From setback to comeback

 So many people have taken massive failures in life and turned them into successes. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey and Walt Disney are among people who were fired once, only to turn their lives around.

“Ya gotta suffer first to sing the blues” is a famous saying.

In retrospect, sometimes my biggest failures have been the best things that could have happened.

I had been running the afternoon news desk at the Associated Press Washington bureau for four years when I went to the bureau chief to complain about my pay.

He told me I was about to lose my position as part of a shakeup. I was devastated—it was a powerful job, editing and approving most of the news articles out of Washington for morning newspapers during the Watergate era. But I didn’t realize I had burned out. And maybe I wasn’t that good at telling people what to do.

Two months later I was sitting in the front row of the inauguration of a U.S. president (Jimmy Carter), helping to report on it for the same news organization. Soon I covered the economics beat, launching myself into a 30-year career as a business news specialist.

Decades later, in retirement, I was crushed when I was ousted by failing a choral re-audition at Choralis, a northern Virginia choir. I wasn’t sure I wanted to return anyway, and I was distracted by a speeding ticket on the way there.

A week later, I saw that City Choir of Washington was holding auditions.  I showed up in a thunderstorm and sang while the prestigious director, Robert Shafer, played piano and listened. 

The song he gave me was the same one we had sung at a church choir the week before. I nailed it. And then lightning struck and the lights went out. When they came back on, Shafer looked confused. “I guess you know what you are doing” he said. I knew then that I belonged there. He was the best director I had ever sung with.

In my personal life, I was dumped by my girl friend in 1977 for a guy who took her with him to work at the North Slope of Alaska in the winter. She chose freezing cold over me? I was shattered. It took me years to get over it.

And then I came across Pickett, the love of my life, who had no ambitions to go to the Arctic Circle. We have been married 40 years. A long time after our breakup, the ex-girl friend called to see if I was still available. Her marriage with her Alaska-fixated friend had fallen apart.

She wondered if she had made a mistake. “Hell yes,” is what I should have told her. But instead, I said, “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

I’m still grateful for past failures like that.

 

 

Column: The bumpy ride to old age

—I really don’t like this classic song about relationships and growing old: “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?” No, I haven’t stayed too long! I’m still on the roller coaster!

—I really liked the movie “Thursday Murder Club,” now on TV. But most of the people in the retirement home were younger than me!

— “What did you do before there was technology?” My9-year-old grandson asked me. I said, “We did have three channels of television, primitive cars and airplanes. But I should have just told him, “We played outside.”

—More than half of the people born in the same year as I was are now dead. Makes you stop and think.

— When I knock down a spider web, I don’t know if I feel bad for ruining a spider’s dinner or glad that I just saved a butterfly’s life.

— On the advice of ChatGPT, I just learned how to get through to a real person at my cable TV company. “When they give you a list of options over the phone, just use the word “cancel,” it said. I got through!

—A B&B guests who owns a lot of houses told us one way he he approves tenants in a tight housing market: He looks inside their cars to see how messy they are..

— We keep hearing about how peaceful it is in nature. But have you noticed how vines keep trying to strangle trees? I tell you, it’s a “plant-eat-plant” world out there!

—A hang-gliding relative once told me, “The only sports worth doing are the ones that could kill you.” Hm. I have loved biking and skiing, which can be dangerous. Billiards, bowling and bridge? No, thank you.

— In gardening, my wife is the creator, and I am the destroyer! She may plant bulbs for pretty flowers to bloom, but my role is to hack away at the bamboo and tree branches that threaten. Got to defend the family!

—When we started out, my wife wanted a Victorian house, and I wanted a California-modern style home. We couldn’t agree. Until the realtor found us a house with a Victorian style front, with a built-on modern rear featuring large glass windows. Sold!

 

 

 

 

 

Who am I really? Make a guess

“Cellophane, Mister Cellophane shoulda been my name. Mister Cellophane. ‘Cause you can look right through

me, walk right by me and never know I’m here.”

That song from the musical “Chicago” fits me nicely. People didn’t tend to notice or remember me (at least until I started this column). 

Being invisible benefits: I was not bullied as a child. As a reporter, I went unnoticed (until I went in for the kill!). I don’t get into many arguments. I haven’t offended many people with these nonpartisan writings.

But onceit got me into trouble with my boss. “You never have any opinions,” he told me. That is a problem when you are editor of a magazine (Satellite Orbit) with a staff of seven and a circulation of 300,000 readers. (If I had expressed my opinion about him, I’m sure I would have been fired.)

In college, a very drunken senior went into a rant about each classmate there. When he got to me, he said, “Doan, you are a nonentity. We don’t know anything about you!” I looked it up: It means non-existent. Good. I liked it that way.

You could look back on my college career and not know what to think. I started off on the college newspaper with a bunch of student radicals. And this was at UC Berkeleyin the 1960s, the national capital of rebellion, just like Rome is the headquarters of the Catholic Church.

The staff sang revolutionary songs by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger at parties. They demonstrated at the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings in San Francisco. We went on strike when the student government didn’t like us endorsing a leftist candidate. My name even showed up with the others in a state government report on subversive activities.

So as a junior, what did I do for a second act? I went to the dark side. I joined a fraternity.

The radicals considered me a traitor as I cut my hair shorter and began wearing button-down shirts and white socks, the uniform of these reactionary, elitist Patrician snobs.

No more singing “We Shall Overcome” at Saturday night parties. Now, it was sorority dances, paddling at initiations and crooning to guys’ girlfriends…though that was past the era of panty raids.

I even became the fraternity president, a leader in the overlords of oppression, and met regularly with the ultra-establishment fraternity council.

Had I finally seen the light? We’ll, no. I had been lonely.

So, what did all this make me? Well, you’ll never know. Not here anyway, Signed: Mr. Cellophane.

(The song in the video is actually “Waving Through a Window” from the musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” with the same theme.)

 

The good side of Halifax County

 

Halifax County has gotten a lot of bad media coverage lately. It’s time for a change, to write about what is good about South Boston, Halifax and their surroundings.

1.  We have the a champion kids’ softball team. The Halifax South Boston Dixie softball team won the Dixie Darlings World Series title this year.

2.  One of the best major league pitchers is a local boy…Andrew Abbott, who played in the all-star game this year.

3.  You always come across someone you know when you shop at Food Lion. And you won’t stop talking for at least 15 minutes.

4.  Unlike most small towns, we have some classy restaurants, including Molasses Grill and Paco’s.

5.  Top-notch auto racing tracks include Virginia International Raceway and the South Boston Speedway.

6.  The Factory Street Brewing Company has become a major entertainment center, with rock concerts like the one Labor Day weekend. And the Prizery is envied by nearby communities as a great theater venue.

7.  A new state-of-the-art high school just opened in South Boston.

8.  The Tobacco Heritage Trail is maintained very nicely. It is never crowded for biking, walking and horseback riding.

9.  People of all ethnicities are generally friendly and tolerant of different opinions.

10.                           Kayaking, canoeing and fishing are popular on the Wild Blueway that includes the Bannister River in Halifax.

11.                           We have a historic past, including the Crossing of the Dan during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War skirmish commemorated at Staunton River Battlefield Park.

12.                           One of the darkest and best places in the country for star-gazing is at Staunton River State Park.

13.                           There are no traffic jams—except maybe when the train comes through town.