Editorializing from the bunny cage

“I was cleaning out the bunny cage,” said my friend Kathy, as I wondered fleetingly why she was telling me a story about animal sanitation, “when I looked down and saw an article you’d written about sightseeing in Concord.”

Covered with rabbit poop, apparently, but still, my byline shimmered through. Hmmm. In the 21^st century, journalists are happy to be read at all, and I’m no exception. If that’s what it takes, it’s still good enough for me.

Every journalist fantasizes about readers who scan the pages looking only for that one byline, eager to read any word you write, on any topic, but I find more often these days that people are reading me by accident, as Kathy did while freshening up her pet rabbit’s dwelling. Actually, I’m impressed that she gets a print copy of the newspaper at all, with all the virtual options now available. My household subscribes to the iPad version of the paper; when an article of mine gets published, I have to ask my parents to save the clipping for me so that I can add it to my portfolio. Occasionally when my daughter wants to do an art project, she’ll ask me for newspaper to protect her work surface, and I’ll have to admit we don’t have any newspapers in the house anymore, so she ends up papering the kitchen table with supermarket circulars and real estate brochures instead.

Stories are getting shorter, too. The quarterly alumni magazine for which I write used to allot me 1,200 words per profile, or one full two-page spread. A few years ago they cut the profiles from two pages back to one page, or 600 words. For the most recent issue, my editor said she thought 450 to 500 words would be ideal. “Do you want me to just do a detailed photo caption?” I asked her, half-joking.

Still, I find it just as satisfying to know my work has been read now as I did with my very first byline in our local newspaper when I was a college student trying to accrue clips for a job-hunting portfolio. Earlier this month, I wrote a story for the Globe about a Concord family taking part in a trans-Iowa bike ride. The day it was published, I received emails from two different newspaper editors at small-town papers in Iowa, asking if they could run my story. Of course, I told them. I’d already gone to the trouble of writing it; why not savor the fact that more eyes would rest upon my words, at least for a moment or two while they scanned the lead paragraph?

Other writers are more opinionated than I am about the issue of proprietary work and intellectual copyright in the Internet era. I know my work has been printed without my knowledge at times; if I Google my name, I find references to essays I wrote for local publications popping up in special interest magazines and newsletters from Alabama to Albania. But it’s okay. We write to be read, just as we speak to be heard. Whether it’s Albania or the bunny cage, I’m happy to be in print.

What I don't know how to do (but maybe can do anyway)

I’m a big believer in core competencies: figure out what you do well and focus on it.

I’m also happy with my career. I’ve found what I like to do and I have abundant opportunities to do it.

All of which is to explain why it takes such a big push sometimes to get me out of my comfort zone.

But yesterday I was pushed rather abruptly out of my comfort zone, professionally speaking, when news of an unusual and complicated crime broke in our town and my editors sent me out onto the street.

Covering breaking news is the kind of work I learned about when I studied journalism in high school, but my career path has taken me a long, long way from the life of a beat reporter. I’m an arts correspondent and a feature writer. Most of my topics are fairly low-key, whether they involve a tuba concert, a play about the Armenian genocide, a family with a long-lasting tradition of publishing a quarterly print newsletter, or the record number of twins who enrolled for kindergarten in Carlisle one particular autumn.

It could reasonably be said, therefore, that my job tends to be easy. I talk to people who want to talk to me, whether to promote an event or to explain their own passions. I never have to ambush story subjects as they walk out of their offices or ask people contentious questions.

So my first, albeit unspoken, response when my editor called yesterday afternoon to ask if I could drive across town to investigate the scene of a police shootout was “Can’t you find someone more qualified? You know I’m not that kind of reporter.”

But better judgment prevailed, and I told her I’d see what I could do.

I was resisting it every step of the way, though. I don’t how to do this, I told myself as I drove the four miles to the crime scene, which involved a shootout between local police and a carjacking suspect that took place midafternoon on a main road in Carlisle. I don’t know how to get information from people who aren’t eager to talk. I don’t know how to get a statement from the police chief. I don’t know how to dig up eye witnesses if there aren’t any standing right on the street with their hands raised.

And then it occurred to me that it’s really easy to say “I can’t” and “I don’t know how.”

Let’s just pretend you do know how, I suggested to myself. Act like a real reporter for once.

So I parked near the blockade and made my way to the police officer who was directing traffic, the imminent danger having passed once the suspect sped on to a neighboring town. And at that moment I realized something else. I wasn’t Nancy the room parent asking parents to bring in popsicles for Field Day, and I wasn’t Nancy the class fundraising officer trying to get my prep school classmates to make a yearly donation, and I wasn’t Nancy from church imploring people to join more volunteer committees.

I was a professional doing my job.

“I’m from the Globe,” I said to the officer on the scene. “Are you able to talk about this incident?”

He wasn’t, but he said I could continue past the roadblock to get closer to the crime scene and talk to the officers there.

“Really?” I was surprised. “You’ll let me go through the roadblock?”

“I have to. You’re the media,” he replied curtly. Oops. Apparently he knows the rules of my trade better than I do.

Eventually I made my way to the police station for a statement from the chief. He wasn’t talking yet, but no one at the police station told me to pipe down and go home. They told me to call back later for an official statement. They treated me like a reporter who knew how to cover a breaking crime story.

I still needed eyewitnesses. I thought about calling my editor and saying “I’m sorry, but no one was standing in the roadway offering to tell me about the shoot-out they’d just witnessed.” Then I imagined her saying “No kidding. Get the story anyway.”

So I emailed six acquaintances who live along the stretch of roadway where the incident happened. I posted on Facebook asking anyone who had witnessed the event to contact me. I stopped by our town’s only coffee shop, found the owner, who chats with everyone who walks through the door, and asked him to keep me in mind if he heard anyone talking about it.

By the time I got home, I had three messages from eye witnesses.

So that story came together. In the end, a more senior reporter actually wrote it; I was just listed as a contributor. But that’s enough for me. “I won’t get a byline from this,” I told my husband.

“But you’ll get some professional credibility, plus you gave your editors what they asked for,” he pointed out.

He was right. I’m no beat reporter and still don’t really believe I have the mettle to do this kind of story every day, but when the opportunity arose, I somehow managed to, if not exactly run with it, at least walk with it. I followed through on what needed to be done.

And for at least an hour or so, I was too busy tracking leads to tell myself “I don’t know how to do this” or “I’m not a good enough journalist to do this” or even “I’m too insecure to approach people who don’t want to talk to me.”

For one brief afternoon, I stopped telling myself what I couldn’t do. And during that time, I learn what, in fact, I could do.

Not much of a fan

My husband does not think of me as a very good sports fan.

In fact, he’s pretty sure that if the success of our local pro teams depended on my support, we wouldn’t even have the teams anymore, let alone the occasional championship season.

Right now, the Red Sox are halfway through a World Series, and the Patriots are having a generally winning, if not stellar, year. So the TV is on a lot at our house, tuned to various matches.

I find the score read-out at the top of the screen enormously useful. It allows me to take a quick peek, see whether our team is winning or losing, and continue on my way. If our team is losing, I usually say something insightful like “Oh, no!” If we’re winning, I can usually muster up a “Yay!” After all, I might not be genuinely interested, but the rest of my household is, and so are many of the people with whom I interact in a typical day, so life is better for me when the home team wins even if I personally don’t particularly care.

Rick likes to remind me that one impediment to true fandom in my life is that I don’t like the thought of anyone losing. I like people to be happy and feel good about themselves as long as they’ve tried hard. You don’t reach the upper echelons of professional sports without pretty much always trying hard, which means that you nearly always end up with one group of guys who gave it their all but lost anyway. I always hope they enjoyed the game despite the score, but coming home to a city of disappointed fans when you’ve lost can’t really be as good a feeling as I’d like to think it is.

The irony is that for the past couple of years, one of my varied freelance roles has been to write profiles of past and present NFL players. To a writer who was more of a football fan, this would be a dream assignment, getting to hear the innermost thoughts of these men as they train or reflect on past championship games. To me, it’s just another writing assignment, although a generally interesting one since each player’s path to the top is a little different, and each man’s perspective on the obstacles he faced along the way varies.

But regardless of the details, I’m not star-struck by them. I’ve never heard of any of them. In a way, that gives me a healthy advantage in terms of journalistic objectivity, but it also means that I don’t always get the terminology right. Rick occasionally looks over my work and points out that I’ve misused the term “sacking” or referred incorrectly to a “college draft.”

It may be to my disadvantage that I’m not a sports fan, but almost without exception, everything I cover as a journalist eventually becomes interesting to me, and even if I still can’t follow the score while watching the Super Bowl, I appreciate the players for their fierce athleticism and the mountains they’ve climbed to reach their particular level of accomplishment. Later this week, I’ll have the opportunity to interview the women’s Olympic hockey team. I’ve never watched a pro hockey game in my life (and actually, the only time I’ve ever watched a non-pro hockey game was when the only opportunity I had to meet with my literary agent was over her son’s Pee-Wee Tournament), but I’m eager to hear what they have to say about their training, their challenges, and how they imagine the Olympics will be.

Sports may not interest me, but people always do. So it’s true that I probably won’t sit down for a minute of the World Series this week. But given the chance to talk one-on-one with an athlete, I’m always confident I’ll learn something fascinating.

Moment of truth

I suppose I always knew this day would come. But actually, I thought it would be a lot worse.

“Mom, can you just tell me when you’re going to write about me in the newspaper?” Holly implored at dinner last night.

I tried to remember what might have brought this on just now. My most recent Globe stories were about supporting small businesses in West Concord and a portrait gallery in Lexington; my monthly personal essay column in our local newspaper this month is about how great it is to have a reliable coffee maker.

“Heather said at school last week that she read a whole article about me wanting to be taller than you,” Holly said in response to my puzzlement.

Oh, right. That was last month’s newspaper essay.

“Welcome to the rest of your life, kid,” my husband commented with what could be described as grim satisfaction. I think he’s been wondering for years whether the time would eventually arrive when the kids didn’t want their foibles and exploits turned into column fodder anymore. “That’s why I don’t read Mommy’s articles. They’re always about me.”

“Not anymore!” I protested. “They used to be about you! Now they’re always about the kids.”

Both kids looked at me then, and I realized it wasn’t necessarily the most artful response.

My father made a comment twenty years ago to the effect that the best thing about my getting married was that it meant my husband rather than my parents became the butt of most of my satirical writing. And of course it was only a matter of time before the kids became more interesting as writing subjects than either my parents or my husband.

My older child has never particularly minded, though. Not even when I wrote an essay about his approach to a sprint we ran together when he was three: he rounded the bend in the driveway and then stopped to pee in the woods. Of course, he was three; realistically, he probably didn’t read the paper back then and perhaps never knew about that column. But when I wrote an entire memoir about the unique challenges of parenting him and how I attempted to address them by inviting him to go running with me every day for a year, he seemed to think that was just fine. He even submitted to a radio interview about the book.

In the preface to Anne Lamott’s new book about grandparenting, her son, whose own birth inspired Lamott’s earlier memoir, said that her book about his infancy was “the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.” And Anne Lamott certainly has a lot more readers than I do – millions more. So I’d like to think that my children are equally sanguine regarding my essays about them, but it’s a lot to ask, I realize.

For years, readers and friends have asked if the kids mind being treated as characters, and I’ve always said they don’t, but I also always had the feeling I was living on borrowed time with that. And it’s not like Holly issued a cease-and-desist order. She just asked me to forewarn her when the whole town was going to be reading about her latest developmental phase.

It’s a reasonable request, and one I agreed to honor. A couple of years ago when I was taking a writers’ workshop, one of my classmates finished an excerpt of my then-unpublished book and said, “It’s good. And I can’t wait for the sequel.” “Why thank you!” I said, trying to sound modest. “I’m flattered. But a sequel? I’m not sure I’ll be writing another book about parenting.”

“Not by you,” he said with a smirk. “By Tim. The sequel will be his memoir about being parented by you.”

Fair enough. Because in a way, he’s right on a figurative level as much as a literal one: the sequel to everything we do as parents is what our children write about us, whether or not they or we ever actually put pen to paper. And if Tim – or Holly – ever does write that book, or even a newspaper column or two about me, I will do my very best to be as good a sport as they have always been for me. 

Covering stories about things I don't like

I can’t remember the last time I wrote about a subject toward which I felt conscious antipathy.          

   

Until yesterday, that is.

Usually I write about things that fascinate or engage or amuse me: societal trends, parenting, the arts. Occasionally I write about things I don’t really know anything about, like cybersecurity or liposuction. And sometimes I write about things I didn’t know I was interested in until I started researching the story, like NFL quarterbacks.

But it’s typical of me that as soon as I dig my hands into the topic, I fall in love with it.

So it was strange yesterday morning to be doing an interview about something to which I have a genuine aversion. The Framingham History Center is running a special exhibit for the next several months about Shopper’s World, or to be more specific the original Shopper’s World, the indoor mall built in the early 1950s that forty years later was razed and replaced with an outdoor shopping plaza which is also called Shopper’s World.

The woman from the Framingham History Center sounded downright joyful as she told me how meaningful it had been to her to put together this exhibit of old photos of Shopper’s World, memorabilia from the stores, interviews with the structure’s earliest employees and shoppers.

But all I could think of, even as I asked questions and noted down her responses, was how much I dislike Shopper’s World.

It was effectively the country’s first shopping mall, though technically another one, in Seattle, beat it to opening day by a hair. And as I see it, that makes Shopper’s World the precursor to so many undesirable things that followed. Big box shopping. Automobile culture, in which errands are done by car. The demise of the downtown, and the crumbling of small local businesses. In fact, just last week I was working on an assignment about a last-ditch effort by community members in West Concord to salvage the West Concord 5&10, one of the area’s last remaining decades-old locally owned small businesses. Shopper’s World is, to my mind, emblematic of what ruined modern commerce: first shopping malls, then big box stores, then outdoor plazas, all of which fostered the movement toward shopping by car in big shopping centers rather than in the pedestrian-friendly downtown areas that preceded them.

But the article I was writing wasn’t really about what’s wrong or right with modern retail; it was about this particular exhibit. And so I suppressed my antipathy and tried instead to focus on what the woman from the historical society was telling me about the exhibit.

And eventually, just like with almost every story I work on, I began to feel more warmly toward it. This woman loved the exhibit she had put together, loved the response it was getting from visitors who told her about their first job or the first excursion they ever remember taking or their first date at Shopper’s World. She enthused about the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins she served at a round-table discussion about Shopper’s World as they were putting the exhibit together, and she told me about the posters and memorabilia from the advertising campaign that brought 200,000 shoppers to opening day at Shopper’s World back in 1954.

I’m not sure whether this tendency to get drawn in by every subject I write about ultimately makes me a better or worse journalist. To some extent, I think it shows an unfortunate predilection for subjectivity. How effective a journalist can I be if I lose all cynicism as soon as I hear someone start talking about a subject they love?

And yet if I didn’t have this tendency, I’m not sure I’d be able to sustain a career as a journalist at all. What I love, and what I’ve always loved, is listening to people talk about their passions. It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether that’s a passion for building boats or playing football or performing vein surgery or mentoring underprivileged children or putting together an exhibit about a shopping mall. When people talk about what interests them, it interests me.

I still don’t like Shopper’s World, and I honestly still think society would be better off had it never been built and subsequently touched off the shopping mall movement. But even feeling that way, I think I can write an article that does justice to the historical society’s hard work on this exhibit. Creating it was someone’s passion, and telling the story of other people’s passions is my passion. And somehow amidst that paradox is where I’ve found my career.

Empathy in interviewing

Much of my workday is spent interviewing people about subjects important to them: projects, initiatives, passions, experiences. After the publication of my memoir last fall, I had a small number of opportunities to be an interview subject rather than an interviewer. The host of a nationally syndicated show on NPR interviewed me for a whole hour, a reporter for a community newspaper in our region came over for coffee to interview me, and one of my colleagues at the Boston Globe even did a short phone interview that she later wrote up into a brief blurb (reasonably enough, the Globe prefers not to give a great deal of coverage to its own writers’ projects).

At the time, I told some of these interviewers that I was tickled to be “on the other side of the counter,” because it was just fun to have people asking questions about me rather than vice versa. (I’ve sometimes imagined a New Yorker cartoon in which Terry Gross is approached at a cocktail party and snaps, “Listen, I’m really not interested in hearing about you! Let’s make it about me for once!”) But as more time goes by, I realize that it was not only fun but also professionally beneficial for me to be interviewed, because it reminded me to be more empathetic of the people I’m interviewing.

Specifically, when I have numerous quotes to gather in a little time, I tend to grow secretly impatient with people who have a lot to say. Though I have enough experience as a journalist to know it really doesn’t help to try to hurry people, I also tend to know before our conversation even begins what it is that I need from them, and it’s tempting to try to race through the discussion to get to the part I’m after.

But then I remember how as I was falling asleep the night before my NPR interview, I was still thinking about what I would say, how to tell my story, the right words for framing certain thoughts.

In short, it was a big deal to me to be interviewed, and I wanted time and space to tell my story clearly. And it helps me to remember that when I call other people for quotes, I myself may know that they are just one of a half-dozen people I need to talk to on the same topic, and all I really need is a sentence or two – but to them, it’s a big deal to be asked to share their thoughts, and they too probably thought long and hard about just what they want to say.

The bottom line is that no matter whether the end result is an article or some entirely different product, empathy almost never hurts, and being an interview subject, even just for a very short phase in my life, helped me to see that. It’s good for me to remember that I’m asking people about issues that are important to them, and they want to be heard.

So now I try to slow down. Even when an interview subject is explaining something to me that I already understand, I let them process it in their own words. Even when they’re straying far from the important part of my question, I let them meander. Every last element of their response may not matter much to me, but it does to them. And the more I can remember that feeling when I had it myself, the more I can ultimately do justice to their perspective. Which is, after all, why I bothered to called them.

If I heard it, I'll remember it

I was making a quick stop at the general store here in town when I ran into a woman I had met only once, at a New Year’s Eve party six months ago. She was buying a cake mix to make a Summer Solstice cake and mentioned that her elder daughter was home from college for the summer and doing an internship nearby. “And is she still seeing Henry?” I asked.

The woman looked briefly stunned. “How do you know about Henry?”

“You told us on New Year’s Eve. Oh, and by the way, I was thinking of you recently because of a novel I’m reading that reminded me of how you and your husband started dating in high school.”

Now she looked even more astonished. Oops, I’d done it again. I’m usually more careful, but because our encounter was unexpected, I’d let my guard down.

I have this very, very peculiar problem. Though this is entirely self-diagnosed, my theory is that I have a phonographic memory: not a photographic memory, where I remember what I see, but phonographic, where I remember what I hear. Specifically when people are telling me anecdotes about their lives. So when I’m talking to friends or acquaintances, I routinely refer to trivial details that they’ve relayed to me in the past, only to find them astonished and sometimes a little disturbed that I recall those details.

In my thirties, I finally realized that this tendency made me a bit of a social oddity and learned to rein it in. Now I pretend not to know things about people simply because I know there’s no way those people will remember having shared those details with me. Occasionally, people find it flattering that I remember the littlest stories they’ve recounted. For example, the mother of one of my daughter’s friends was amused when I remembered that her sons named a vitamin after their aunt, and now I always ask after Aunt Vitamin when I see this mom. But other people just find it weird, almost as if I’ve been spying on them. “What do you mean, how was my college roommate’s layover in Iceland?” they’ll snap, having long forgotten themselves that they mentioned to me one day at the post office that their roommate was en route to Europe via Iceland that very day.

And sometimes it makes certain events a little more boring than they might otherwise be. When I meet friends-of-friends, I can recall every detail that our mutual friend has told me about them – details that people often share as small talk at weddings and other get-togethers. So sometimes I pretend not to know that someone follows a vegan diet or once dated a U.S. senator’s son simply so that we’ll have something to talk about when we meet.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to talk to a newspaper columnist whose work I’d followed for a long time. I mentioned finding it funny that her son confused his kindergarten teacher with his rabbi. “My son is a senior in high school,” she said, sure I was thinking of someone else.

“But you wrote about it once,” I told her.

“I wrote a column about my son mistaking his kindergarten teacher for our rabbi?”

“Not a whole column. You just mentioned it.”

She clearly had no memory of including this tiny detail in a column that was probably about an entirely different topic. But I remembered.

I assume this phonographic memory is related to the fact that I became a journalist, though I’m not sure which came first: the interest in telling other people’s stories, or the improbable aptitude for remembering what I’ve heard. I tend to think I’m unusually attentive to what people tell me; thus I remember. But I suspect it’s somewhat physiological in nature as well, something about cognitive patterns. My sisters and my mother are both very good at remembering people’s stories as well, though I don’t think they’ve found it to be quite the social liability I have.

No matter; professionally it’s tremendously useful. I don’t need a Rolodex; it’s all in my memory, whether I need to contact someone who has a family member with a food allergy or track down a source who has a neighbor that works for NASA. And some of my friends have even learned to take advantage of me as a resource, which I fully support. One close friend routinely calls me when she needs to fact-check certain details of her own life. “What was the name of the town where I lived when I was studying in Russia?” she’ll ask. “What were the circumstances of the case I heard the first time I had jury duty?”

For a writer, this total recall is not a bad thing. Perhaps it will lessen somewhat with age. But in any case, I’ve learned to hold back most of the time so that I don’t come across like a stalker when I encounter acquaintances about whom I know far more than they realize. Except for times like today when I briefly lose those inhibitions.

The woman I ran into in the general store said that her daughter and Henry were not currently seeing each other. I’ll be more prudent about bringing up the subject next time we meet, which probably won’t be until next New Year’s Eve if then. But when I see her, I can ask how the Summer Solstice cake she made for her younger daughter and friends came out. There is that one advantage, after all: I’m never tongue-tied at parties. And if the CIA has any questions about anyone I’ve ever met, they know where to find me.

Privileged to tell their stories

Weekly if not monthly I think about how lucky I am to be a journalist, but usually my reason for thinking that is just that I like the work so much and it’s what I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. This month it’s been a little different: I feel lucky all over again, but not only because the work makes me happy but because it’s been a genuine privilege to cover the stories I’ve covered this month.

Just yesterday, I put the final wraps on a “centerpiece” feature that will run the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. It’s about a nearby town that is unveiling a memorial to the four fallen soldiers who graduated from the local high school, and I’ve learned so much while working on the story, both about military logistics and about how families cope in the wake of tragedy.

I thought the calls I had to make would be hard: to the families of two young men who died in Iraq, six and seven years ago, respectively. But their family members talked about them with a sense of fond good cheer. One young man’s mother laughed and laughed as she told me about her son as a ten-year-old building a fox hole in the backyard. How can she be so merry? I wondered as I listened to her. Indeed, some of it might have been a touch of mild hysteria brought on by my taking an interest in her stories about him, and maybe preparing for the dedication next week has made her more emotionally mercurial right at this time than she normally is. But she didn’t sound like I expected. She just wanted to tell me funny stories about her son, and then in a tone only a shade more somber, she talked about her gratitude to the town for initiating the memorial.

After that I talked to the younger sister of the other Iraq soldier. He died at nineteen, as she was about to celebrate her thirteenth birthday. “He was the most awesome brother,” she told me, her tone exuberant. “He’d babysit for my little sister and me and do the silliest dances to make us laugh.”

I expected the families to sound more angry, more depressed. But they were proud of their soldiers, they were full of happy memories, they were grateful to the town for planning the Memorial Day dedication. “The community has been a tremendous source of support to us, and we’re so grateful,” said the father of one of the young men.

Last week I was working on a very different story, one about Transcendentalist and writer Margaret Fuller. A group in Concord was in the final stages of planning a bicentennial celebration honoring her 200th birthday, and they were just as eager and willing to tell me about their passion for Margaret Fuller’s lifework as the soldiers’ family members were to tell me about their lost loved ones. In the few days I spent researching that story, I learned a lot about Margaret Fuller, a historical figure I first heard about in a very general sense in eighth grade and then for several years thereafter confused with Margaret Sanger. I definitely won’t make that mistake again. I felt privileged to spend those days in her company just as I did with the soldiers.

And the weekend before that I did a story that was not like either the fallen soldiers or Margaret Fuller. I wrote about my parents’ volunteer work at prisons. For years, I’ve wanted to write about the program through which my parents volunteer, but it’s the irony of my work as a feature writer that I can write about anyone who I think is doing something fascinating except for my own family members. In a feature story, that is. But every now and then the Globe runs a personal essay segment. That’s a first-person narrative and the usual rules do not apply. I asked my editor if I could try an essay about my parents’ volunteer work and what it means to me, and she said yes.

The results were spectacular, not in terms of my prose but in terms of the response. Strangers were calling my home phone number to say how much they enjoyed reading about my parents. Friends and acquaintances from all over the Globe’s readership mentioned the story to me, and to my parents as well. My mother heard from two former volunteers who had lost touch with the program, and she also heard from a town employee whose brother was once an inmate – though not one my parents worked with – and the town employee felt reassured to learn that there were people like my parents devoting their time to people like him.

So it’s been a good month for me: not because I’ve had a lot of bylines or paychecks but because I’ve experienced so much through my journalism. I’ve learned about the resilience of brave and proud, though bereaved, parents; the determination of a nineteenth century feminist; and the power of my own parents to affect people through their work. And I did all this through my work. I’m not a soldier, a crusader, not even a volunteer to the needy. I can’t claim to be doing anything nearly as important as my subjects. So what I’ve done in telling their stories is not something for me to be proud of, just grateful for. I’m always grateful to be a journalist. This month I’ve felt enormously privileged as well.