Win or Lose
Like most humans, I win some and I lose some. I got an electric-start lawnmower this summer, but I fell off my neighbor's stoop last week and maybe broke my foot.
My eight-year-old daughter lights up my life when she sings, but I can't stop biting my fingernails in time for my high-school reunion.
I'm in good enough shape to run charity 5Ks, but I can't give blood because I ate meat in the UK back when mad cow disease was going around.
I won't get to retire whenever I feel like it, but I get to go to work with the neatest people on the planet.
Take Mary Erpenbach. When I was hired as the magazine's associate editor, Mary was the interim AE who couldn't wait to hand me the July issue to finish. She was a writer not an editor and the minutiae of the job, not to mention the insane production schedule, was killing her.
She was so relieved to get back to her writing business and the studio of artists she shared space with on East Mifflin Street that it was months before we heard from her again.
But eventually she resurfaced, and nine years later she's penned dozens of terrific articles for us and filled in on staff in a pinch; she's one of the few people I trust to edit my own work (I can spell but I'm no English major); and on a personal note, her friendship once saved my life–no joke.
When it comes to Mary—in the win-or-lose game, I win.
Sure, she might have missed a deadline or twelve over the years, but when the writing comes in, it is tight, elegant and accessible. I barely touch it.
A wise journalism professor once told me the difference between a good writer and a great writer: a great one waits for the right word. That's Mary. Sometimes she waits so long she nearly gives me a heart attack, but I'll take that check mark in the lose column as a balance to her winning--award-winning--work.
And her humor. God is she funny. Once, while using her relentless reporting skills to conduct research on an illness for a sick friend, she called me, fit to be tied. "I found the end of the Internet," she declared. "And I still don't have the answer!"
Right now Mary is busy--furiously busy I'm sure--working on a profile for our October issue. I hired her to write it for a number of reasons, one of which is her previous good work in the area of cancer research and treatment. When you have a top-notch cancer center in your community you need a top-notch journalist to cover it. So when I teased her about going to medical school in her next life, I got this quick-witted reply:
"I don't know why, but I remember every medical factoid I've ever learned. The only other subject I can say that about is Bruce Springsteen. And that one specific rule that says you don't hyphenate after an -ly word. I have to relearn everything else constantly: my kids' zodiac signs, how gravity works, cities I've visited, the ratio of vinegar to oil in a chopped salad, the make, model and year of my car and where it's parked, the number of justices on the state and U.S. supreme courts, etc. I could tell you ten differences between botulism and salmonella, but I couldn't tell you on any given day which is Johnson and which is Gorham. Sad but true."
Like the rest of us Mary, you win some, you lose some.
Oh, and Johnson Street goes East. Duh.
Email
Print
Feed
