(This is for the Slice of Life challenge for March, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We are writing each day about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)
You ever have one of those strange moments when you hear a voice on the radio and you think: I know that voice but you can’t for the life of you remember why or who?
That happened to me yesterday on my drive into school. I was listening to New England Public Radio and this commentator came on, talking about dogs and cats and spit and love.
I know .. interesting, right?
But as I listened to the piece and wondered about the dog/cat debate (I used to be cat; now I am dog), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew that voice — that timbre and tone and rhythm.
Who was it? Come on, memory banks. It’s not that early in the morning! You’ve had your coffee!
I never got to the answer on my own, but thankfully, the radio helped me out. The commentator was Robert Chipkin. Not many of you know him (and if you do, it would be really weird but it would also very cool), but he was an important person in my “life before teaching.” Before getting into education, I was a journalist for a decade with the larger daily newspaper in Western Massachusetts, and “Chip” was my first city editor there.
He was a patient man, it seemed to me now in retrospect, since I didn’t know what the heck I was doing when I got the job. Or maybe I knew just enough to get hired but not enough to know what to do when I was there. You know the drill, I am sure. (Turns out, the same thing happened when I got hired as a teacher at the end of one summer. I’m still trying to figure it out.)
Chip helped shape my stories and talked to me about the finer points of newspaper writing. He wasn’t a mentor, per se, but a decent editor who taught me some of the ropes of being a journalist and the politics of the newsroom. I was not a star by any stretch. Not rising nor falling. Just an average reporter, in it more for the chance to write every day than the glory of breaking some huge story.
Hearing Chip’s voice in my car, and connecting his voice to his face in my memory … that sent me on one of those time tumbles, where you are taken back to your past. There I was, at my desk in the newsroom, wondering what the heck I was going to write on deadline, knowing my editors would be needing something any minute now.
I’d better get writing …
Peace (in the past),
Kevin
PS — Chip left the newspaper before I did and yet he writes a humorous column from the narrative voice of his dog at the newspaper. Talk about strange twists.