“There is something we didn’t tell you last year,” said Sandy, the daughter.
“When you last saw us my mother was dying. She had pancreatic cancer. She didn’t think she would make it through the spring. She was on heavy chemo.”
What? What reserve. What self-control. What lack of self-pity not to tell us earlier. What human beauty. What wonderfulness.
“And now?”
“All better.”
And what about Sandy?
I didn’t notice when we first met because there was nothing to compare her with, but she weighed just 90 pounds and she didn’t think she was going to make it to see the flowers bloom either.
I don’t know what her problem was. I didn’t ask and she didn’t say but she did say she got a life-saving operation. Since then she had gained 45 pounds and was doing well.
Her mother showed us the peas and tomatoes she was growing for her grandson. Near them a hummingbird was drinking from flowers. We were taking pictures of it, beautiful pictures that showed a miracle of nature.
But of course you can see the line coming now; the real miracle was a mother and daughter. You know it if you have ever thought about it: the beauty of a garden is mostly in the gardeners.
The Tree in the Hallway
It lives most of the year in a box. It is forgotten about, ignored. Not even a passing glimmer of thought gets dropped on it.
Then somewhere around the second week of December someone says, “Where did we put that box? It’s time, right now.”
And someone else says, “You do it. I’m too busy.”
And then someone, actually it is Delores Laszuk, the chief editor, says she will get it and a few minutes later the old brown cardboard box comes out of the back of someplace only she remembers and, what do you know? It’s Christmas.
“So where are the decorations?” someone else asks.
And Delores opens a drawer that only she remembers is where and, what do you know? It’s time to dress the tree.
“Can’t do it now,” says someone who is standing next to the tree. “Got to cut a story for noon.”
It is ten minutes to twelve. No rush. Editors are like that. They live on not panicking even when anyone in their right mind would melt in fear of a hand on a clock that does not stop moving.
“Someone will do it,” says Delores who knows that before the short hand on the clock reaches one and the anchors in the next room say goodbye to the audience the tree will be top-heavy with lights and decorations from many years ago.
For the first ten minutes the tree is bare. We are talking about something only as tall as your arm. It doesn’t matter how tall your arm is, the tree is the same height. It stands on a small table that wasn’t there ten minutes ago.
Then Sabrina Gans looks out through the half-open door of her edit room. She is working on a story that will go on the air before the bottom of the hour. She has pictures of her son and daughter in front of her. They are Rhys and Emily, aged nine and six, and behind her is a calendar with their pictures on each month.
If Sabrina looks in front of her she sees her children. If she turns around she sees her children. There are no wrong directions in her life.
She is part of a mostly young group of editors, all of whom think they are older. She has a husband, her two kids (one of whom is collecting rocks), a new home, visiting in-laws, a clogged rain gutter on her roof and groceries to get this afternoon. That’s enough to make anyone think they have lived through everything. And she is right, until the rest comes.
There is soccer on rain-soaked weekends, baseball on sun-baked weekends, and her husband takes the kids fishing in creeks and ponds whenever that is in season, which is all the time.
As far as time and space go for a young family, there is never enough space for all the time that is needed, which makes it a wonderful time. That is the way she will remember it much later when there is more time than is needed for anything.
And on top of all her woes there is the tree just outside her door. She leaves her magic keyboard, takes the string of lights out of the box and spreads them around the stubby plastic branches. She steps back. She moves them. That is what editors do. They rearrange until things look good.
Then she plugs the end of the wire into the socket and instantly—life.
She slides open the glass door to her little room and goes back to moving around the pictures of the story that will be on the air in eight minutes. Not even a nudge up in blood pressure.
Across the hallway is Kim Crillo. She has a two-year-old daughter—Micky, short for Michelina—whom she beams about.
Kim’s husband is a professional drummer in a band. Now, in your entire life, how many drummers have you known? Me, none. Kim, one.
Her daughter has her own practice set. I get to see how she is doing when Kim says, “Micky goes like this, and then this,” and Kim’s hands are beating a rhythm on the edge of the computer. Mother imitating daughter with pride only a mother knows.
This is better than the stories on the air.
At one year Micky was counting. You know that. You’ve been there. At one year and one month Micky was writing. Micky is basically organizing the household and plotting her future. At one year and a half she is reorganizing the world. At two she is a drummer with her own kit, just like Daddy, only with kid-sized sticks.
It is so good to work with someone with a new child. Kim sees promise and life and fulfillment and beauty in everything. All she has to do is close her eyes and look at her baby or, to be more honest, she takes out her phone and shows us the pictures. People like that make beautiful stories.
She isn’t the only one with new babies in the newsroom. Another editor, Ryan Prevost, has a smile as broad as the brim of his baseball cap. His new baby’s name is Accalia. No, I’d never the heard the name either. It is from Roman mythology and is derived from the name of the woman who adopted the twins who had been suckled by a she-wolf, Remus and his brother Romulus, the founder of Rome. That is one powerful name. According to those who know such things, people with this name have a deep inner desire to create and express themselves, and they enjoy life immensely.
I’ll say it again and again; it is so good to work with happy people.
The opposite is another lesson in philosophy. If the person working with you is an idiot and is always unhappy, you be happy. He or she will either change for the better or report you to human resources as impossible to work with. In either case you win.
When you get older, hearing someone with a new baby is gold.
How much does that shape the news you see? Plenty! When you have a good spirit doing something, the something that comes out is good. I know I am repeating myself again, but some things are worth repeating.
If you are an employer, think of that the next time you groan when you hear that someone working for you is pregnant. It may take a while to get her back, but what you will get is something human resources can’t deliver.
If you are an employer, get to know who is in the pictures on the walls of your employees. They will affect your profits. One compliment and the profits would rise.
Now back to the tree in the hallway.
(Please don’t expect a chronological flow in these stories. The stories, like everything, are like life. They bounce around. Also, obviously, I like editors. I think they more than most others keep out the bad and suggest the good.
But the fundamental rule of editing is continuity. You must have it, according to the schools of news and movies and books. On the other hand, one of the wisest editors I have ever known said simply, “Continuity is for wimps.”
Do what you think is right, and don’t break under the rules.)
So, as I was saying, back to the tree in the hallway.
Jeannine Avelino in the next room picks up a tiny dangling ding-dang and hangs it on the tree. Jeannine i
s in love. Somewhat with her cat and majorly with her boyfriend whom she met long ago, separated from and then got back together with. She has pictures of her cat and her boyfriend in her room. She has stepped out of her room on her way to a run during her lunch break.
“You run a lot?” I ask.
“I try,” she says. Then she goes out in the rain, for an hour.
Jump ahead in time.
In the spring I go into the editing room with Kim. She is working days instead of nights. (Don’t go into television if you want a normal schedule.)
“I’m working for Jeannine,” she says. “She’s in Paris running through the streets.”
“What?” I say.
This leads to a conversation, as most things do.
“Four years ago,” says Kim who has the new baby, “I was a runner. Jeannine came out with me one day. She barely made it to the corner.”
Then Kim chooses a picture for today’s story. It is a strange one about a little girl naming her knapsack Who-Who. The story is the best part of my day.
First there is the three-year-old girl whose backpack has an owl on it so she calls it Who-Who. Sensible.
Second in the story is one of God’s eventual angels. We were told in Sunday school you never know who is an angel. He might be that man dressed in rags. In Sunday school that made me think.
Of course I’m older now. This fellow is covered with tattoos. We know this because he has on no shirt, and the ink is everywhere from stomach to back and arms and neck.
Kim the editor said, “Looks homemade.” Editors know everything.
Some of the tats are girls’ names with hearts around them. (Yes, the apostrophe is after the s, which means plural, as you know.)
He is stretched out on the ground next to his bicycle, which he bought, he says, and on the back tire are many names. Names of his friends and names of his girlfriends. We know they are girlfriends because they have hearts next to them.
“She loves me,” he said. “And this one loves me.”
This doesn’t go over well with his new girlfriend, who is stretched out on the ground next to him.
“Are you jealous?” I ask of her.
“Yes,” she says honestly, but then she adds wistfully, “I hope I’ll be there soon.”
This is something I don’t understand. The guy is a loser. The Sunday school teacher would say “If he was an angel he would at least pretend to be nice.”
The guy, in my humble, street-educated opinion, hasn’t done much to further the advancement of human kind.
Yes, I am prejudiced. Yes, he looks like a schmuck and a nasty schmuck and a bum. At least to me he looks that way but the pretty girl next to him is in love or fascination or delirium.
I have seen this so many times and I can only say, “Girls, smack yourselves in the head and wake up. Schmucks who look like schmucks and act like schmucks are schmucks. You just schmuck yourself when you go with them.”
If you look up schmuck in a dictionary—that’s an old-fashioned book with words in it—you will see many meanings. All of them are bad or worse but the simple definition of schmuck is someone who puts other girls’ names with hearts on his bicycle tire and his arms when he goes out with someone else. Also a schmuck is someone who will not pass the Sunday school teacher’s test.
Anyway, we had pictures of the names on his bicycle tire and we had the name of a knapsack. Just one more magical ingredient is needed.
And look! Over there is a woman painting a picture. She has a beach umbrella on a pole over her head and her easel in front of her and, wow, she is doing something.
She tells us about the different shades of colour that she is using. It isn’t just red and blue; it is carnelian red and cerulean blue.
I love people who use long names. I don’t want to be with them or be friends, I just want to hear them use long names because that is like a cbc newscast. I don’t know what they are talking about but I feel like I have learned something afterwards.
Together the little girl with the backpack, the soon-to-rise angel with the names on his bike tire and the artist make a story.
I honestly don’t know how, but we can work on it.
That is the same with all things. Whatever you get dealt, just work on it.
Remember Kenny Rogers’s song “The Gambler”: every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser. That is another bit of eternal advice that should be taught in Harvard or Yale. We got it free in a song.
Whatever you get, work with it. It’s better than complaining you got a bad hand, throwing down your cards and feeling sorry for yourself.
We have a three-year-old with a backpack and an artist and a schmuck, and we’re working on it in Kim’s tiny editing room.
“Funny,” she said, looking at Jeannine’s dark room, “Jeannine could barely run back then. But she took it up with everything she had. She trained and ran and now—a marathon.”
“What?” as I said a few pages ago.
Then I added, “Paris?!”
Kim smiled as though she were the parent of a marathoner.
Kim was so proud of her friend. She took her jogging once and there was born a long-distance runner. Jeannine’s boyfriend went with her when she ran in Paris. She is happy. Again, the work that happy people do has that look about it. You can’t buy it. You can only appreciate it.
And then, because this is reality and this is how things work, we went back to the story of the backpack and the owl.
I keep saying it, but don’t worry if you don’t have a plan for getting somewhere. Just go, and you will get there. And that will be the best place.
The story turned out to be beautiful. Just a little girl talking about her backpack.
Kim was happy. She got to talk about her friend and her baby. And I was happy. I got to work with people who were happy.
It sounds so trite, but it is not. The stories in everyone’s lives are the best. And usually, the rewards will be better than the project you are working on.
Take a breath. We’re going back to the tree. (Sorry if you prefer the shorter stories of the past books. They were about the stories that are my life. These, the longer stories, to be honest, are about my life wrapped up in the stories. It is hard to tell them apart.)
And then there is Derek Whelan. He is one of the two, or two-and-a-half, who are not young, but he is a writer and he is Irish, so he is double blessed. He edits in the day and writes at night.
He doesn’t say he is Irish because his great-grandfather came from Ireland. Derek is from there himself, which makes him really Irish, and almost everyone in Ireland wants to be a writer because how else can you suffer and go through anxiety and pain and despair and struggle unless you are a writer?
To be Irish you must be a writer. Ireland doesn’t produce many artists, despite being in such a beautiful country, but it pours out writers, some of the most incredible in the history of the world. And there are no light, happy writers. Dr. Seuss would have died in a pub in Ireland.
Derek is one of Ireland’s writers, living in Canada, looking for a publisher.
He is very good. He is deep and lyrical and meaningful and touching and sometimes he gives up Guinness just to write, which is a sacrifice only those in Ireland would understand. When I listen to him he is a writer in all the categories that are Irish.
On his father’s eightieth birthday he went back to Ireland to read a letter he had written for him. He hired a violist to play while he read.
“Did he like it?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but everyone else did,” he said.
Derek walked by the tree. He always wears a white shirt and tie, sometimes a bow tie. In the spring he came to work with a white jacket and cane. He is a writer.
But today he picked up a decoration and put it on a branch near the top and then kept on walking.
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In the next two rooms are Corinne Newell and Ashley Alonzo. They get up at three a.m., they have coffee and stale cake from yesterday for breakfast at four a.m. and the first things they see are accidents and death.
That is when the rest of us are sleeping. They put the death here and the day there. Try that every day and keep your sanity.
They leave for home when the rest of the world is having lunch.
But on their way down the hallway they each take a decoration out of the box and put it on the tree.
And further down the hall is Carl Waymen, who lost 80 pounds of himself when he went on a diet. It was simple. He just ate less. He drank less. He ate better. He walked. Try it. No gimmicks, no rules, no counting of calories or weighing of portions. You got fat by eating too much, drinking too much and moving too little, so eat less, drink less and move more. It works. Guaranteed.
He has no belief in a god—he thinks religions have caused many of the wars of the world—but he looked at the tree at the end of the hallway.
“Nice,” he said.
Ethan Faber walked by. Assistant news director. Management. Not an editor. He stopped, picked up a decoration and hooked it on the tree near the bottom, which was bare. Good for him.
He started to walk away, stopped, turned, came back and put on a second decoration.
Okay, management has a heart.
Greg Novik was at the end of the hallway and he has recently retired. Everything is always changing. That is another rule of life. Right after you say “Nothing’s new,” hang on. In a moment everything will be. There is a philosophical truth in there. I only wish I knew what it was.
He was the oldest of the editors and we had long talks about things such as the meaning of life and editing before computers. One of those, the meaning of life, was easy to understand.
For the Christmas stories I’ve done for ctv Greg did everything imaginable and more to find pictures of kids on Christmas morning and Santa and also a picture of a tree that looked amazingly like the tree at the end of the hallway.
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