Greetings:

What better day to start this new blog but on Father’s Day. I remember my own father, who passed away just last year at the age of 89. I also have the pleasure of spending the day with my three sons, two of whom now are fathers themselves. And of course I wish my first son was here to spend the day with me, but he’s been gone now for 14 years. So this day is dedicated to Pete, Colin, Seth, Will and Graham.

This day also marks my renewed effort to once again write on a regular basis, this time using a blog form. I want to do this because writing brings me enjoyment and fulfillment, of course with not a small amount of angst thrown in. This has been the case since I was very young, writing a family “newspaper” which my mother would send to my grandparents. We lived quite far away from the grandparents so this allowed me to give them the family news (this was the time without smart phones, email, etc.). The other day when I was going through the boxes of our family photos and other odds and ends from the past I ran into some of those newspapers and got a chuckle out of them. I called them “The Family Circle,” not much of a creative name since the popular weekly magazine of the day was one of the same name. In all my writing creativity has not been my strong suit, I’m better at being more of an observer and researcher and interviewer and then writing about the things others have said or done.

This early writing ended up providing me with an education in journalism and for the first eight years of my adult life a real job as a newspaper reporter before changing careers. But even after leaving journalism I always found a way to keep writing, sending a weekly email to those in the company I was in charge of as well as writing a column for our local newspaper in Monument Colorado. I also wrote a column for our college newspaper so you see I have been writing in one form or another practically all my life.

In addition I wrote a book after Graham died in 2005, essentially about his life and death, an my feelings about both. (This is self serving I suppose but if you want to check it out it is on Amazon, the title is Under the Night Sky.) In fact the name of this blog comes from a chapter in my book about Purple Mountain, where I discovered was a mountain Graham climbed as a boy and wrote fondly about in a journal I found after his death. Our family buried Graham’s ashes several years ago on a hill overlooking Purple Mountain and we all visit that site together each summer.

Recently I began writing a second book, this one a novel that had been brewing in my head for the past few years. I had written little fiction so I thought this would be a nice change, only to find out just how difficult that is and feeling that I was failing in writing something that was interesting and meaningful. It seems I should stick to “reporting” and stay away from “creating.”

That may explain my attempt to write a blog, something that gives me some form and structure and will hopefully keep me writing. Now that I’m retired I certainly have the time to write, and hopefully I can feed my lifelong need to tap away at the keyboard, reporting what I see around me and perhaps even trying to make some sense of it. Writing is a funny thing in that it is a very quiet and singular activity that connects my brain to paper, helpful to me in ways that are difficult to explain or even understand, and perhaps even helpful to others who might read what I have said.

So on this Father’s Day let us note the important things in life, like fatherhood, as well as the less important things such as writing about important things. Hopefully I can continue to discover the difference between those two things as I do this writing thing well into my future.

Thanks for listening

Sincerely, Steve