It’s been about a decade since you and I last visited. That’s how long I’ve been gone from the Tribune. A lot of water over the dam. A lot more gray hair (at least on my part). Nearly everybody I worked with at the paper is gone now, with a few exceptions. Time does indeed march on.

I left the paper tired of having to attend endless meetings and sporting events and having to photograph giant cabbages and drunken class reunions and car wrecks. Refrigerator journalism (a reference to somebody cutting a picture or story out and posting it on the fridge), Dave called it, and I’m not belittling it. I know that’s a function of a small-town paper. People like to read about the accomplishments, large and small, of our town. And people need to know. The good stuff and the bad. And only somebody who lives and works in a town can truly know the heart of that community, because they’re part of that heart. They’re writing about their neighbors and friends.

I remember once, during my tenure, a rather self important writer from The New York Times showed up at the paper wanting some background assistance from a local reporter. If my sometimes hazy memory serves me correctly, he was doing a story about the crank epidemic in the rural West.

He had a patrician Ivy League name and clearly thought we were minor leaguers out here, not worthy of carrying his jock.

Puffy buns was wrong about us. My colleagues and I lived and worked in Powell out of choice, not because we had to. We knew something Puffy buns could never know: life in a small community out here in nowhere particularly important is as vibrant and worthwhile and meaningful as it is in the Big Apple.

That’s why we live here. That’s why I have stayed and that’s why my folks returned here after having left for Colorado for a decade. It is the last best place, with apologies to Montana.

l was blessed during my time at the paper to have had several outstanding mentors. Dave Bonner gave me a job when he had some reason to think it might not pan out. Scott Hagel and Dennis Davis were experienced and really smart journalists who willingly shared what they knew, when I was willing to listen. My fellow writers and the ad staff put up with a lot of crap when it came to me. Profane outbursts. Computer and copy machine ineptitude. Overall ineptitude. The fart machine. Angry letters and calls to Dave after insulting our neighboring communities in the Powell Buffoon April Fool’s papers we did.

In other words, I was kind of a troublemaker, something that’s followed me all of my days.

I loved the people I worked with, and I think some of them loved me back. When I told Dave I was leaving the paper after some 13 years, I cried. I never knew a workplace like that before or since.

So skip forward with me 10 years to the present. I’m a few months away from turning 60. My second marriage is toast after 16 years. The financial assets my former wife and I worked to accumulate are gone like the wind. I have no savings, no health insurance, no job, no common sense. Can’t pay my bills. I’ve given my elderly folks, my adult children and the few close friends who knew what was going on something to worry about. In fact I’ve been something of a burden to them to my eternal shame.

Some of you more cynical readers or people who have reason not to like me are surely wondering why, if things are so screwed up, I haven’t left. I will confess to having thought about it a lot this past year, particularly after I got fired from a crappy job in Cody, a job I needed badly.

After all if life’s a gift, you can give it back. All of us know someone who has. And the truth is, life doesn’t feel like much of a gift when you can’t pay your bills or buy groceries or you get fired or your spouse walks out the door.

My answer to that is I still believe God has a plan for me, and I couldn’t do that to the people who love me. I have four beautiful granddaughters and they don’t know grandpa is an unemployed bum and financial flop. They just know I’m grandpa and that I will bounce on the trampoline with them and play hide and seek. That’s enough to keep me here and enough to keep me trying.

So bring it on 2015. If it’s in the cards or the stars I’ll go down swinging. But I’m not quitting and I’m not giving up, and you shouldn’t either.

After all, we’re from Powell, best little town by a damn sight, apologies to Cody.