This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

It was a first for me. 

What?

Attending a college reunion.

With my wife, Nancy, I did so last weekend.  It was 50^th reunion for my graduation from Seattle Pacific College, now called Seattle Pacific University.  [She went along, though she graduated from the University of Oregon.]

Yes, it has been more than 50 years since I graduated in 1970, but like many other things these days, our reunion in 2020 was postponed due to the pandemic.

A few perceptions from attending this time around:

• I only knew about five people who were there from my class.  Two I did know – John Glancy, a long-time SPU guy who attended college with me, then worked for the institution for about 30 years, and Mel MacDonald, a great athlete back in my day who now sometimes plays pickle-ball with my son, Eric, in Palm Springs – were the ones who invited me by phone.  I agreed to attend.

• The program for the evening was long – too long – for anyone like me to pay much attention after about two hours.

• Before dinner, Nancy and I walked around the campus on a self-guided tour, but all the doors to buildings were closed and locked.  At least a few of them should have been open to us.

• For me, that included the office of The Falcon, the student newspaper I edited as a senior.  It would have been good to see the office and remember the hundreds of hours I spent there, toiling over the campus daily newspaper.

At dinner, I sat next to one of my friends from college days, Don Mortenson.  When I was a senior and he was a junior, we lived together in an off-campus apartment with two other guys.

He recalled a particular memory.  At our apartment, he said I would often get calls late at night or early in the morning from someone on “my” college newspaper staff wondering about, (a) how to write a story, (b) what to cover, or, (c) even, reporting about a typo in the paper after it had been printed.

On the latter, Don remembers that I often exclaimed in a loud voice, “Oh no, how did that happen?”  Well, I might have used harsher words.

Will I attend future reunions?  Probably not.

They are not my thing.

But not bad being there once, though I wish arrangements would have been a bit more welcoming for those of us who survived past 50 years from graduation – like open doors.