Tara’s Takes
Ihad 20 minutes. On the week before Memorial Day in this industry 20 minutes is like heaven. Tuesday night I thought I had exactly that, a full 20 minutes. Enough time to fly home and make supper for the two kids I had there before running one of them to soccer practice. Which also meant supper would be ready for the third kid when he got home.
So after sending two graduation editions to print and running a to a few other events, I zipped home and made supper. Natalie was so surprised that I had a few minutes home.
Afterwards, I loaded her up and headed to drop her at soccer practice. On the way, she casually mentioned to me, “When are you going to the bike thing?”
My heart leaped into my throat. I knew I didn’t actually have 20 minutes free. I was missing an event. So I ran to the bike rodeo right at the end. But because of the weather, most kids had left. I got a photo of all those who donated their time.
But I was kicking myself the rest of the night. Not only had a forgotten something, but I had created a color coded list of all the events we had this week and who was covering them. I have it on my calendar and I have that bright yellow list on my desk.
There was no reason that it should have slipped my mind.
Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe it’s the chaos of May.
Maybe it’s trying to keep up with my own kids’ events.
I know that we have huge support in Tracy and if we miss an event because we can’t be everywhere, people understand.
The problem is, Per and I are our own worst critics. We always say when we put out a perfect paper, we will retire. That means we’ll never retire. We can spend hours, but there is always something that could have been done different, a mistake that got past proofing, something we could have covered more.
When I told Per Tuesday night and how awful I felt, his response was simple, “welcome to my world.”
And that’s 100% true. It’s a chaotic, fast-paced, ever changing, challenging but so rewarding world.
Someday I won’t be running to all the events and I’ll probably miss it. So instead, I am trying to keep my head above water and walk a few miles in Per’s shoes to see what it is like to try to get to all events. They are big shoes, and his steps are much further apart than mine.
We’ll send pages to print on Wednesday and still have two events to get to and papers to deliver before we head in opposite directions Thursday for delivery and school event coverage.
But when you capture all the moments that become part of a family of town’s history, it’s worth all the color coded lists I can create.
