Clarity at Dusk

By five o clock, I was rethinking my career path (again). Nothing new there; just the same litany of ills that have been haunting me for the past 18 years. First, staffing issues ripped me from my soft news nap. Then, Eric White and I embarked on a fruitless pursuit of assignment wannabes. For a while, every flimsy story idea we landed on collapsed under our weight. Forced to flee to the next possible lead, we logged many, many miles along the unforgiving interstate. When finally we settled on hyping the weather, Mother Nature retaliated by damn near freezing me at the salt yard. This unleashed a torrent of bellyachin' and Eric White should receive a medal for enduring my endless lament. (He should then be pummelled repeatedly for being so damn happy all the time. The nerve of that guy!)

By the time we parked a live truck on a favorite patch of grass off I-85, I was o-v-e-r it. The insipid assignments, the marathon driving, the fretful repetition of countless newscasts; I grumbled about it all as I pulled various gizmos out of the truck. 'I'm a fairly clever chap', I thought. When did I agree to spend my working life erecting these disposable vignettes? Bending at the waist, I plugged in my lights and vowed for perhaps the millionth time to do something more meaningful with my life. Then I stood up, glanced at my camera's flip-out screen and stopped dead in my tracks. It was ... beautiful. With the sun setting behind Eric's head, a thin ribbon of orange settled over the horizon. Slowly receding as the Earth turned, it would be gone altogether by the time we went live(!), but something about that fleeting layer of sunlight pleased me in a way I cannot express. Instantly renewed, I tweaked my lights and checked my monitor, happy once again to simply slather images across the atmosphere. At one point Whitey noticed I was humming and undoubtedly rolled his eyes.

Can't say I blame him...