LETTERS FROM HOME: `THE LAST TIME I SAW RICHARD' 20 YEARS LATER

April 24, 1997

Dear Paul,

Your mother sent along pictures of your wife and new son. What a trip into the unknown to help create your own family, eh?

In telling DC who you are, I said you possessed a certain Nordic affection for viewing the world bleakly. Being your roommate was a bit like living with Ingmar Bergman, which certainly had moments of drama. I'm imagining we've both changed some in 20 years.

I'm remembering the young police reporter who wore sandals to work, who kept a hyperactive German shorthaired pointer in his room, who was yelled at by an editor for walking instead of running to his car to go cover a possible plane crash.

Judging by the ponytail, some things haven't changed...

Women were problematic for both of us those years on Bellevue Street, so I guess we must have hinged ourselves up somewhat. Sure took awhile.

So many hopeless nights at the Second Chance and the End Zone, two of the city's more prophetically named drinking establishments. The former's a parking lot, the latter a clothing outlet store.

It wasn't a romantic life, spent mooning over the Mean Sisters, half in darkness, half in sunglasses, but we had to romanticize something.

I haven't quite become Joni Mitchell's nightmare in "The Last Time I Saw Richard," who sits at home most nights now with the house lights turned up and the TV on. But I would buy my wife DC a dishwasher and a coffee percolator if she wanted new ones. Twenty years later, I still know happiness isn't to be found in these things but it isn't in making yourself and others unhappy either.

How remarkable that the heart searching for meaning awakens not in some fantasyland but in wide-eyed reality.

There is that in me -- I do not know what it is -- but I

know it is in me....

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death -- it is form, union, plan -- it is

eternal life -- it is Happiness.

--- Walt Whitman

Cape Girardeau is changing, too, Manifest Destiny moving the city westward until it runs into Jackson and Gordonville. Farmland disappearing, strip malls in bloom. We almost have traffic jams now, but down in the old part of town where we live you can still imagine the town founders riding down the shady lanes with provisions from the mercantile store. With my wife DC's help, I have developed an appreciation for that which has aged.

Besides me, the perpetual boomerang, only John R. and Ray O. remain at the newspaper from those years. John B. retired, Sally O. does PR for one hospital, Mary S. for the other. Gloria D. works for a motel chain, Linda H. is now Linda S. and a church lady. Brad K. is an SID for a university, and I've lost Bonnie. Somewhere, someone is saying to her, You look good today.

I am now one of those wizened newsroom veterans whose lives we were never interested in, still skeptical after all these years. Skeptical of politics and bosses' agendas -- but not my own, of course -- and reporters' excuses. I don't think those reporters see us as old pros, though, more like over-the-hill bosses who play golf all morning and then come in to work to cool off and nitpick the stories they've been sweating over. It's always that way with reporters and editors.

So now you teach journalism at a big frozen university. I'm imagining you're skeptical of university politics, your dean's agendas and your students' excuses. But happy, in a bleak kind of way.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.