By Tad Bartimus, The Portland Oregonian
This is not a cautionary tale…Welcome to a speech about “Writing and the Meaning of Life.” I want to thank my host and dear friend Mark Trahant for giving my talk that title. It’s the best lesson I’ve ever learned about returning phone calls. The name of this speech is my punishment for not getting back to Mark before the program went to press.
Tad Bartimus | |
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Twenty-four years after I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, I had no reason to doubt that I would always be the person that Mark knew, that roving special correspondent for the Associated Press. I was living in Estes Park, Colorado, where for 12 years I had been sending stories by modem to editors at AP headquarters in New York. I operated pretty much as a loner out on the edge of a very long limb, backed up by the world’s largest newsgathering organization. From an old log house on five acres bordered by Rocky Mountain National Park, I would drive out of my driveway, dodging deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, and negotiate a narrow 30-mile two-lane canyon road to the interstate. From there I would go out into the world to report on trends and issues throughout a million square miles of the American West. That’s how I met Mark, Jay Shelledy, Betsy Marston of High Country News, naturalist and writer Terry Tempest Williams, publisher Jerry Brady, Bill Kittredge, and so many other friends in this room.
If I wasn’t on the road in my Jeep, I was catching a jet for anywhere to do my job as one of AP’s top writers. I had a wonderful husband who stayed home and ran our bed-and- breakfast inn and kept my domestic life tidy while I had adventures and worked 20-hour days. I was out on the road nearly two-thirds of every year. When I was home I was on call around the clock as an AP fireman who could be dropped down anywhere to write about anything-Yellowstone fires, race riots, Exxon Valdez, the national mood on the eve of the Gulf War.
Tad, the natural writer, evolved into Tad, the corporate creature. My professional life became encircled by a safety net of monthly paychecks, a good salary, and comprehensive health and life insurance. I had enough name recognition to be invited to be a Pulitzer juror, to command a thousand dollars a day conducting writing and editing workshops, and to be called on far too many times to pontificate at portentous gatherings.
As a beauty queen would proudly wear her rhinestone crown, so I wore the knowledge that I was one of only 18 people- and the first woman-the AP had ever chosen to be a special correspondent. That honor came 15 years after the AP made me its first female chief of a domestic bureau.
Exactly one year ago, when Mark and I first spoke of today’s conference, I was 45 years old, and had been a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice- in 1989 and again in 1991, in the feature writing category. I told myself that it was only a matter of time until my quarter-century in the business finally paid off with the big enchilada. I also was a published author with a nonfiction book about the West selling fairly well and about to go paperback. I had a lot of ideas stockpiled for more books, more stories, more status, and more status quo. I saw my future. It was respectable, comfortable, predictable, and secure. What the world saw was who I thought I was: a journalist at the top of her game who knew what the final score would be.
Life’s Cosmic Curve Balls
If my speech today is titled “Writing and the Meaning of Life,” I guess the lead should be: Your life won’t turn out the way you think it will, either. That’s not bad; that’s not good; that’s just a fact. We cannot predict what will happen to us. We can exhort the future to “DO IT MY WAY” but chances are, fate isn’t listening.
For a few minutes this morning, consider me your canary in the mine. Because what I am now, one year after Mark and I first talked about a pleasant little speech on writing, is this:
- A 46-year-old woman permanently crippled with carpal tunnel syndrome injuries acquired at a computer keyboard. After three failed operations, my hands don’t work. I had to type this speech in 15-minute increments spread out over days. Because of swelling and pain, I cannot wear my wedding ring or pick up anything heavier than my purse. I can no longer safely drive my Jeep any farther than the grocery store. I cannot type up a story. I cannot carry a suitcase. That means I cannot be a street reporter.
I have been diagnosed as having a chronic, incurable illness called lupus. It is an autoimmune disease that, in medical shorthand, is the opposite of AIDS, and that occasionally threatens to kill me. My doctor and I believe that Agent Orange or some unknown toxin triggered this illness 20 years ago while I was working as a war correspondent for the AP in Vietnam. I finally, thankfully, found out what was wrong with me in 1992, after years of mysterious medical problems, including the premature loss of my only child and a brush with cancer. I am lupus’s reluctant prisoner, reined in from a wild mustang to a carnival pony who goes ’round ‘n ’round in a tethered circle, hobbled by pain and the need for sleep.
We have all been burying too many friends with breast cancer. Those statistics, those one in eight American women who will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, have turned out to be my best friend, my neighbor, my fishing buddy, my photo editor, my park ranger, my grocery store checker. In mid-life, I am starting to feel the loss of friends whose presence cannot be replaced. Like some of you in this room, I have been helping my parents die. When lung cancer claimed my father, I became one of his nurses, his constant companion in his last precious days. I saw the medical community in its rawest form, I learned about compassion in its finest hour, and I felt for the first time a spiritual presence far beyond the known and the seen. I learned, as I let him go, that there are much worse things than death.
Now, it is my mother’s turn. We have traded places, she and I. Since her cancer came I have traveled to her bedside to help bathe her and get her ready for bed. I have read to her, combed her hair, held her hand as she fought for sleep, and promised not to turn out the night light. In that room that smells too much of medicine and decay, I have whispered to her small sleeping figure on the bed the words: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”
Some of my friends don’t call or write any more. My change of status, my free fall out of the professional nest, has been too frightening, too threatening, for them to probe for further details. They clucked in sympathy as my world started to unravel. Now their Christmas cards are signed with embossed names. My editor sent flowers after the first operation. Her boss sent a bouquet after the second one. The vase was empty the third time. Word got around: It’s too scary to think about because it could happen to you. Recently, when I called the AP’s General Desk in New York to leave a message for an old colleague, the editor who answered said, “And may I tell him what company you work for?” I force myself to remember that if the New York Yankees could fire Yogi Berra, nothing is sacred. After a quarter of a century with the AP, I am history. Simone de Beauvoir said, “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.”
My genuine conditions are these:
- I will soon become an orphan.
- My hands and my lupus mean that I will never write another bulletin, chase another ambulance, or drop down into another country to write headline stories for the Associated Press, or anybody else.
I now live in an 800-square-foot apartment in Anchorage, Alaska, with the family pets and my husband Dean while he rushes through his master’s degree at the university so that he can get a teaching job. It must be a teaching job with health insurance, although it is doubtful pre-existing conditions will be covered.
I have just been turned down for decreasing my life insurance by my private carrier, New York Life, for reasons that they refused to disclose to me after I’d waited six months for their reply to what I thought was a routine request. Their representative will say only, “You have a file in the central medical computer bank. It is confidential.”
Our Colorado house is for sale and all our worldly goods are crammed into two storage lockers in Estes Park. We pay by the month; our rental agreement is open-ended. We don’t know when, or where, we will unpack.
Even though my thirtysomething editor and her fortysomething boss took a powder when my going got tough, I still have a lot of caring and loyal friends in the news business. And the AP has a human face: his name is Louis E. Boccardi, president and general manager. He has been my friend and counselor throughout this ordeal and his faith in me has sustained me more than he will ever know. But not even Lou, with all his power and willingness to help, can fix this, so I am on an indefinite leave of absence.
While Dean is going to school I teach writing and ethics at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. But without a master’s degree, my academic colleagues tell me I probably can’t get hired as a full-time professor at any institution of higher learning in this country. It takes at least two years to earn a master’s degree.
Freedom’s Just Another Word
I lead a more balanced and healthy lifestyle than ever before. My marriage is thriving, back from the brink of near separation in those old jet-setting, upwardly mobile days. I still have a great mind: if I am doing less, I am giving more. I am passing along to future writers what I have learned out there on the edge, and they are honoring me with their attention and admiration. My self-esteem has never been higher.
In all this sadness and change, I have been forced to examine myself as a Rubik’s cube, pulling apart all the pieces, turning them over and wooling them to death, then putting them to rights again. My life is not over; it is changed. There is an exhilaration in knowing that I am suddenly under a real deadline, that the computer screen has gone blank, but I can write anything on it I damn well please. I can’t live for the next byline any more, so I can simply…live.
I am rejecting some of the things I was taught in journalism school, too, lessons gleaned from various Lou Grants in Vietnam and Belfast and Lima and Topeka…the ones that made me so objective that I was alienated from my friends, my neighbors, my community; so dedicated to work that I nearly suffocated in a bell jar when I couldn’t work any more; so one-dimensional that when I no longer had work to talk about, I didn’t have anything to say.
If Bill Clinton found his anthem in Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow,” I am finding mine in Janis Joplin’s “Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothin’ Left to Lose.” I have set aside the old lessons, and I am learning new ones. This is what I have learned so far:
- We are not our work…our work is not our life.
We are more than modems and Word for Windows, more than Filofaxes and Skytel, more than deadlines and datelines.
We are sons and daughters; wives and husbands and significant others; mothers and fathers; friends and fellow travelers.
If we don’t stop and listen-to ourselves, to all those others-we will run out of things to say. And then we will have nothing to write. And then we will die. Even if we don’t notice when it happens.
I have a grand friend in Anchorage named Suzan Nightingale who is a Daily News columnist, the mother of two sons under the age of seven, a book author, and an adjunct professor of writing at the university. Arriving her usual 15 minutes late for our twice-a-month writers’ group, she sighed:
“Why do I feel like I am always circling the airport of my life?”
Is It Worth It?
The information superhighway is supposed to unite us because we will have so many ways to know so much. But I don’t believe that surfing channels with our remotes, turning our newsrooms into mauve-carpeted funeral parlors, and playing tag with each other on e-mail and voice mail is going to make us relate better to one another.
I stand on the outside now, looking in, and sometimes, when I see colleagues in physical frenzy and near emotional collapse from overload, I want to bang on the soundproof glass and yell: “Stop! Think! Ask yourself today, right now-IS IT WORTH IT?”
I want to say that to a friend who’s an executive at a major newspaper chain and who spends 80 hours a week at the office. This chic, intelligent woman who hasn’t had a date in two years because, she says, she hasn’t got time, recently bought a six-figure home so she could entertain for business with catered dinners. She saw no irony in hiring a decorator to dress up a house where nobody’s home, to gussy up a family room where the only thing missing is the family.
I want to ask, “Is it worth it?” to a colleague my age, one of a handful of women I started out with in 1969. She calls me from halfway around the globe to fill me in on what’s happening with the rest of the “Old Broads.” I am the only married one, everybody else lives in apartments scattered around the world, with housekeepers and cats and social calendars already booked up ’til Christmas. But the last time we got together, my friend, who seldom takes even a Sunday off, looked deep into her white wine spritzer and muttered: “I’m not Cinderella any more.”
I wonder, “Is it worth it?” as I watch a beloved colleague and his working hard-charging newspaper executive wife try to juggle high-powered 60-hour-a-week+ jobs while raising two small children. Their solution is a bigger house with a wing for the nanny. But I question: Can we really have it all? Will we want it once we get it? And who will pay for a success measured in job titles and merit raises? Will it be the people who love us the most? The ones to whom we give what’s left over after our jobs take the best out of us?
Be Careful What You Wish For
“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”What I thought I wanted was adventure, fame, fortune, and a Pulitzer Prize. I got a lot of adventure, Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, very little fortune, and a good run at the Pulitzers. The last thing I want to do here today is tell you I have all the answers. I’m not sure I even have one or two. I just ask you to remember that I have a lot of “firsts” after my name, and so I am a pioneer in my generation of journalists. I am, as I warned you, your canary in the mine. And Roy Hobbs was right when he said, “Things sure turned out different…” Different….
But as his long-lost love Iris replied: “I believe we have two lives-the life we learn with, and the life we live with after that…”
Last year my life felt like an ambush. Now it feels like just another adventure. My friends have pressed me to find new ways to write, to say new things in new ways. So I use a yellow legal pad and No. 2 lead pencils now. And I don’t just write up other people’s quotes, I am learning to express thoughts of my own. My real friends-inside and outside the news business-have convinced me that, as Joan Didion says, I must keep writing in order to know what I think. Will I be able to translate this into a way to earn money? Who knows. But the point is, I’m still writing, because I’m still living.
Annie Dillard was talking about when her work goes bad when she wrote this, but I also believe she was talking about life:
“You just have to hang on, through that time, with faith,” she said, describing what she does when she finds a fatal flaw in her writing. “It happens…I think to everybody …the thing just dissolves in your hands. You have to be able to analyze out that problem and look at it bare-and roll up your sleeves and solve it intellectually. And you have to be able to separate yourself from your feeling of utter disaster when it happens.”When I am feeling utter disaster, when I see no way out, when I weep for times lost, friends gone, powers diminished, I often go stand in a river. In my waders, with a flyrod in my hands, relentless current forces me to stand strong, or I will drown. Being out there in nature, where trout leap and salmon run and there are no other voices competing with my own, I remind myself that I am all that I have lived through, that I still have much to say, and that nothing has been wasted or lost.
There is only one of me; there is only one of you. You must never lose yourself in a crowd. Your life must never accelerate so fast that you fail to recognize your own voice or hear what’s in your own heart.
So, Mark, what do I know about writing and the meaning of life? The thing about newspapers is, they’re so damned daily. And so is life. The meaning is in the living itself. Norman Maclean promised that when the writing is good, you will see your own life coming together in paragraphs. Just as you would in a story, put the most important things at the top. Create a great lead. Cut out all the stuff you don’t need. Prioritize. Keep it simple. And know when to stop.
And if life throws you a few cosmic curve balls, remember me. I may be your canary in the mine, but I’m still singing.
