of our lives, I realize mine has been one God wink after another and that I've had a purpose in one way at the newspaper and now in another way in what is the fourth quarter of life, one that will include riding off into the sunset.
Thank you and happy trails!