March 19, 2021

I wrote this poem about my mother-in-law Jaye, who died two weeks ago.

The Last Day

Hungry.
Stop for
a chicken sandwich.
Arrive at
the nursing home
by 1:15 p.m.

In Jaye’s room,
an attendant
tells us gently:
She passed away
at 1 p.m.

Overwhelmed
by guilt.
If only
we hadn’t stopped,
we could have been present
for the last minutes
of my dear mother-in-law’s life.

Trying to ease
our minds,
the staffer says:
She’s been in
a coma-like
state
for a couple of days.

It’s easy to see
that Jaye
is gone.
Her face
is turning
sallow.
Her body
is so, so still.

We sit
beside her
in silent
mourning.
My sister-in-law
arrives.
We hug
and sob.

A seven-year bout
with dementia
erased
the joy in Jaye’s life –
and some of the joy in mine.

Before,
she had loved me
as if I were
her child.
She praised
my stories,
my mothering,
even my cooking.

Her love for me
was unequivocal.
I loved her
the same way.

If only we
hadn’t stopped,
we could have
held her hands,
stroked her hair,
helped to ease her
into eternity.

Jan. 28, 2021

I walked into the Charlotte Observer building for the first time in the spring of 1993. An editor had asked me to apply for an investigative reporting job and the paper had set up a two-day interview. I wasn’t sure I was interested because I had a satisfying job at the Houston Chronicle.

Still, the Observer was a premier Southern newspaper in a state I loved. I was a proud graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and wanted to locate closer to my family in Virginia. My father had just been diagnosed with cancer and I wanted to spend more time with him.

During my Observer interview, I met with close to a dozen editors, talked about journalism for hours and toured parts of the city I’d never seen.

There was plenty to see, including the lovely uptown with its growing number of skyscrapers, tree-lined streets and flower-filled planters. But what intrigued me the most about the commercial area was the iconic Observer building.

I’ve always been interested in architecture and could tell that the white, rectangular building was built in the Brutalism style. Located at one end of uptown, it was constructed in 1971, when that type of heavy, faux-modern style was popular. The five-story edifice seemed to squat on its plot of land, its high slitted windows giving it a hooded look.

Inside, a central atrium flooded the middle of the building with light. On each side of the atrium were the escalators, where staffers going up and down waved to each other and talked – or nearly shouted – in truncated conversations. I’d never worked in a newspaper building with escalators and the effect was collegial and charming.

Or so I thought. Two months later, I was working at the Observer and discovered that the escalators were the bane of the staffers’ existence. The moving stairs broke down chronically and often required days to repair. Two small elevators took up most of the slack – and too much time.

The newsroom was on the fourth floor and its signature narrow vertical windows cast a mostly gloomy light on the L-shaped newsroom.

The news staff grumbled about the building’s general inefficiency, but everyone knew important things went on there. The stories ranged from Pulitzer prize winners to three-inch weather updates. In between were civic-minded reports on the school board, city council and county commission.

In my 15 years in the newsroom, I saw and generally experienced varieties of every emotion – exhilaration, boredom, happiness, sadness, pity and disgust. As an editor, I comforted people as they cried, hugged excited staffers and helped to pacify angry reporters.

When I left the paper in 2009 and moved to London, it was with a sense of foreboding. The Observer and its relatively new owner, the McClatchy Corp., were being pummeled by a terrible economy, crippling debt and plummeting circulation. Bankruptcy came a few years later. It was just a matter of time before something bad would happen to the building on Tryon Street.

Sure enough, the building and its ten acres were sold for a multi-use development in 2016 and the wrecking ball appeared not long after. Before the old building was demolished, a big party was held to celebrate its storied history. I didn’t have the heart to go, but my name was inscribed on the lobby’s wall, along with the names of a few thousand other people who’d worked there over the years.

The remnants of the depleted Observer staff moved to the NASCAR building a few blocks away, but that didn’t last either. A few months ago, the editor announced that the paper’s newsroom would be shut down and the few dozen staffers left would work at home, partly because of Covid 19 but mostly because the modern quarters had gotten too expensive. A hedge fund now owns the paper and decided it really doesn’t need a newsroom.

The reviled but beloved Observer building is gone, replaced by a sleek, tall bank. But the new building can’t take away the memories.

Oct. 7, 2017

I never chose my job. Journalism found me.

My father was successively the editor and publisher of two small Virginia newspapers owned by a chain. The first was located in Radford in southwest Virginia and his second one was in Suffolk, near the coast.

My life was inextricably bound to those newspapers. My first real job was proofreading the Radford paper the summers I was 13 and 14. I’d sit in a dingy office in the basement near the printing presses and workers would bring me freshly inked galleys – long columns of print – to read. I’d mark them up with the proofreading symbols I learned. I was proud that I was a good speller and spotted errors easily. The job had long hours but I loved it because I was working with my father. He’d discuss his day during our rides home for lunch and dinner, almost as one adult to another.

The summer I was 19 and a prospective sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill, I started working as a reporter at his Suffolk paper, soaking in the art and craft of newspapering. I covered mostly city council and police news. I’d observe the honorable and friendly way my father dealt with employees, customers, advertising prospects and anyone else who came in the door. He even delivered newspapers after hours to customers who’d call us at home to say they hadn’t gotten one. He worked incredible hours to keep the business going, wrote pithy editorials and sometimes shot pictures and wrote high school football stories.

During my sophomore year, I walked into the Daily Tar Heel offices and offered my services to the editor. On my own for the first time, I was put to work immediately. I loved the fraternity of the student newsroom and the daily sense of accomplishment. I was hooked.

My first job after graduation was as a women’s editor for the Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Virginia. During the 38 years I worked for newspapers in Virginia, California, Texas and North Carolina as a reporter and as an assigning editor, I mostly loved it. It was hard, with long days that often stretched into late nights, but I believed that my job was important to society.

In the early 1980s, my father was rewarded for decades of hard work by being laid off by his mercenary chain. He was a few years short of retirement age, but a new generation owned the chain and the ungrateful son wanted to get rid of the old guys. My father negotiated a settlement and eventually wrote columns for the new editor. I treasure those columns. He died in 1995 and I lost the best role model I ever had.

When I think of our president referring to the media as “an enemy of the people,” I’m offended. I wonder if citizens understand how hard journalists work to bring the truth to light. I’ve never met a reporter who didn’t take the work seriously, who didn’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying about misspelling a name or who didn’t put in extra hours to ensure a story was airtight.

I’ve been threatened, cursed at and verbally abused many times, but I still feel that the work of a journalist is a sacred calling.

June 1, 2016

I had no idea that Vladimir Putin had an opinion on Texas secession until I saw this editorial comment in Sunday’s London Times. Could I somehow get a copy of Winning Texas to him?

From the Times:

“As we debate Brexit, isit time for Texit? Pravda, once the official organ of the Soviet communist party, has suggested that the US would be better off without Texas.

“Texas has been a particular cancer on the people of the United States,” says the paper, which blames the state for, among other things, unleashing George W. Bush on the White House. Texans should now follow the British example and plunge into weeks and weeks of angry debate followed by a referendum. Nothing quite so bracing, is there?”

Thanks to my London friend Sylvia Wallach Squires for sharing this bit of British commentary.