Last week I briefly mentioned ‘the front step’ of my childhood home, and I’ve been thinking about that pivotal spot quite a bit since! It was a gathering place through the years, for sure. We sucked on homemade Tupperware Popsicles as young children, gossiped about school later on, lamented broken hearts, took countless photos – grad photos, wedding photos, baby photos of our own generation and the next. The front step is where the big revelation first hit me that I wanted to be a journalist.
It was an odd – and sad – catalyst that informed me of my future career when I was just an eight year-old. It was 1969 and my friend next door ran over with the latest Life Magazine that had coverage of the Manson Murders, which had just taken place in Los Angeles and struck terror in the hearts of everyone. It wasn’t that I was gawking at the article – I have always hated making anyone uncomfortable and never felt I really had the chops to be a journalist, which is why I went into public relations. But that all came later – that day on the front step I was putting two and two together that creating the piece and the entire magazine was actually someone’s job.
I had never known it was a profession until then, that there were people who took on the responsibility of being present at a dramatic point in time and then worked to interpret the information they uncovered to the rest of us. It was someone’s job to write these things down, document them for history. Not the sensational stories, but all the stories, I thought to myself as I excitedly flipped through the pages of that magazine.
There were a few articles on other movie stars, if I recall, and some general interest features. My family subscribed to the Calgary Herald and some news magazines, so I was exposed to news everyday – I just hadn’t understood that it was developed by people! That there were mysterious, important steps that resulted in a product that we could hold in our hands and be involved in. I was hooked.
The voracious reading in our home was another important catalyst in my love of the written word. All six of us in the house always had a book on the go, and there was usually someone reading in the living room anytime you walked in, or books stacked up on the coffee table waiting. It was in that room that I jumped from Nancy Drew to ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, which I have since discovered was many people’s first adult book. But it was the front step where my life’s work first entered my consciousness and I began to write.
I went on to type what I called ‘my book’ on the manual typewriter in the basement. It was actually a five page really bad short story called ‘The Worst Day of My Life’. I was 11 – what did I know about how bad things could really be?! I still have those stained yellow pages and dig them out from time to time. It was my first ‘assignment’, although there was no place for it to go (which is why I still have it!). This was followed a few years later by an entry into a short story contest hosted by a major American women’s magazine which, sadly, required me to send away the only existing copy of what I’m sure was of equally crappy quality. It would be a hoot to read it now – I only remember the title, ‘The Really Bad Man’. Riveting!
This was all followed by years of journaling – stacks of coil bound notebooks that I filled with teenage insight, politics of the day, my emerging quest for truth and social justice. Again, I would love to be able to read those eight years of dedicated ‘prose’, but I burned them all in the downstairs fireplace one day. The same room in which I had plunked out my ‘book’ years before, now swallowed up true volumes of work. I was 19 by then and was about to leave for a backpacking trip overseas, and for some reason I was scared someone would find them. They didn’t reveal anything bad about me, or any big misdeeds – I had been a bit of a rebellious teenager, but in the end hadn’t really done anything wrong. It was more that it would have been such an invasion of privacy, having someone glimpse at my innermost thoughts.
Of course, in the years to come I got quite used to putting my thoughts on paper for everyone to see! But there was still a lot of learning to do at that point, a lot of writing skills to hone, journalism college to attend. And– alas – seeing that childhood home sold off to a new family that filled it once again with young children who would mark their own milestones near the fireplace in the basement, under the big light in the living room, and on the ample front step.
Sandy Bexon is stepping into retirement after over 35 years as a communications professional, reporter and writer. She lives in Red Deer.
