Take Your Time Forming That Opinion...

Know what an Opinion Shaper is? It’s a person who gets to write a column for our local community weekly newspaper 3-4 times a year. It’s a lot of fun—it’s like blogging, in a way, because, to quote my daughter one more time, you get your stuff out there.


So I’m one of the Opinion Shapers for our West County Journal, and the newly minted team for the coming twelve-month period met Tuesday night. We got our new publication schedule for the year, and had our mug shots taken.

We met our new editors (yes, there’ve been shake-ups at this paper, too, since last year.) Ten out of the twelve Opinion Shapers were veterans; some of us have done this for five or six years, one guy’s been at it for fifteen!

We went around the table introducing ourselves. One of the newbies remarked that she was really impressed to be a part of this group of writers. I felt compelled to relate an anecdote I read many years ago, when I had recently moved away from San Francisco.

A quirky, intellectual professor of English at San Francisco State, Hayakawa was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976. After about a year in Washington, he was quoted as saying, “When I first came here I was in awe of the 99 peers I sat among in this august body. Now I’m embarrassed to be one of them.”

Okay, I couldn’t find the exact quote, but that was definitely the message. So I told Miss Newbie not to be overly impressed by us, and that a year from now she may feel very differently about her cohorts.

The editors looked at each other nervously. Maybe they were wondering whether there will be a next year…

Senator Hayakawa

Was It a Coincidence?

People say all the time that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. Like when things happen that seem to be linked, and we want to say, “What a coincidence!” their take on it is that some giant hand of fate manipulated events to occur in that way. “That was no accident—everything happens for a reason,” they suggest. Or insist.


So I was actually writing something Friday about the new year, and the Roman god Janus, for whom January is named. Janus had two faces, and he was able to look forward and backward at the same time. The Romans held him to be the god of beginnings and endings.

I love this not only because I was really smitten with Greek and Roman mythology in college, and took an elective course on the stuff, but also because, if you look at the banner on this blog, you’ll see I’m photographing myself in the rearview (yeah, I know: sideview) mirror of my car. Even my cute little blog business cards say (below Funny Is the New Young) “Moving Forward and Looking Back.” A little bit of Janus in me, I supposed.

I started this blog thinking that it marked a bit of a turning point for me between my former self (job- and family-focused), and my newer self with no job, and family grown and gone. I could self-define and self-direct and make new choices. No clueless pointy-haired boss to kiss up to (a la Dilbert), no commuting hassles, no dry cleaning debt, no alarm clock! Yowza!

I know, I know, what’s this got to do with the whole coincidence thing I started out on? I’m getting there.

Yes. Friday. I opened my newspaper (yay, there’s still a daily paper in St. Louis, and it still carries Ellen Goodman’s column) and found to my great dismay that the venerable (no, that is NOT a synonym for old) columnist from the Boston Globe is retiring. So I guess the Post-Dispatch doesn’t exactly carry her column any more, because she just extinguished it.

Sure, she’s entitled. I can’t exactly do it myself and then get all indignant when anyone else wants to end the career. Of course she hints that she’s not completely going away, and that she’ll still be writing, just not on the same schedule or in the same format. Good for her. I’ll look forward to reading her new stuff as time goes on. She’s been a beacon for readers for decades, and a role model for writers.

But here’s (I know—FINALLY!) the coincidence: Her opening paragraph is about Janus. She mentions beginnings and endings. She points out that he looked backward and forward at the same time. (Insert theme from The Twilight Zone, or that five-note riff from Close Encounters of the Third Kind here.) It totally freaked me out.

Goodman starts out with the observation that there is something fitting about writing her last column on the first day of a new year. As usual, she does a splendid job of sharing her journey with us. She notes that there’s a trick to moving on without moving out. Good for her. I’ll miss her columns, as I do those of the late, great Molly Ivins.

But Janus and I will be watching…