I thought while George W. Bush was on vacation would be the perfect time to slip in a bit of good news for my friends on the right – this marks the last time you’ll have to read anything I write in this particular publication.
Like most divorces, this has been a long time coming. We’ve been drifting apart for a long time. But it’s time to make it formal.
When I started here about eight years ago, I was seduced by the vision of journalistic integrity and honesty Executive Editor Jack Sanders not just spoke about, but lives. Coincidentally, his wife Sally, the Arts & Leisure editor, became my personal editor, the one to whom I faithfully submitted each column, even as the distance between columns grew. Writers know, sure, you trust your wife, sure you’ll put your life in the hands of your surgeon, but there is no trust stronger nor more delicate than that with your editor, and that trust was never betrayed.
Time to move on, and out, but I’ll miss you guys. Thanks.
I’ll miss you readers as well. Wherever I end up, whatever other readers I may be fortunate enough to have, you were my first, and that means I’ll never forget you. I do hope we’ll run into each other again, that some other time, on some other page somewhere, we’ll have the chance to reconnect, to find that place for us.
I’ve seen lots of changes during our time together, and I haven’t liked most of them. Maybe I’ve just become an old fuddy-duddy. Maybe I always was an old fuddy-duddy. Maybe I just feel old. And I do. Feel old. Very old. Very tired. Too many fights, too many losses, too little left to win, too little hope of winning.
Doesn’t much matter now, I’m heading off to where I can feel young again.
I got an e-mail from a lovely woman in Ridgefield after a column I wrote recently. She mentioned how when I started I’d been so filled with fire and brimstone, but now I had, to put it nicely, mellowed out.
It’s true. I read some of those early columns and hardly recognize that person. That person was someone who came into journalism believing it was possible to make changes, that a newspaper column was truth, and truth a great weapon in the fight for justice. The person I see today is so much closer to Muhammad Ali – the good days gone – and today tinged with that ineffable sadness that comes from knowing most your energy was wasted fighting within, leaving too little for the enemy without. Too little left to fight the battle raging still.
And so I go, eight years later, perhaps not noticeably wiser, but definitely sadder, less convinced that truth will win out, that good will triumph over evil, that tomorrow will be better than today.
So go I must, in hope that I may find once more that passion now extinguished that once burned right through my heart onto the page, in hope that I may find a place for it, there, or there, or there, somewhere, out there, somewhere that I may find if I look just hard enough, just once again, just take another look.