Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

I‘ve seen this a lot lately. The title of this post, –30–. Mostly I’ve seen it at the end of farewell pieces written by journalists who are leaving their newspaper jobs because the companies they work for are downsizing or cutting expenses or closing down. And after 26 years in journalism I can’t say, with any certainty, exactly what it means.

I can venture a guess though.

Back in the days of the typewriter, writers would have to put certain characters into their text that typesetters could understand, markup actually. Things like quad left or CR or em space.

Although the first newspaper I worked for did use typewriters, I didn’t. I was a photographer and had no need to learn typesetting code. But I did see a hell of a lot of hard copy going in and out of the backshop. Different typesetting systems used different types of code but there was some similarity overall.

I’m going to guess. –30– means end. The end. Stop.

So, yesterday as I sat at my desk at work looking over a newsroom that has been picked away at like carrion on a dry lakebed, and doing the work that just a few weeks ago would have been scheduled for two individuals, on an election night, I get an IM from my wife Linda.

“Bad news,” she IM’d.

“Oh shit,” I replied.

I pretty much knew what that meant. Earlier in the day she was chatting with me that she had a bad feeling, that there was just a dreadful vibe permeating her workplace. Now, she told me, her boss had held individual meetings with her and her co-workers and that he’s having to cut everybody’s pay by 20% and that one person, and a damn talented one, was going to be let go.

This after having to cut all their hours just a few months ago by another 20%.

At least she wasn’t the one that was being let go. At least I’ve managed to dodge that layoff bullet for the past year. Our newsroom which was at 125 last February is now at 65. Somehow, I’m still there. I think it’s because I’m invisible.

Invisible is good. But my shields are getting weaker.

Last night, one of our reporters asked me if I had watched the video at the Rocky Mountain News yet. I said that I hadn’t and she told me that I must. So this morning I looked it up, found the HD version on Vimeo and watched the whole 20 minutes with a lump in my throat the size of a fruitcake. I don’t think I know a single person that worked in that newsroom but my heart was breaking anyway.

My heart was breaking for the loss that every one of those people at the Rocky are feeling and the loss the entire industry that I’ve loved for 26 years is feeling and the loss that Circuit City employees are feeling and the loss the auto industry is feeling and the loss anyone who owns stocks is feeling and the loss that Linda is feeling … and on and on.

At the end of the video, as the music melted away and I sat alone at my desk in my quiet house, a very hard rain began to fall.

It was, kind of, beautiful.

It was devastatingly beautiful.

Fade to black.

–30–

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and back then, I won’t give away my age here but it was sometime during the last ice age, we pretty much counted on a white Christmas every year.

It was a time when sea levels were much lower than they are now and there was a land bridge between North America and Asia.

And it snowed in the winter. A lot.

It snowed so much that we never wondered if we would have a white Christmas or not. We rarely wondered if we would have a white Thanksgiving.

We just did.

For some reason, even though there was already snow on the ground on Christmas Eve, the universe would dump another foot or two overnight as if to make sure that six-year-olds, with brand-new sleds, would have plenty of virgin power to test them out in.

Nearly every memory I have of Christmas, as a kid growing up in that great, white north was just extraordinary, bordering on supernatural. I’m sure that’s true of most kids growing up in middle class America during the last ice age. But there is something otherworldly about waking up on Christmas morning before the sun, standing in the twinkling light of the Christmas tree, looking out the front door and not being able to see the steps up to the front porch.

There are no streets or curbs or sidewalks. There is only a single, unbroken blanket of fizzy brilliance as snowflakes the size of silver dollars fall silently and constantly straight down, as if in slow motion.

This morning, Linda and I went out to a local Starbucks for coffee and just outside the door was a young girl, probably about 13-years-old, sitting on what was clearly a brand-new Christmas bicycle and guarding a second one nearby, likely belonging to her older sister.

As I passed her I asked, “Is that a new Christmas bike you have there?”

“Yes!”

Of course it was. Once inside Linda and I talked about how a new bike had to be one of the ultimate Christmas presents a kid could get. I told her that we never got bikes for Christmas because you couldn’t use it for another 6 months. You’d just sit in the basement and look at it and dream about summer as an ice storm raged outside.

Standard Christmas gifts for kids growing up in the great, white north during the last ice age were, sleds, toboggans, ice skates and usually some new mittens or boots or a scarf.

The way I remember it, we weren’t rich or even as well off as more than half the kids I knew at school, but the economy was pretty good during the last ice age and we all loved Christmas.

One of the things that has stayed with me for all these millennia was the excitement of dragging all the boxes of Christmas lights and decorations down from the attic. Opening up those boxes and taking out all the ornaments meant Christmas was finally and officially here and it always slammed me back to the year before.

I would remember putting those things away the year before like it was yesterday and then, there was the smell.

The scent of last year’s Christmas tree still lingered inside those boxes as if you’d just cut it down and rolled around in the sap.

Inevitably, in the haste to put an end to Christmas and return it to it’s tomb, some pine needles or maybe a small bit of a branch still attached to a bulb or an icicle would get packed away. I grew up loving the smell of the remnants of last year’s Christmas tree. It is still one of my favorite memories of Christmas as a kid.

Now, and for the past few years, Linda and I purposely take a piece of our tree from the current year and pack it away with all the ornaments and decorations.

The photo above is of the top of our tree from last year and a small slice of the trunk which we packed away on January 5, 2008 at about 4:45 p.m.

When we took it out of it’s storage tub a few weeks ago, it smelled awesome and as always, slammed me back to Christmases during the last ice age.