To a young man setting out upon a great adventure

A young man I know has made a big decision.

After living all his life in essentially one place -- although it is a big city -- he has apparently decided to move 1,200 miles away and get a fresh start in life.

He is 30 years old. When I was 30, I felt old as death, but from the perspective of 33 more years, I think I was actually pretty young. He has a good education -- a graduate degree -- and has yet to start a family of his own.

He is bright, outgoing and talented, but the fields he has been pursuing have been changing rapidly. He has seen the struggles of men of his father's generation and it would certainly be understandable if he wanted to step away from the table and take some time to think.

24 years ago.

I have known him since before his third birthday, and I figure he's about the second-best young man of his generation that I know. (I'm not rating anyone ahead of my son, but I love this kid and would do whatever I could to help him)

He wants to be a writer, but for every big success in that field, there are a dozen who just get by and a hundred more who don't make it at all. If I could give him any advice at all about that, I would tell him to make a mark for himself writing non-fiction first. Magazine articles, biographies, that sort of thing. Those are things for which there is still a market and you don't have to compete with the thousand wannabes who are trying to write the next big science-fiction movie.

In his move, he is doing something I did many times during my career -- picking up stakes and going somewhere entirely different for a fresh start. I always had jobs waiting for me when I moved, but he has friends and a place to stay waiting for him.

Leaving a place you have lived for a long time can be a mixed bag, and many people tend to expect too much of it. They think all their problems will be left behind, and of course that isn't true. Because whenever you move, no matter how far you go, the one thing you can never leave behind is yourself.

I got that line from a movie I never actually saw -- "Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension" -- and what it actually said was, "Wherever you go, there you are." During the years I was a newspaper columnist, I was called upon several times to give speeches to 18-year-olds who were getting awards. What I eventually got from it was that yes, you don't leave your problems behind, but you also carry your strengths along with you.

You have the love of your parents and your sisters, your friends and acquaintances. You have what you have been taught and what you have learned. And if there's one thing I can leave you with, maybe it's this:

Remember Jay Gatsby, of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald said he paid a very high price for living so long with the same dream.

Dreams come and go. If one good thing doesn't happen, something else will as long as you keep faith with yourself.

Best of luck, kiddo.

You'll be fine.

Modern man is and always will be a social creature

Imagine waking up one morning and finding you were all alone.

Not just where you live, but everywhere you go. You get into your car and drive through your neighborhood, but you don't see any other signs of life. You get out onto a main drag, or a freeway, only to see that you are the only car moving in either direction.

You stop at the grocery store. The parking lot is empty, and when you go into the store, there is no one there. The only sound you hear is the air conditioning. You take what you needed, and since you're honest, you leave money on the counter to pay for it.

Back in your car, you turn on an oldies station. After a Beatles song and a doo-wop group, a song comes on that you had all but forgotten. Jonathan King's "Everyone's Gone to the Moon."

It's funny. Right around the time we actually did go to the Moon, we stopped believing in all those wonderful stories about space travel and colonizing other planets. We stopped thinking that ordinary people -- average Joes and Janes -- would ever get to do things like that.

The stories changed. Now when the towns were empty, it wasn't because the people had gone anywhere. It was because they had died. Dystopian stories like George Stewart's "Earth Abides," Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" and Stephen King's "The Stand" told wonderfully how the Earth was rapidly depopulated. Two by disease, one by worldwide nuclear war.

All three books are worth reading, so I'm not going to recap plots. But I was listening to the audiobook version of "The Stand" -- King's apocalyptic tour de force -- and two of the characters were looking for camping supplies in a completely empty small town in Colorado.

That's nothing strange in itself, but imagine an America where the population has dropped from more than 300 million people to about 2 million. Due to the gregarious nature of people, some less-populated states might drop almost to Zero Population.

Think about walking into a town that has been completely depopulated. There's a library that will never issue another card or check out another book, a movie theater that will never show another film, a church where no one will ever pray.

Think about driving, or riding, or walking hundreds of miles and never seeing a living soul. Think of living out the rest of your life and never being able to talk to anyone else. Of course you would have to give up television, radio and computers, because there would be no one to keep the electricity running. If you were knowledgeable enough to use portable generators and to find gasoline and/or batteries, you might be able to have at least a few benefits of the modern world.

But you would never be a social creature again. And almost any formerly minor problem could be fatal. Step on a rusty nail and die because there's no one to give you a tetanus shot. Or you might break a leg and not be anywhere you could do anything to fix it.

Of course, the saddest of all possibilities came from the mind of Rod Serling in the first season of "The Twilight Zone." Burgess Meredith plays a harried little man who loves to read but never has time to do it. One day he is deep in an underground vault when a nuclear explosion destroys New York.

Meredith comes out to find that he is the last man alive in the city. He joyously finds himself outside what remains of the New York Public Library, and sees books he loves scattered all around him.
Then something happens and he realizes what all of us eventually would. Man is a social creature.

Is there anything that does more for the world than music?

What's the very best thing about being alive?

I'm not sure there is a bigger, more open-ended question than that, but I'm going to make it a little easier by eliminating an entire category. Just as Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Hell is other people," I'm going to ask the question without including interpersonal relationships.

After all, all you need is love.

But if we look at so many of the other good things in the world, from sunsets to cheeseburgers, there really isn't any doubt to me what belongs at the top of the list.

Music.

There is nothing in the world that can touch more emotions or enhance more moods than music, and there are few things in this world that come at us from more directions.

What's great about music is that you can love music even if the only thing you enjoy is George Jones. Or Gregorian chants. Or John, Paul, George and Ringo. Or even Simon, Theodore and Alvin.

 I was fortunate to grow up in a home in which both of my parents appreciated music, and a great deal of what I heard at age 7 or 8 in the late '50s was Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger, among others.

At about age 11, I started listening to rock 'n' roll, and in fifth grade I started playing a musical instrument myself. I never got very good at the cornet, and in 10th grade, my high school band director suggested that I switch to the tuba. He told me I wouldn't get to the top band on the cornet, but he promised me two years at that level if I learned the tuba.

I did. I spent two years in marching band playing the Sousaphone in the fall and playing the tuba in symphonic band in winter and spring. I never got really good at it, and that was exacerbated by the fact that I sat next to the best tuba player in the state and was constantly reminded of my own shortcomings.

But I gained a real love for the music we played, and when I hear Sousa marches, my feet still want to step higher.

I stopped playing after high school, partly because I didn't own my instrument. But I loved music more and more as the years passed. I collected albums, then cassettes, the CDs and finally a big iPod that has more than 13,000 songs on it. In the space of half an hour, I can hear Jacques Brel, Alan Jackson, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Buffett, Eric Bogle and Spike Jones. I can hear popular music from the 1930s up to the present.

I've got video of one of the best musicians I have ever known, my son Virgile on the saxophone. He played through high school and his first two years of college, and as a senior he was both all-state -- in the state where it means the most -- and drum major of the marching band.

I'm not sure there's anything -- excluding people and maybe baseball -- that I love more than music. The song I'll use to wrap this up is far from the best music around, but the words mean something, and there is a certain beauty to it.

We really are all better off when we add some music to our day.

Big timers sure, but the best memory is of a kid in a chair

I wrote the other day about my two years in Greeley, Colorado, and what they meant to me.

But something happened this week that brought back something very important that I had all but forgotten.

Somebody died.

When I went to Greeley in the fall of 1986, I had been in journalism as a sportswriter for seven years. My job in St. Louis had been big-time until the paper ran out of money. I covered college basketball and went to the NCAA Final Four in both 1985 and '86.

But my purpose in going to Greeley was to manage a department -- three full-time and three part-time employees -- and serve as a mentor to them. I told them when I started there that if they had ambitions, I wanted to help them achieve them. Two of my people want on to big-time careers.

Mike Fisher went all the way to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to cover the Dallas Cowboys and has since gone on to become one of the top names in sports radio in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

My other employee who made it even bigger originally came from Texas. Nancy Gay worked for several major metros before winding up at the San Francisco Chronicle. Earlier this year, she went to work as managing editor for Comcast's Sports Net in the Bay Area and for all of California.

She actually has achieved even more in terms of the NFL. She's one of 44 voters for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

As impressive as the two of them turned out to be, and as proud as I am of the small role I played in their success, I'm pretty sure both of them would have succeeded if I had never gone within a thousand miles of Colorado.

Where I made a difference was with Matt Schuman, who died Sunday at the age of 49.

When I first met Matt, I was told that the previous sports editor had hired him to grab sports agate off the wire and clean it up for publication. I was told that was all I could expect of Matt, since he had been born with muscular dystrophy.

That was fine with me. I liked him and felt good about the fact that we were providing a job for someone who was partly disabled.

He told me he thought he could do more, though, and he asked for the opportunity. I had him take phone calls from high schools and write up the reports, a huge part of any small-city sports department.

He did well, so we tried sending him out for feature stories, sidebars at afternoon events and finally game coverage.

He may not have been able to stand up, but he certainly was able to rise to the challenge. He was still a part-timer when I left Greeley in October 1988, In my final column as sports editor, I wrote about some of the things I would never forget about my two years in Colorado. I mentioned 15 different items, and this one was No. 6:

"One of my sportswriters, Matt Schuman, who is fighting a lifelong battle against muscular dystrophy. When the previous sports editor hired Matt, he didn't expect him to be able to do more than type up agate results. Now he writes almost as well as a lot of full-time sportswriters I've known."

Sometime in the years after I left, Matt earned a full-time position with the Tribune and he worked there for the rest of his life. In 2003, he did a seven-part series on Weld County citizens living with disabilities that won him numerous awards.

This past weekend, he went into the hospital for some routine tests, and he developed pneumonia and died. In many of the stories written about Matt after his death, so many of the people who knew him talked about how he never complained. I didn't laugh when I read it, but I did think it was strange.

Complain about what? His disability? I think Matt understood that most of us have strengths and weaknesses, and we don't always get to choose what they are. There are plenty of people who have no obvious physical shortcomings, but they're dumb as a bagful of hammers. Or they're rich but they have no heart, no compassion for others.

Matt's legs didn't work, and he had other shortcomings physically, but he was smart, talented and had a lot of people who loved him.

My guess is he thought he had a pretty good deal.

Sail on, Matt. I believe you are in a better place, and I know you'll appreciate it. I thank the Lord for my contact with you and for any small role I played in improving your situation. You're my best memory of my time as a mentor.

God bless you.

Serving in the military, people earn the respect of others

Almost alone among American institutions, I have tremendous respect for the military.

I certainly have little use for American business; there's far too much greed and selfishness and far too little ethics. It's pretty much the same with politics, with a few exceptions, and there are plenty of people who call themselves religious when what they really mean is that they're holier than thou.

The military certainly isn't perfect. There are places -- like the Air Force Academy, for one -- where religious Dominionists try to force their own brand of Christianity on others. For the most part, though, the military is the closest thing we have to a meritocracy in our country.

Middle class or poor, black or white, male or female. Work hard and follow orders and you can get ahead in the military. Back in the '50s and '60s, a lot of kids were able to straighten out their lives when judges offered them a choice of sentences for a minor crime -- time in jail or enlist in the Army.

There really isn't any doubt that the period mentioned and the one directly before it -- World War II -- was perhaps the most egalitarian our country has ever seen.

Soldiers serving in the 3rd Armored Division in Freidberg, Germany, in the late '50s served with maybe the most famous man in America at the time -- Elvis Presley.

In WWII and Korea, many of the richest and most powerful families in America had sons serving in combat. Pretty much the only reason John F. Kennedy became president was that his older brother -- Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. -- died when his plane went down. He was the Kennedy son who had been slated for politics.

In the postwar era, service in the military mattered, both in business careers and in politics. If someone didn't service, it raised eyebrows and questions. Ronald Reagan was the first president who didn't serve overseas, and Bill Clinton was the first president with no military record at all. Several Republicans avoided service with cushy appointments to the National Guard, and Dick Cheney pretty well sneered at those who served by saying he had "other priorities."

The 2012 election was the first in which none of the four candidates -- Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden or Paul Ryan -- had any military service. The draft had ended, and none of them chose to serve.

I didn't serve in the military, and neither did any of my close friends. Two of them had fathers who were career officers, one in the Navy and the other in the Air Force.

I wish I could have served. From age 18 to about 25, I was lost and stumbling through my life. Learning some discipline and personal responsibility might have made my life very different, but when I turned 18, most of the recruits were going from basic training to Vietnam. I wasn't know for my survival skills at the time, and I'd say the odds of me surviving a month in Vietnam -- let alone a year -- were not in my favor.

But I do admire people who served, either then or later, especially when the draft was no longer in force. In this era of greed and selfishness, it's nice to see people who understand that being part of a society is giving of yourself as much as taking from others.

When I meet some who served, it tells me something good about them. When I meet people who pulled every string they could to avoid serving. I admire George H.W. Bush for his service as the youngest fighter pilot in the Navy in World War II, but I have no use for his son, who avoided Vietnam by using family connections to serve in the Alabama National Guard.

I honestly don't recall Gee Dubya ever living in Alabama.

Maybe another great American Gee Dubya -- George Wallace -- helped him out.

Neither one of them could carry Colin Powell's jockstrap.

And the greatest Republican president of the last 100 years? Not the guy who sold war bonds, but the guy who ran the Normandy invasion.

Yes, I like Ike -- a lot more than I liked Ronnie.

Happy birthday to an extremely special person

I didn't meet my daughter until she was 12 years old.

Pauline was 12 and Virgile was 7 when I married their mother and became their stepfather. Ever since the fall of 1992, I have had the opportunity to watch two of the most amazing young people on the planet grow to adulthood.

Pauline and Virgile in 2005.

I know I brag on my children a lot, but today is Pauline's birthday and I am going to do it again.

My daughter works for the Department of State as a Foreign Service officer, and she is currently serving at her fourth posting. She has been getting every possible promotion at the earliest opportunity and she is already making twice as much money as I ever made at any job I ever had.

Those are both good things, but they aren't the best things about Pauline. The very best thing about her is her love of family and her loyalty to the people who love her. A couple of years ago, I was writing a piece about basic truths of life, and of all the people I asked for their opinions, Pauline gave the most interesting answer.

"I always put my family first -- no exceptions."

Pauline at work.

She has two children. Madison will be 5 next month and Lexington will be 2 in November, and Pauline has told me that when her kids are older, she will assess how the frequent moves are affecting them and then decide whether she can stay with her current career plan.

And yes, she will give up her great job and her great career if she deems it better for her children.

A lot of people talk the talk, but my daughter is one person who absolutely walks the walk.

Happy 33rd, Pauline.

You know how much I love you.

But I also want you to know -- just as much -- how proud I have always been of you.

A fascinating time, even living without an automobile

Of all the years of my adult life, maybe the most interesting -- because it was so different -- was the last two months of 1986 and the first two of 1987.

I was living somewhere I had never lived before, enjoying a brand-new job at the very best place I ever worked, living in a new apartment -- and doing it all without owning a car or even having access to one.

I never worked in this building.

It all came out of the blue. I had made contact with a former girlfriend who was working in Minnesota in September and we wound up spending a week together in Denver in mid October. I was pretty fed up with my employer at the time. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat had gone out of business once already while I was there and was heading for another fall.

I had come to Denver for fun. I had brought my resume and some clips along, but I really wasn't planning to apply for any jobs. I didn't bring anything to wear for an interview. But I was looking at an issue of Editor and Publisher and I noticed that the Greeley Tribune was looking for a sports editor. I phoned up there and talked to Ron Stewart, the paper's editor, and asked if the job was still open.

He said they were fairly far into the process, but he would be glad to talk to me. I told him I would come up the next day, but that I would have to interview in blue jeans. My friend Nancy Anderson drove me to Greeley, about an hour from Denver, and I met the very best boss I would ever have in the newspaper business.

Downtown Greeley.

The Tribune was an excellent local paper, less than 25,000 circulation, and it would be the second smallest paper for which I ever worked. I didn't get the job till I had been back in St. Louis for nearly a week. I gave two weeks notice, but within a week, the Globe went out of business. I left for Colorado two days later.

My plan all along was to take my stuff in a U-Haul and tow my eight-year-old Subaru behind it. But the engine blew on my car and I left it behind. I drove to Greeley, found an apartment, unloaded the truck and then turned in the vehicle. For the first time in my adult life, I didn't have transportation.

For four months, I took the bus to and from work. What would be about a seven-minute commute once I bought a car was a 30-minute bus ride. I was able to take the bus to the mall, to the movies and to the grocery and occasionally one of my colleagues would give me a ride.

I was sports editor, in charge of the section and supervising three full-time and three part-time employees, so I didn't need to go to a lot of assignments. I rode along with one of my reporters to Denver Broncos games and wrote columns, and I completely fell in love with Colorado.

I even had my own little private payday treat. We got paid every other Thursday. I deposited my check, got some cash and went to one of the downtown bar/restaurants. I got a table by myself, ordered their wonderful nachos -- best I had before or since -- and sat there by myself eating, reading and drinking two Pina Coladas. Then I went home.

I bought a new car in March 2007 and a lot of things changed. But I loved living in Colorado -- in Greeley -- so much. I stayed two years, and when I left it was only because I had set a goal for myself years ago. I wanted to live in California and cover pro sports. I did, but I wound up working for the worst paper -- and eventually the worst bosses -- in my entire career.

I would have loved to have had the best of both worlds, and winding up in California gave me my wonderful family. But oh, it sure would have been nice to have lived in Colorado and raised our kids there.

We really can't have it all.

If we could, we probably wouldn't appreciate it.