Readers who pay attention to masthead changes will notice several in this week's paper.
First, the newbies.
As you'll learn in this week's Urban Explorer column, our new staff writer Alex Pickett has returned to Tampa Bay after a 10-year absence. You might conclude from his column that he spent that decade bouncing around the country grabbing rides on freight trains hobo-style, but in fact he found gainful employ in all the places he lived, including (he told me in an e-mail) "fraud analyst for a major credit card company, executive producer at a sketchy Internet radio station" and "mean-spirited barista." But it was his newspaper credentials that impressed me most. Alt-weekly vet Paul Bass, former managing editor of the New Haven Advocate, wrote me that Alex "was one of the best of (the many) interns I had over the years — open-minded, creative, dependable, intelligent, curious, and open to new approaches to reporting and writing." So what did he do after interning at a hard-hitting paper in a tough Northeastern city? Took a job as news editor for a community newsweekly in the suburbs of Phoenix, a leap of faith on the part of all concerned. But Alex impressed his Arizona colleagues, too — even the ones who thought at first that he was too young for the job. (It helped when he agreed to dress up in an inflatable newspaper suit to promote the product at a rodeo party.)
Alex's boss in Arizona told me the thing she liked best about him was that he always kept his readers in mind. I like that in a writer. I also appreciate that, even after having had his car toilet-papered during the Planet's indoor campout, he still agreed to work here. (Go to our blog, blurbex.com, for more on that story, or read about it in next week's Summer Guide.)
Look for Alex at your favorite yard sales. As a returnee for whom everything old is new again, he'll have a lot to discover.
Speaking of discoveries, I thank Anne Arsenault for recommending Leslie Paredes to be our new editorial assistant, the position Anne occupied before her meteoric rise to copy editor. Anne and Leslie knew each other when they were editorial-assisting at the St. Petersburg Times, and, like Anne, Leslie comes to us with a boatload of clips of suitably eclectic range. She's already so poised and accomplished that it's impossible to believe she's not even out of college yet: she's taking night classes at USF toward a B.A. in creative writing and anthropology. We sense another meteoric rise in the making.
Anne wasn't the only Planet staffer to get a promotion in recent weeks. Her predecessor as copy editor, Joe Bardi, is now operations editor, succeeding Kelli Kwiatkowski, who was promoted to a managerial position in Creative Loafing's design department. Kelli, we miss you, but Joe has taken over your responsibilities with grace and grit, adding his own welcome brand of Bardi irreverence.
Alex, Leslie, Anne, Joe — congratulations.
On a personal note, I want to mention a new arrival of another kind: Last week, I moved my 88-year-old mother down to Florida to live in a senior community in St. Pete. It wasn't safe for her to live alone anymore, which she'd been doing for many years on Cape Cod.
My parents are divorced — have been for years and years — but they're still friends. On the day last week when my mother and I were scheduled to drive to Boston for the flight south, my father was at the house helping with final cleanup. There was one task left to do in the remaining minutes — figure out which of my mother's old clothes would appeal to vintage-seekers at the estate sale.
My mother worked for much of her life as an accounting supervisor at a Cape Cod bank, a job that required dresses: jerseys and shirtwaists from the '60s and '70s, floor-length gowns for big occasions, blouses with ruffles that are now inexplicably fashionable again. My father favored a frilly-but-worn negligee a little more than was warranted — "How come I never saw this one?" he muttered ("Maybe because you were sleeping elsewhere" was the response I didn't give) — but we were mostly brisk and businesslike in making our separate piles for sale and Salvation (Army).
And yet — these clothes were full of memories. This wardrobe was a part of my mother's past that we'd never see again, and here we were consigning it to a glorified yard sale.
It was the kind of task that people usually wind up doing after a relative is dead. My mother, on the other hand, despite her unsteady gait and bad back, was straightening up the rest of the house so prospective buyers wouldn't think she was a bad housekeeper. Though frail, she was and is very much alive.
I'm hoping that, as she adjusts to her new life in a convivial place called The Fountains, it will be a good long while before we have to sort through her wardrobe again.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2006.