Page Two: Years, Dreams, and Ghosts

Part One: In the Beginning. This is the 51st issue of our publishing year. In two weeks, when we hit the first week of September, it will mark 27 years of our publishing the Chronicle. This column has let many Chronicle anniversaries pass without comment. As much as anything else, anniversaries have often not been commented on because there has been so much else going on – who could stop to notice? Once we made it through 10 years – which no one, including much of the staff, thought would happen – and then 15 and 20, the flow dominated the date; the workload trumped special celebrations.

Why the 27th anniversary – not a significant one in the scheme of things, when half-decades are the clear marker – looms so large to me probably has to do with any number of factors. If nothing else, it is just the magnitude of the idea of 27 years of publishing. Where did all that time go so quickly, and so very slowly?

It feels as substantial as a breeze that blew gently across a boat one night in a lake in Massachusetts, near Cape Cod. I was alone, rowing, worrying, and lost. All I could think of at first were endings and failures. It wasn't even that I wanted to be more optimistic; I just wanted the failures to mate with the endings to create an end – not a soft, partial project ending but a firm, solid ending of it all: one that didn't hesitate and lose purpose because, once again, a few small clumps of green were sprouting up, pushed out from the dry soil, providing false hope that a garden really could be cultivated in this place.

I was feeling like this and less than this as the sky darkened toward evening. I rowed.

Then the breeze found me, or I found me, or after the breeze, I felt found – or something like each of those and all of them. The breeze came up quickly, smoothly draping the lake. Nothing was quick about this to me; instead, it was all in multiple speeds and no speeds at all. There was no sense of time attached to the breeze or the changes that followed. It was just a gentle, lazy feeling as I rowed for the longest time, not even realizing I had stopped thinking of death.

The 27 years also seem like a dozen, or two dozen, lifetimes piled on one another, the weight of years, dreams, and ghosts pressing down on us. I can't tell if the staff is laughing or screaming, but that comes as no surprise – especially to the staff.

Never a short run, always 27 long years, it is sometimes remembered as a never-ending breeze of opportunities and accomplishments stained with the color of many, many small failures.

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The beginning of this journey, our adventure in putting out this publication, The Austin Chronicle, for those many years was not informed nor illuminated, in any way, by any conscious piloting toward or even vague awareness of any of its eventual destinations. It was a voyage into the fog with a crew that, at best, just expected more fog.

There was no foreshadowing of things to come. It started hard, got bad, and then, at least internally and emotionally, got worse. Not one oracle offered a hint of anything positive, much less survival. Many, many folks let us know that the odds were hopelessly against the Chronicle – informed us over and over again that the trip would end only in sinking and drowning and that we should hold out no hope of any of the storms lessening, much less passing.

For many of us, it was a time without sun to begin with, so we expected light not at all. There were precious few dissenters to these dire predictions among our staff – maybe Nick Barbaro, maybe Carolyn Phillips, but not many others.

But, truth be told, I bet most of us not only figured that long-term survival was not an option but also were not entirely unhappy with that thought of ending. The void, all blackness, would at least be calming, rather than the turbulence of the continuous seasons of never-ending storms.

In September 1981, we began publishing the Chronicle. For some time afterward, probably a different time in each individual case (with the longest time being mine), we moved forward because, oddly enough, it really was the easiest way to go. Giving up would have required new thought, action, and movement. Frozen in the night, we moved straight ahead until 10 or 15 days from now, when we pass the 27th year of publishing marker without slowing down. I can barely make it out that many days ahead, but it is on my mind and in my heart this morning.

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Next: Part Two: The Voyage Continues. Now, even if you are mocking this or dreading any more thoughts on it, if you are reading, then you are along for at least a small part of it.