Columns

I came looking for a job and I found a friend and serendipity.

Serendipity is something every journalist needs.

The tough, but garrulous journalism scholar John Bremner of the University of Kansas told journalists in his seminars they needed to find serendipity.

Serendipity occurs when you are on your way to one thing and you discover another thing. It brings magic and the joy of the unexpected.

You could have canned and sold serendipity.

You lived it very day.

You shared it every day.

Fred and Ethel are dead. And so are the Clampetts. The entire clan.

For two days I have mourned the loss of my neighbors-not the sitcom stars of 50 years ago but an entire convocation of spiders, presumably banana spiders, that have resided at my back door all summer and most recently decided to expand their lodging to the front door.

For the last three summers, I have watched their homes develop over days, weeks and months- lacework webs that bear intricate patterns and designs.

Visitors often dodged them and admonished me to tear them down.

Chiefland's sewer plant personnel have listened to a salesman and come up with a way to cut their energy use, cut fuel use, and cut the amount of sludge the City Water Reclamation Plant produces.

If you read the story in another part of this newspaper, you thought it was a story about money and saving energy.

Really, the story is about building relationships and trust.

Randy Wilkerson said it was his working relationship with a sales rep from TSC-Jacobs Group, the company that supplies the city with much of its wastewater equipment, that led to the savings.

I never thought my father and I had much in common despite my mother's ever-constant lament, "You're just like your daddy."

Back then I scoffed at the idea.

But then in 1993, my father died suddenly one week after his 62nd birthday and in the 15 years since, not a week has gone by that I don't somehow recall him, his words and his actions.

He wasn't an affectionate man. He grew up in an era and place where children were begat to work. He didn't know much about tenderness or bonding. His way of showing love was through providing and sacrificing so his family was secure.