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.