Steve Moseley

Your shuffling scribe has embarked on a new project, that of writing my own obituary. Conversationally. In the first person. Exactly as though speaking eye-to-eye to the folks clustered around my ashes. Macabre, you say? A little creepy maybe?

Upon deeper consideration, I think not really.

Who bears the scars of my life’s ups and downs, its minutia of details great and small more than me? Further, as a person who made a living and fed his family as a professional writer these past 35 years, who better to commit my story to paper?

I ran it by Good Wife Norma and, a bit surprisingly perhaps, she did not recoil in horror. Quite the opposite, she thought it a good and practical idea.

So here I am, north of 75 summers, chronicling a most unremarkable yet, I hope, occasionally interesting life experience.

How will this odd assignment turn out? Well, first is to croak I suppose. Isn’t that kind of the point? Then you’ll be the judge of those final self-descriptive sentences. Best of all, this assures me the last word on everyone and perhaps even a chuckle or two.

I must, of course, include how I married my high school sweetheart Norma Garling. You know her as Good Wife Norma. We were so young the whole birds and bees business was mutually mysterious at the beginning. Quite puzzling in fact. Happy to report through trial, error and teamwork we figured it out to the tune of three wonderful children, not one of whom has ever brought a scintilla of disappointment or shame down upon us. Not ever. They also gifted us with six treasured grandkids for whom we are forever grateful and proud.

I’d like the obit to tell anyone who wanders off the street into my memorial service, hoping for a free church-lady dinner, what happened to make me anti-Halloween for life. Or why I am so self-conscious and disparaging of my own nose, but I doubt space in a wee funeral program will permit such revelations.

I would also purge and share how the ill-conceived and poorly-executed "New Math" fad that set simple arithmetic aflame in my youth led directly to failure to obtain a college degree at then-Kearney State. But, again … time and space will not allow.

I’ll try not to dwell in my obit about pride in how the absence of an academic pedigree did not stop me from ending up where life meant me to be all along; a newspaper reporter, columnist, photographer and editor over nearly four decades. Natural appreciation of a silky-smooth, clever turn of phrase blended with an inexplicable ability to compose them better than some — no thanks to any heroic effort on my part — caused this destiny to finally manifest itself; even if not until deep in life.

Major credit goes to encouragement and assistance from the late Shirley Frohman of the Nebraska Job Service, a tiny but determined, gravelly voiced lady who encouraged, cajoled and, when my lack of daring forced her hand, browbeat a 40-year-old green grocer and meat cutter with cold feet and a family to feed into embarking on a terrifying and wildly unlikely career path.

Her confidence in me folded together with my fear of displeasing this wee dynamo yielded years of wonderful professional and personal relationships, more warm fuzzies than I deserve and boxes of award plaques and certificates from the Wyoming and Nebraska state press associations and The Associated Press.

Long before Shirley, the handwriting of my favorite teacher at Genoa High School, Katherine Nutter, penned this message upon my graduation in 1967. Turns out she had me figured out even then. Off to college I rushed, only to be driven back to the grocery store by the lingering infection of that despised scourge New Math.

Probably best about now, I suppose, to put a wrap on these random ramblings and get back to work on that obit. I hear the clock ticking ever louder and thus dare not procrastinate.

At 76, everything I do could be the last thing I ever did, and I don’t want a half-finished obituary to be it.