Dying Art
We graduated a grand-daughter from college yesterday. Now she’s on to graduate school, and work in her chosen field which appears to be sports information. I say this because the world is changing fast, and I think chosen fields in general are drying up faster than corn in a hard drought. We laughed, at first, about the commencement speaker, a local weatherman, but I thought his speech about preparedness was spot on.
Basically, he told the class, be prepared for change and hard times, because you never know when they’ll come.He pointed at his career as an example, and I thought of mine, and neither of us ended up where we thought we might be going. He wanted to be the next Dan Rather and I wanted to write the great American novel. Fate had different plans as fate almost always does. He became a weatherman, and I ended up editing drilling and completion procedures.
I guess the trick is to decide to be good at whatever it is you’re doing. He obviously did. As for me, no matter what the job, I almost always tried to write, and now I’m a writer, with one book published and others in the work. No great American novel, and self-published, but dreams are fuzzy to begin with and maybe this is what I was meant to do, and how I was meant to do it. And while writing might be a dying art, killed off by video, it’s fun to be one of the last practitioners, writing for my family and a few good friends.