Ink on My Hands

It struck me yesterday as I was bent over my monitor, trying to keep a steady hand as I drew a single pixel line onto a graphic for one of my web pages.

This action is so familiar, I thought, as I ran the line down the page to divide two columns of text that had been threatening to get lost in each other. Familiar, but like a skill I learned a long time ago and then dismissed as something I didn’t need anymore.

I couldn’t figure it out until I had become really focused on the placement of the line…it had to be just right, not a pixel off to the left or right because there wasn’t enough room between the text as it was. That was when the long-forgotten thing I had done in the past came back.

See, I used to want to be a journalist. It started in fourth grade when I was a pretty heavy reader of National Geographic (my parents had a huge collection dating back through the 30’s that came from my grandparents – but the joys of that are for another entry – I digress…). I wrote a short story in the first person in which I was a National Geographic photojournalist sent to Guadalcanal on assignment.

Anyways, from there it was on to creative writing classes in junior high, journalism classes in high school, and joining the staff of the high school newspaper. After a year of writing for the paper, I was promoted to an editorial position in my junior year.

Being an editor on a high school newspaper meant you not only got to write bad newspaper articles, but you got to be in charge of badly laying them out on the page that was then sent to the printer for reproduction.

Twenty years later this sounds ridiculous, but page layout in the late 70’s (at least at a high school paper) involved typing your article out on an electric typewriter, cutting it out with scissors, running the little piece of paper through a machine that put hot wax on the back of it, and then sticking it to a really big piece of paper. When the really big piece of paper was filled with little sticky bits of typed-on paper, it was dubbed “camera-ready” and sent to the printer for reproduction.

I’ve described this process to school age kids now (who are quite likely to have never touched a typewriter and lay out document columns by clicking that squiggly button in Word), and I’m not sure they believed it. I thought they might ask me if I knew Gutenburg personally.

Anyways, in those days when you had to separate columns of text, you had a roll of very skinny black tape that you cut with an X-acto knife, stretched tight, and lined up by eye as best you could between the columns. Performing this successfully required a lot of practice, and was an activity reserved for only the senior editorial staff.

In what’s left of my early-middle-aged brain, it was that action of leaning over the layout table, holding the skinny black tape and my breath, squinting to get the line just right…that was the action that I had forgotten, that came back to me as I leaned into my monitor and tried to get that single-pixel black line in just the right place.

I’ll probably someday tell you what happened to my aspirations to be a journalist, and how they’ve kind of come full circle to what I do now, but this entry is already really long, and I’ve got other things to do at the moment.

The Ink Dries

10/23/98

And on with the story…So there I was in high school, writing for the school paper, taking pictures at football games (which was cool because it got me on the sidelines), doing the layouts for the paper and the yearbook.

I was a junior and the time had come for my parents to start asking me what I wanted to do for a career, and where I wanted to go to college.

So I told my parents I wanted to be a journalist, and they were supportive, in their own ways. I think my mother has always held a wish to someday be a writer of short stories or novels, so she was sympathetic. On the other hand, I think she and my father both thought (very realistically) that journalism is a tough field to get in to, and not very well-paying.

My parents had a friend or acquaintance who was the editor of the local newspaper – not a large city paper, but a pretty big operation – and they set up an appointment with him for me to talk about what kind of opportunity there was (or wasn’t) working in journalism.

The editor was a good guy, brusque to the point that when I try to remember him now I can only picture Lou Grant. The same type of personality. I sat in his office in my only suit, seventeen years old, feeling like I was on my first job interview. He answered all my questions thoughtfully, giving me a great deal of respect and attention.

We talked about how there were a lot of writers in the world, but he said that if you were talented you could always find work. Being seventeen, I had no doubt that if I wasn’t a talented writer at that moment I would be soon.

Finally, the conversation got around to compensation. If I go to a good college and get a journalism degree, I asked, how much can I expect to make in an entry-level position?

He thought for a moment, and asked me, “You’re brother, he’s going to school to be an engineer, right?”

“Yes,” I replied. My brother was studying automotive engineering.

“Well,” the editor said, “I can’t tell you exactly how much money you’ll make, but let me put it this way. If you become a journalist and your brother becomes an engineer, your brother will always make more money than you. If you can live with that, you’re ready to become a journalist.” Followed by a hearty laugh.

Now he didn’t mean this in a sarcastic or mean way, he was just being realistic with me. But the moment still sticks in my head almost twenty years later, as one of those times in your life where the mists lift up a little and you see the road ahead of you for what it is, rather than what you wish it would be.

In any case, I ended up writing computer software for thirteen years. But then I started working on web sites, and suddenly I found that I had to drag those old writing, photography, and page layout skills out of the dusty reaches that I had banished them to. After many years of churning out corporate software for finance departments, and human resources departments, and a myriad of other exciting departments, I find that I can be creative again. And that feels good.

Finally, as if I needed a set piece to end this journal entry with, I got a call last week from the public relations director of a large annual sporting event in my area. We had been talking about doing a web site for the event, and she had decided to go ahead with it. I’ll need to come out to the event and get some pictures and some general information for the site, I said.

“No problem,” she replied. “Come by our office next week and I’ll issue you a press pass. You can get a media kit when you report to the press tent at the event.”

My first press pass ever…if I had a scrapbook I would put it in it, but for now it sits on the dashboard of my car, where I can look at it and get an occasional smile.