In the many years that I’ve had the good fortune to write a column for the Chicago Tribune, I’ve received a remarkable education, much of it from the paper’s readers.
One reader taught me that a banana is easier to peel from the bottom. Another changed my life with the revelation that there are tabs at the end of aluminum foil boxes that, when pushed, keep the roll in place. From a reader I learned the word “apricity,” which means the warmth of the sun in winter.
Tribune readers have introduced me to music, books, plays and poems, often ones about the nature of grief, the power of nature, and the complexity of love. One of those poems is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Limits,” about the impermanence of everything. For years it hung next to my desk in Tribune Tower:
If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time …
Those lines popped into my mind as I sat down to write this column, for the last time. After 41 years in the newspaper business, I’m taking a buyout and leaving my Tribune job.
Forty-one years may sound like a millennium to anyone under 40, but to me, at 67, it seems about as long as it takes to say “abracadabra.”
It’s not so long ago — 1980 — that I was an intern at the Los Angeles Times, where reporters still banged away on typewriters. Later that year, I took my first full-time newspaper job at the Peninsula Times Tribune, a small afternoon daily in Palo Alto, California, that had only recently transitioned to computers.
It’s not so long ago — 1983 — that I landed at the Orlando Sentinel, where reporters still smoked in the newsroom until the day smoking was banned. The cigar-chomping music critic climbed on his desk and, furiously puffing, whacked the new smoke detector out of the ceiling.
It’s not so long ago — 1985 — that I came to the Tribune and then, after two years of writing features, was dispatched to Atlanta as a national correspondent. I spent five years roaming around the South, learning the country’s racial history and how the South connects to the North and how the past created the present.
In the chilly April of 1992 — really, not so long ago — I returned to Chicago to write a column on what the Tribune then called the Metro page.
One night shortly after I arrived, I sat on my roof and looked out at the city. I’d spent my life in the smaller, sunnier towns of Georgia, Arizona, California and Florida. This vast, Northern metropolis mystified me. What was going on behind those thousands of windows? Down there in the labyrinth of streets? How would I ever understand it well enough to write about it?
“One story at a time,” an inner voice said, and that’s the voice that has guided me since. One story at a time.
The news business has changed a lot since then, and so has the old-fashioned Metro column. It was once a species of column found in daily newspapers everywhere. It mixed opinion, reported stories and personal reflection. It was grounded in its place. It was usually written by men, typically gruff men whose personas involved drinking with the cops (men) and politicians (also men). Some of those columnists were geniuses of the form.
But I was a woman, with different interests and a different temperament, and I needed to adapt the Metro column for my sensibilities and skill set. Less overt argument, more stories. Sometimes about politics, more often not.
There are many columnists better at opinion and analysis. I admire them. At the same time, I’ve always believed that stories are a quiet form of opinion, that the ones we choose to tell reflect and shape values, sometimes better than argument alone.
Through these years, people from every part of the city have shared their stories with me — meaning with you, the Tribune’s readers. If I had space I’d name them all, but I’ll simply say a special thank you to Judge Joan Lefkow; Tavon Tanner and his mother, Mellanie Washington; and the many people of Cabrini-Green, who for two decades and through dozens of columns let me into their homes and lives.
I learned from all of them, was changed by them all.
Another privilege of writing this column has been the chance to write about the family I came from. Through this newspaper, I’ve been able to reflect on growing up with seven siblings, a difficult father, little money and constant moving around. I wrote often about my mother’s aging and dying. Many of you shared your own stories of family in return, and in doing so helped me understand how personal stories can create common ground.
When I set off for college in California in 1971 — not very long ago — my family was living in a motel room in Phoenix; I’d gone to live nearby with a friend. I remember the September Saturday they all showed up at the airport to wave me away toward my new life.
Heading toward the plane, elated and terrified, I turned around and thought: How can I leave them? And I thought: I have to go. I have to go explore the world.
I didn’t know then how I would explore it. The answer, it turned out, was newspaper work. Even more than college, newspaper work would be my education.
So thank you.
To all the people who educated me by sharing their stories, who taught me what’s going on behind the windows and in the streets.
To the editors who let me be myself while pushing me to think harder.
To the colleagues whose work has made mine better and whose friendship has given me courage. Those who remain at the Tribune are as smart and dedicated as any journalists I’ve ever worked with. They do more with less than we did in the so-called glory days when the money flowed. They’ll keep doing it.
And thank you to the Tribune’s readers, you who have shared your time by reading what I’ve written. Special shoutout to the ones who understand that silly rhymes can be serious.
I’ll probably write again, somehow, somewhere. My colleague Eric Zorn and I are already discussing this year’s Songs of Good Cheer, the holiday singalong we put on with friends at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I’m on Facebook and Twitter if you want to connect there. You can email me through Friday at mschmich@chicagotribune.com.
I’ve never written a column that I didn’t wish was better, including this one. But I’ve done it as well as I knew how, never forgetting, even when I cursed the constant deadlines or felt bad that I couldn’t answer all the email, that there was nothing better than being granted this education and this connection with the world, with all of you.
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