Some days come and go but while they’re around, I am feeling like the dinosaur I have become.
Today is one of those days. Nothing precisely triggered this ancient feeling. I survey the political landscape daily. Sometimes, in fact, for several hours on a given day.
I feel compelled to comment on issues of the day. Then I stop. What’s the point? I figure no one is going to care about the thoughts of a washed-up newspaper reporter and editor.
Then it occurs to me that younger versions of myself are still toiling away, studying the issues of the day and chronicling what they learn each day on various media platforms.
Then I don’t feel like a retread.
At a certain level, though, my nearly 37 years as a print journalist make me feel older than I am. I turn 75 in a couple of months, which is many more years than either my Mom and Dad were able to celebrate. Dad’s death at 59 in a boating accident shocked us to our core. Mom’s slow decline over many years to Alzheimer’s disease was impossible to stop, but no less tragic when she finally let go at age 61.
The career I pursue with gusto and vigor bears little resemblance today than what it looked like when I began. Then again, the career I started in the late 1970s already was undergoing massive change. My journalism forebears no doubt felt like prehistoric creatures when we young punks took over.
So, what goes around surely comes around.
You know what? I don’t feel so old right now as I did when I began this message.
Who knew?