After three years and 417 articles, you’d think writing just one more would be easy. But this one is hard, because “just one more” is all it really is, and it hurts.
I promised myself I wouldn’t let my last column be a rambling emotional elegy to all things great about the U, the state and my family at The Chronicle, but promises are made to be broken.
I’m not ashamed to say that working at The Chronicle for three years is quite a feat, and one of which I’m very proud. I’ve been here longer than some people have been in prison. I think the only difference is that here, the sex isn’t as good.
When I transferred to the U from New York right before the Olympics, it was with a closed mind and no sense of immediacy. I had no intention of making friends and the U was to be a stepping stone to greater ambitions that lay beyond my horizon. I didn’t know what the hell a Ute even was, and I wasn’t going to take the time to find out.
But then I fell in love, first with the Wasatch Front and the wide streets and then with the way the sun sets and pokes through the spires of the Latter-day Saints Temple.
Now, the only thing about the U I loathe are the words to “Utah Man.”
Anybody who knows me well will tell you how proud I am of my New England heritage and my Boston roots. So when somebody asked me the other day why I’ve been at The Chrony for so long, I looked back East for the answer.
I found it in an old poetry anthology by Robert Frost-the quintessential voice of all things New England.
“We love the things we love for what they are,” he wrote in his 1916 poem “Hyla Brook.”
I love The Chronicle for the simplest of reasons: for what it is and what it does.
No outlet on campus does as much to influence the day to-day opinions of students than your humble campus newspaper.
Chronicle employees are among the top 1 percent of the most informed students on campus.
If you think that’s an overstatement, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the latest changes to the LRDP, and then maybe we can do lunch and talk about the two tier tuition system and the recent alterations to funding for the Presenter’s Office.
What’s kept me writing and curious through more than 400 stories is that people keep reading and battles keep erupting.
The Chronicle is much less paper and much more news now than it was when I got here three years ago, but we still have a ways to go. And we’ll get there, despite what some may say. It may come as a shock to some, but The Chronicle staff is comprised of human beings-young human beings who do make mistakes but who work hard to fix them.
People who care about things on this campus most students don’t even know exist.
People who sacrifice free time for deadlines and don’t complain.
People I’m as proud of as my own family-mainly because they’ve become a part of it.
It won’t be easy to stop including myself in The Chronicle’s “we,” but being a part of its “us” means more than I could ask for.
Thanks, Chrony, for being a giant in my life.