Some days I want to be flat, like the light in my backyard this morning. It’s bland, soft, and with little definition. It’s the kind of day when my back neighbor’s dog barks and the sound echoes off the fence and wraps itself around me like a comfortable blanket. I am safe and bored, with nothing much to do, and that’s just fine.
I wait for the little things to happen. I look around, across, up and down. A crow is on a utility wire above me. He caws and bobs his head at me, making sure I am doing okay.
These are my slow days. They are the days between my jobs as a television journalist. I need days like these to bring me down from the speed of the fast-paced life of a news person.
When I am working the facts, I dart across the country.
I get in and out of airplanes more often than some people get in and out of bed.
The headlines beckon and I rush into the world with the urgency of a firefighter trying to save a burning house. Unfortunately, most of the time I don’t save the house, I usually get there too late. I arrive just when the victims return home to cry over their losses. I get there just in time to see them stumble over the ashes of things they once cherished. Just in time to get their reactions to what happened to them. I point a camera at their shocked expressions and ask them to express their pain as my camera person zooms in to get a closeup of their tears.
The hooting of the mourning dove and the soft rumble of the airliner high in the paint brushed white clouds above me, circling in for a landing at LAX keep me present in the smallness of me.
My warm cup of coffee at my side, loose sweat pants, flip-flops and my 14-year-old border collie mix at my feet are simple pleasures that fold their arms around me and speak “there, there.”
I watch as the blades of lawn grass silently stretch awake as the sun dries their dew covered backs.
The slow is where I place myself today. It is how I reacquaint myself to myself. I inhale and stop. I do nothing for a moment.
I get in and out of airplanes more often than some people get in and out of bed.
My life is a rush to move my body through space, squished up against the side of the flying tin cans, as my legs tuck under the backpack beneath the seat in front of me that holds my computer, notebooks, a kindle, and my travel masks.
I carry surgical masks, KN95s masks with ear straps, and KN95 masks with head straps for long flights, and I carry the professional mask I put on while flying to each news event.
I bundle myself into this small space, close my eyes, and hope to sleep a little before I have to jump into action as soon as the landing gear touches the tarmac.
I left this job once. It became too much about almost 20 years of nonstop action. I took a few years off, then slowly came back to it. My bills forced me back into the saddle. I can’t say I missed it too much, not with a cozy back yard, my dogs, and writing to entertain me.
When I left, I felt an overwhelm bundled with burnout. I thought I would die if I continued chasing the news. Not only was it hard on my body sitting in those planes, getting up at the crack of dawn and possibly pulling an all-nighter, it was also hard on my soul.
It got more and more difficult to go to the places where bad things happened.
The bad crawled inside me to feast on my humanity and ate my empathy for lunch.
It turned my face into a tableau of sorrow while I wasn’t being sad. The years of news plastered crevasses onto my face, each line of my furrowed brow slowly turning my expression into a permanent scowl.
I aged and shrunk. I lost myself inside the bad news and succumb to it like a slave to a master, powerless and shackled to my deadlines. Like all the people I interviewed, I became a victim.
It started early on, when I got my first assignment chasing the bad news.
I will never forget my first day of rushing into the fire. I got a call from the company that would eventually hire me full time as a television producer. They said there was a shooting in a school in Colorado, just outside of Denver, in a place called Columbine.
Go! They said.
So I boarded the next airplane out of LAX. The plane was full of journalists, television crews, print reporters, photographers, all of us heading into the storm.
I was nervous. I didn’t know how to react. I was in shock, like the rest of the world, at what we had heard had happened. 12 dead, bombs, automatic weapons, a library, school hallways, blood, many wounded, and dead. Teenagers killing teenagers.
I wanted to cry as I sat in the middle seat next to a reporter that had his laptop open and was pounding away at writing something; he powered out his words like a gushing wound and it spilled all over me. Though I couldn’t read what he was writing, I knew the words would shock just by stating the facts.
The air was so thick with anxiety mixed with the adrenaline that I couldn’t really breathe properly.
I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to see the place where the bad took over and killed innocence. I didn’t want to do anything but return to Los Angeles and cry.
I didn’t cry. I walked into the rumble and roar of the news and performed. I reported what happened. I found witnesses who told us about the horror of seeing their friends shot, about hiding in classrooms, under tables, about running out of the school with their hands in the air. I put on my cool hard mask of professionalism, which stayed on for the next 20 years, and listened to the crying victims.
And I didn’t cry.
The ruby breasted finches are gathering the remains of the weeds I pulled from my raised planter. The male nudges his partner. They bob their heads in unison, grab some dried grass, and fly up into the orange tree. Their nest is hiding deep under the green panoply, just next to a ripe orange. I see the fine twigs peaking out of the leaves, a perfect spiral home for their offspring.
The airplane high above me switches speeds, slows down for landing. I lift my cup of coffee and sit back on my plastic Adirondack chair. I watch my puppy roll on her back on the freshly cut grass, kicking her hind legs in the air in ecstasy.
I wait for nothing in particular to happen.
I try hard not go back to that day exactly 23 years ago in Colorado or all the other days when I had to ask the hard questions and not cry.
Maybe today I just may cry a little.
