Wednesday, August 22, 2012

No. 652 – Never Can Say Goodbye

Performer: The Jackson 5
Songwriter: Clifton Davis
Original Release: single, Maybe Tomorrow
Year: 1971
Definitive Version: None

Yeah, I have a Jackson 5 song on the list; what of it? I can’t remember exactly why—the lingering effects of Jukebox Saturday Night, I’m guessing—but I really got into this song just as I was about to leave gleaming Herald City for gritty Flint. That meant I would have to say goodbye to Sara, and that turned out to be a bigger deal than I had been expecting.

I was at the Daily Herald for almost exactly a year, and although all of the top copy editors—my direct bosses—left long before the end of that year, most of the rim went unchanged. The copy desk consisted mostly of women, most of whom were married with kids, so they weren’t moving on. Everyone got along pretty well, were friendly at work and got together for drinks afterward once in a while. It was, all in all, a pretty good crew.

I don’t remember how it started, but as fall 1989 got rolling, Sara and I started doing things outside of work. It started small; we’d have dinner together on our break, but it slowly began to progress. We went to see a movie together (Sea of Love, which was kind of a hot choice). It seemed like it was a just-friends situation, which was cool, because I’d never had a female friend before. But … she kept talking about doing more things together as the holidays drew close, and I started to wonder whether we might have something more in time.

However, a job at the Flint Journal soon appeared out of nowhere in October as a result of something I had done a few months earlier when I was a bit sour about the Daily Herald (story to come). I had no interest in moving at the time, but I quite simply couldn’t refuse the offer that was made.

After I turned in my two weeks’ notice, the copy desk made plans for my Fade. A Fade was what they called people’s going-away party where the whole copy desk would go out after work for drinks to bid you fare … well … and … bon … voy … age. (Saw Monty Python’s tribute to Whicker’s World the other night. YouTube it.)

That’s the typical Fade anyway. For various reasons, people couldn’t make it on the same night, so I had two fades. The first one was at the end of my last shift, as is proper. I had been given a nice going-away present by everyone at work—a bunch of good-luck notes on my final work calendar that I kept. Then the folks in paste-up got a hold of it and dolled it up with all sorts of goofy pictures taken from the newspaper and hand-written captions. I still have it in my work-treasures box somewhere in storage.

But I was disappointed when not one of them came to my Fade. In fact, it was almost entirely new-timers, who took me to a bar in Palatime, which stayed open till 5 but wasn’t quite the scene I had hoped.

Most of the people whom I really wanted to party with could make it only on the next night, so I drove up to Arlington Heights for the event. But it turned out that that somehow made it an unofficial fade, so it was kind of lame. Only a few people came to a bar down the street from the newspaper building, and everyone cut out after about an hour. When you’re gone, you’re gone, I guess.

The last person there was Sara, and as we walked back to our cars parked at the newspaper we chatted a bit about Flint and the apartment I had found the previous weekend. As we were about to wrap up, she said, “It’s too bad that you’re leaving …” And in a flash, I understood that I wasn’t the only one wondering whether there would be more in the future, and now there clearly wouldn’t be.

Talk about bittersweet. Had I known that she was interested in something beyond being friends, I would’ve turned down Flint before an offer even had been made. But it was too late. An opportunity was missed, and we said goodbye.

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