Dreams do come true

When I was the tender age of 28, I learned what I was supposed to be if I ever grew up.

It was really a thing of beauty, the way it happened and all.

I was staring at my laptop, in the middle of the day, unemployed and recovering from a failed relationship, when an ad to a writing program miraculously appeared on the screen. Then — suddenly! — an arch of bright light swopped over the screen and an invisible choir of angels sang a harmonious and epiphanous Ahh!

I had seen the light. I was supposed to write.

I spent the next five years learning to write and working toward transitioning from a field I had long ago begun to abhor — auto mechanics — to one where I would be paid to sit in front of a computer screen in my pajamas while guzzling copious amounts of coffee.

My parents are old school and old country. They spent eight years in the 1980s bribing and bugging the communist government of Romania to let us emigrate to the U.S. During that time, Dad became impatient and served two prison terms for two failed defections because of it. Mom says it was his big mouth that got him caught. Dad apparently bragged that he was going to defect. Dad thinks Mom is crazy.

My parents’ goals weren’t lofty or even very idealistic — they just wanted to live in a country where they could keep the labor of their hands and worship freely without worrying about the government snatching them off the streets and throwing them in prison.

So when they learned I wanted to throw away a decade of training and experience to write, they thought I was being ridiculous. You can’t make a decent living doing that! That’s not why we fought hard to come to this country.

I was hired at the Havre Daily by John Kelleher and Stacy Mantle last November. By the time I got the call, I had applied to about 30 small newspapers in every time zone in the country. I heard back from very few.

I’m grateful that those two took a chance on me.

I didn’t know much about Montana, only that it was once a wild place, it’s big yet has a total population barely larger than Gwinnett County — the little metro Atlanta area in which I grew up — and that it gets really cold.

My parents, when I told them I was moving to Havre said I was going to freeze to death. For Christmas they sent me a jacket made by NASA, so I won’t die, and enough pairs of thermal socks to put on the feet of everyone on the Hi-Line. They told me to wear two pairs at a time.

I didn’t need to check out Montana before driving 2,000 miles across the country with only the things I could throw in the back of my little pickup. I knew it was an open door I was supposed to walk through.

Journalism wasn’t my first choice. All writers want to be J.D. Salinger or Mark Twain. But I love writing, and over time I learned to love a lot of aspects of journalism.

I like the investigative part because I always wanted to be a detective but never wanted to go to the academy or work five years of night patrol. And I like it when I get to write about people — human interests and people profiles — because I believe people are amazing.

I get paid — sort of — to write words. More times than not, I write my stories from home, oftentimes in my sweats, with the aroma from the pot of coffee in the next room in the air.

Friday, just a smidge less than a year into my journalism career, I learned that I won a first-place national award for investigative work. I won for a series I had written on a company that’s buying properties in Havre through tax liens and letting the properties rot while refusing to sell to interested parties. The idea for the series was Kelleher’s, but if you ask him, he’ll try to deflect credit to his eye doctor, who initially proposed the idea. Since nobody wants to take credit, I’ll say it was my brilliant idea.

As unfortunate as the few known facts about the story are, the bright side is I got to be a messenger to a community by doing what I love.

Dreams do come true.

Now to figure out why my other entries didn’t win.