Our stories endure
It has been a privilege to tell some of them.
Forty-one years later, the memory is still palpable: I’m standing on a porch, summoning the courage to tap on a wood-framed screen door. The parents living behind the door of this rural Pennsylvania home had just lost their son to a drunk driver.
I’m a 20-year-old reporter, an intern for the Lancaster New Era.
My only assignment: Collect a photograph of the boy for a story in that afternoon’s edition. I tap lightly. Beyond the door, a funereal scene: Adults face each other, seated silently on the perimeter of the living room.
The parents welcome me warmly. They tell me about their child. They’re grateful I’ve come, that our newspaper will share the story of his life and death. They give me his photograph.
I leave with much more: an appreciation for our need to tell our stories; a respect for the generosity of those who insist on telling the hard ones; the courage to ask questions; the grace to listen.
In the four decades since that episode, I’ve written about families displaced by hurricanes. I’ve soared beside aerobatic pilots. I’ve sat with students on classroom floors, connecting their work and play to taxpayer spending. I’ve spoken to people about the best days of their lives — and the worst. More recently, I’ve embraced new forms of storytelling for nonprofits and universities — and even learned to do some podcasting.
Now, six weeks from retirement, I’m reflecting on the career I’ve been blessed to have, the stories I’ve written, the events I’ve witnessed, the mistakes I’ve made, the people I’ve met. Some have even tapped me on the shoulder years later.
In early October 1986, on my first weekend shift as a new reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, editors sent me to a park in Pompano Beach. Police interviewed passersby about the nearby van where someone had discovered a baby, just hours old, abandoned on the front seat. I wrote a story for the next morning’s paper. It wasn’t my regular beat, so I never thought about it again.
That is, until July 2020, when a Facebook message popped into my inbox. Toraisa Christina Joseph, 33, wanted to introduce herself. She was that abandoned baby. A parent herself now, with a husband and a career, she hoped I might have some clues about her birth parents. I was little help, other than to facilitate a follow-up story in my old newspaper. We became Facebook friends, and I’ve been privileged to follow the growth of her own family and her journey toward the connection she sought.
In the years since my career began, the fragmentation of news outlets, the dawn of the internet and the chaos of social media have radically changed our relationship with storytellers. What has not changed is this truth, clichéd though it may be: We really do all have stories to tell.
I’m so lucky to have to shared so many of them as a professional storyteller. It’s my favorite thing to do. And I plan to keep doing it. Retirement only means giving up my pro status.
