How a fluke trivia question at age 17 changed the course of my life

Washington Post

3 days ago

The world looks different through older eyes. I thought about this on a drive recently through a rolling English countryside. Patches of pasture were quilted together by stone walls stretching beyond the horizons.
As a young man, I perceived such walls as picturesque. But 40 years later, the stacked stones felt weighty with history and saturated with the meaning of life.
For I saw among those stones the lives of countless human beings. Before there were fences, there were only stones, millions of stones, and each one had to be wrenched and lifted from the earth, then carried or dragged to the place where it was stacked. Some fences were a mile or more apart. I pictured children barely old enough to lift them, and the long walks they made each day under their burdens of stone. I imagined these children growing into adults who shivered in the rain and sweated in the sun as they moved those stones, year in and year out, until the earth's bottomless harvest of rock finally broke them, and more took their places.
'No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,' wrote the philosopher Thomas Hobbes of the existence implicit in those fences.
It was a melancholy thought. But it was followed immediately by a delirium of gratitude. Against all odds, by an inexplicable series of lucky breaks, my life has been different. Of all the places and times for a human being to be born, I've enjoyed the little window, the sliver of history, in which there has been a comfortable living available for a perpetual student who likes making sentences. The only stones I've carried have been the ones I chose.
Forty-seven years ago, on the advice of a teacher, I pestered the sports editor of the Denver Post into letting me apply for a part-time job covering high school football. I was 17, several years younger than the people he had hired before for the same job. After several phone calls, he allowed me to take a three-hour battery of tests to judge my grammar, spelling and general knowledge skills. When I was done, I sat for my interview with the editor, who asked a single question. Referring to a test that challenged applicants to identify various names, he said, 'What did you put for Charles Russell?'
By a fluke, I happened to know that this was an American painter of Western scenes.
'Be here on Friday at 4 o'clock,' my new boss instructed.
The skein of improbabilities in that story staggers me now. That I had a teacher who encouraged me to pursue such an unlikely idea. That the editor asked that particular question. That I knew the right answer, amid the ocean of facts of which I was ignorant. Together, these unlikely events unlocked a way of being that has allowed me the privilege of gratifying my curiosity in exchange for a paycheck.
Because I live in this flicker of time on this magical planet, and because I chanced to know the right trivia, I found my way to a campaign bus in 1992, where I met the beautiful reporter who became my wife of 28 years. And that lagniappe granted me the four children who are my greatest blessings.
I do not believe putting words together is more meaningful or more admirable than putting stones together. Some of those fences are older than Shakespeare, and they will still be marking those fields centuries after I'm gone. By contrast, few commodities are as perishable as old journalism.
What I do know is that learning things and making sentences as a daily journalist, and doing it in the company of people who share the same passion, has been a grand occupation for me, and the fact that such a thing is possible feels miraculous. Forty-seven years of it also feels like enough. My cup runneth over. Time to turn off the tap.
Thanks for reading.