Henry Miller: Retirement 2.0; this time, I'm leaving the notebook at home
As they used to say at the circus, it’s time to clean out the cages and roll up the tents.
Consider this retirement column 2.0.
Memorial Day is my birthday, and a chance to reflect on the fact that it’s a few months shy of spending half of my life at the Statesman Journal.
Not my working life in newspapering; that would add another decade and change. No, it’s been half of my entire life.
My decision to walk away from writing a regular weekly column for the SJ is something of a selfish decision.
It means I can go fishing, camping, hiking and backpacking without having to lug the Nikon, my digital recorder, a notebook and a mechanical pencil.
Note to aspiring outdoor scribblers: Pens run when it’s wet.
Actually, this is my fifth or sixth attempt at writing a last column during the course of two weeks.
I’ve done drafts of “career in review,” “highlights and lowlights,” and other roundup-style formats.
I finally came to the conclusion that those who have read me over the decades know all about it, warts and all. And those who haven’t read the articles and columns won’t have a clue what I’m yammering about.
Doing the math, and deducting a year for the time between retirement 1.0 on Oct. 30, 2015, and return to part-time active duty in 2016, it adds up to about 1,300 weekly outdoor columns.
The late Hall of Famer Ted “the Splendid Splinter” Williams once said that “baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of 10 and be considered a good performer.”
I’m hoping that forgiving readers will give me the same leeway.
An ink-stained wretch
All-in-all, it’s been a pretty sweet ride.
My dad used to say that the best thing about teaching is the job was different every day.
That analogy applies in spades to being among what used to be referred to as the “ink-stained wretches” of the press corps.
The ink stains are gone in the digital age, as are the darkrooms, enlargers and chemical baths for film.
But the people, both in the press corps and among the public, remain largely the same.
The former are still a dedicated cadre of truth-tellers and fact-checkers. The largest humiliation coming when you have to write a correction or, God help you, a retraction.
Like being a scientist, which was my first ambition in college, the truth matters above all else for print journalists.
Truth be told, the greatest joy in my career as a column-writer was making someone famous, however briefly.
There have been times when a laminated article in a frame about a big fish, an accomplishment, or even a restaurant review, is displayed on the wall of a sporting goods store, a home, or a hot dog emporium with my byline on it.
All treasured McNuggets of a personal history.
When it comes to a reason for being, it doesn’t get better than that.
When starting out at a small weekly – we used to say, tongue in cheek, that we “published weakly” – there was a mantra among the three-person writing staff: “Why the hell would anyone want to read this?”
Making it personal, making it interesting, simply making it worth reading became the credo.
And that’s always been the goal.
Like the Splendid Splinter, the hope is that the columns and the articles measured up a good portion of the time.
Everyone has a story to tell.
And if you dig hard enough, almost all of them are worth telling if you do it in a compelling way.
Column No. 1
If I may be allowed a digression, I’d like to tell you about the first outdoor column that I ever wrote at that little weekly in Southern California almost a half-century ago.
It was a story about a motley group of retirees who gathered most days to tell lies and fish, mostly in vain, for halibut off the Goleta Pier.
The central character in the piece was Louie, a retired railroad worker from Louisiana, which he called Looooz-E-anna in his shoofly pie-thick Southern drawl.
Thinking back, he also referred to the fish that he was pursuing as “halibuth.”
I digress.
Post-retirement, Louie had been coaxed to move to Goleta by his son who worked at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Reader reviews about the inaugural column were mixed.
Crickets from the readers, and near tears of gratitude from Louie for the acknowledgment that his life and experiences were a story worth telling.
That intimate, personal Studs Terkel-like experience of telling everyman’s story has kept me hooked on doing it ever since.
Thanks, Louie.
And thanks to you all for the memories.
As I said, it’s been a sweet ride.
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: Live your life as if someone is going to write about it, and your mother gets to edit the draft.
Contact Henry via email at HenryMillerSJ@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Henry Miller on Retirement 2.0; this time, the notebook stays home
