A life well travelled

 I figure this is a life well-travelled and watched, I mean, what decades story-wise to live in. I vaguely remember John Glenn first orbiting the earth, the Kennedy assassination, and that of his brother and Martin Luther King in that haunted year of 1968.  

The 1970s really started in July 1969 with Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface, and the end of the war in Vietnam brought a brief sigh of relief. Only to be crushed by double-digit inflation, wage controls, and interest rates, and high unemployment surged as Governments began to try to slow down the economy. Causing mammoth business and mortgage failures.  

Isn't it ironic how news begins and ends, focusing mainly on stories where the casualty count is front and centre? People rarely remember the happy stories that sometimes make headlines, but are predisposed to all that is tragic, disastrous, and hateful.  

Our happy thoughts, as Peter Pan would suggest, barely get us off the ground before a wave of nasty images comes swooping in and sends us crashing back down to earth.   

It was no different at the assignment desks. The editors wanted the eye-popping, heart-wrenching, graspingly tragic stories right up front and bury what they called the puff pieces somewhere in the middle. Mostly avoiding using them at all. 

Roy Megarry, my boss, who built the Globe and Mail into a powerhouse paper, used to look at me with deeply suspicious eyes as Christie Blatchford and I would write up and collaborate on these stories that he thought read more like Harlequin Romances and submit them under the most dubious names we could think of. He never said it, but I'm sure Worthington over at the Sun was looking at Christie with the same look. The laugh was a great deal of it got published by both publications, Christie, the fire and brimstone political and crime writer, to Alan McKinnon's calm and reasoning style created these fictitious submitters that gave that warm fuzzy feeling stories to the morning read. The laugh was that no readers ever caught on that the stories, however factual, were written by people who didn't exist, and I suspect both Megarry and Worthington loved the parody. 

My wedding anniversary is this weekend 36 years together and knowing each other for 40. You know what? I have centred my life around my family and helping them, so that they are my front pages, they are the keystrokes of my typewriter, and all those other facts are buried away from the stories of my family and good friends. Cause that is the news that is the most important as we guide our lives through a desperate sea. Christie, you may have left us, but the smile you left on my heart still exists today.