Rant #3,157: Written In the Stsrs

Everything has a beginning, and as I have learned in my recent period of discontent during the past nearly four years, everything has an end.

Kids start to play Little League when they are five years old, and there are a select few that can make it from Tee Ball to the major league level, and even they cannot play forever, and are forced to hang up their spikes.

My late father started to drive at probably age 12, because the butcher shop that the family owned needed my father to work and do whatever he could to help his father, my grandfather. My dad finally got his license legally, and through one thing to another, he eventually became a professional and legal yellow medallion cab driver in New York City, and after more than 50 years behind the wheel, he had to give up the job he loved because he simply could not do it anymore.

Me, I have been writing all my life.

As a kid, I would create these little newsletters, and I seem to remember that I would sell these things to my paternal grandmother when I was at her house for $1.

I was always writing, whether it was for school or just for fun, and I knew that somehow English—certainly my best subject in school from day one—was going to be my path to success, whether as a teacher or something else related to the written word.

While I never wrote for the high school newspaper—even though I finally did get something printed in the Massapequa High School newspaper a few years after I left there, a remembrance of a teacher that I had there who set me on the course I took, and who had suddenly passed away—I moved on to college, and my writing experience blossomed as a member of the staff of the Dowling College newspaper staff.

During my four years at the school—1975 to 1979—I was the only constant on that newspaper, the only staff member to serve during the entirety of that four-year span.

(As an aside, during my freshman year, the editor only allowed me to join if I gave blood during a blood drive, and I did just that—that was how determined I was to be on the newspaper staff.)

And I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote—and edited—literally from 1975 to October 2019, when the company I worked for collapsed and I was left with nothing.

Happily, I am still making a living—not really “a living,” but as close to it as I can get right now—as a freelance writer for an Washington, D.C.-based association serving “military resale”—military stores—a job that I filled full-time for nearly a quarter of a century in my last full-time job.

But really, all of this began in college, on that Dowling student newspaper, and for years I have been looking for the scrapbook of my work from 1975 to 1979—the genesis of what became my career—and I came up empty.

I knew my scrapbook was somewhere in this house, as I was able to find my scrapbook of stories I did afterward for the late and lamented Island Ear newspaper—another stepping stone to my career--but those college writings were lost and/or misplaced … but I just knew it was here, and would not go down the tubes as Dowling College did, a school that went out of business a few years back.

With everything going on now, I figured it was a good time to start to clean out my house’s basement—at the prodding of a few people, actually—and lo and behold, as I was filling the third garbage bag with trash, I found my college newspaper scrapbook, and while it was musty and murky looking, it was fully intact!

After breathing a sigh of relief, I thumbed through it a little bit, but the pages were kind of brittle, as the scrapbook probably was in the basement for at least a decade or two.

I laughed, I cringed, I remembered a lot of different things related to what I had written, and I also felt a sense of pride … this was the real beginning for me as a writer, and no matter how cringe-worthy or bad what I did was, this is literally where it all started.

I guess those in other fields can point to similar things that they might have in their possession that they can say was the beginning ot their career … for instance, maybe an accountant can point to a list of long-buried baseball statistics he compiled years ago by playing his Strat-O-Matic baseball game as the first inkling of what he would be doing for the rest of his life.

But for me, this old and ragged scrapbook is a real time capsule of what I was doing and thinking way back when, the real and actual stepping stone to what I eventually did as a professional to put bread on my table to this day.

Yes, my full-time career ended abruptly just about four years ago, but I have carried on as best as I could as a writer—and an editor—and this scrapbook was the very beginning of that odyssey.

I am just so happy and fortunate to have finally found this thing, and while I do wince at some of it, I also laugh at a lot of it, too …

That scrapbook literally is my origin story, and boy, have I come far!

Write on!