Holidays, milestones

Unless I'm terribly mixed up -- again -- this will be my last column of 2009.

With Christmas Day and New Year's Day falling on Fridays, you will have to make the most of your holiday celebrations to fill the void.

No Miss Kitty. No downtown golf. No fruitcakes. No marauding squirrels. This is starting to sound like Lent instead of Advent.

By the time you lay eyes on my next column, I will be starting my 45th year in this business sometimes called journalism, sometimes called worse.

I wrote my first column in 1971 for the newspaper in Moscow, Idaho. That means I've been writing columns for 39 of those 45 years. In case you're thinking about doing some multiplication, that's 2,028 weekly columns, more than 100 fruitcakes, enough squirrels to give you nightmares for the rest of your life and four cats, one of which was a black tomcat who spent 20 years as part of our family -- or, as my wife remembers it, two decades of receiving wee gifts from Blackie in the form of live rodents.

If you put all my columns end to end, they would stretch across 40,560 inches, which would still be too short to go from one end of the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge to the other. In case you're wondering.

All those columns have given me ample opportunity to share details of my family's life. This has not always been appreciated by some readers -- including my wife, two sons, mother, in-laws and assorted aunts, uncles and cousins.

"Wait until I'm dead," my mother used to say when trying to avoid becoming column content. Now that she's gone, it's hard to describe her most noteworthy antics, although I still get occasional pieces of mail addressed to her and forwarded to me by thoughtful individuals who assume manila envelopes must contain something more important than offers for a three-night "fling" in Mexico for $199, airfare included. My mother would have been delighted to receive such mail -- not that she would ever go on such a trip, but, rather, that anyone would think she would want to.

If you collected all of my 2,028 columns into a hardback book, as has been suggested from time to time by some overly kind readers, the book would weigh nearly 10 pounds, making it just as apt to be used for propping doors open as the fruitcakes many of you claim serve the same purpose.

If you collected all my really good columns, culled from nearly 40 years of pecking away on typewriters and computer keyboards, into a paperback book, you would have what might easily be mistaken for a church bulletin, and we all know the shelf life of even a sparkling religious tract.

I am content that readers have, over all these years, occasionally nodded in agreement, broken into smiles or sometimes shed a tear. Thank you for that.

When it's all said and done, I can honestly claim that my columns have not, so far as I know, advanced the cause of civilization in ways likely to attract the attention of, say, the Nobel Prize Committee. See? Churning out 550 fairly ordinary words a week has its upside after all.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I mean it.

jsullivan@semissourian.com<I>