Editorial: A season of change

The first verse of Ecclesiastes 3 has about it a wonderfully universal flavor, in that it can explain, define and lay claim to almost every human experience and condition.

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

It’s hard to think of anything that doesn’t fit within the embrace of those comforting words. Which is no doubt one reason they are quoted so often.

In the almost eight years since Bill and Jim Lynch handed me the editorial reins of this newspaper, in a feat of family faith and trust that still leaves me slightly awed, I have written more than 800 columns in this space.

I have tried to do so mindful of the fact that multiple points of view exist on every issue, and that raw opinion, without balance, and without a careful and thorough examination of the facts, ends up as empty rhetoric, a song sung only for the choir.

Some of those 800 columns have been applauded, some have been condemned and some have won state and national awards. All of them have been created in the hope that readers will find something useful in the words I write and that no one, or at least relatively few, will view the investment a waste of time.

Given that each editorial column contains around 600 words, the grand total comes out above 480,000, a number that gives me pause.

Writing all those words has been both a challenge and a privilege. It has connected me, sometimes deeply and personally, with readers, and it has forced me to open my mind, and sometimes my heart, to issues and actions I might otherwise never have experienced.

For all of that, I am deeply grateful and honored. Filling this chair has enriched me in multiple ways, some of which I am still discovering.

But it has also come to a logical end, a confluence of currents both external and internal that have propelled me toward a decision point that feels right, and right on time.

So this is my last editorial, my last moment as the grateful editor of the finest newspaper in the finest community I have ever known. As with any departure, I will be leaving loose ends, stories I planned to finish writing, interviews I had planned but won’t complete.

There is one loose end, however, that must be addressed before I take my leave.

I came to Sonoma County in the 1970s, not long out of college, and bought with two classmates a failing weekly paper in Santa Rosa. We spent the next decade building it in to a large and prosperous community paper and not long after our ownership commenced a journalism teacher from Santa Rosa Junior College brought me a story, with a photo to prove it, about a two-headed garter snake.

That was my introduction to Geets Vincent, who would become a contributor, an employee and most of all a friend for the following decades.

Geets was an expat Canadian with a fine eye for writing talent and, over the years, she was my pipeline for new journalists. Some of the students she funneled to me went on to substantial careers and one of them, Dennis Wheeler, worked here at the Index-Tribune.

As her teaching load at SRJC declined, she channeled more energy into an adult, autobiographical writing class, and over the years she prodded hundreds of seniors to commit their life stories to print, and to the scrutiny of her sometimes painfully candid class.

Geets was 89 when she died Sept. 7, after several years of physical decline. She was a gift to journalism and to me, and I bid her a grateful goodbye as I do the same to this newspaper.