A blast from my Career Day past

An unexpected blessing, and a reminder of my old vocation

Four years ago, in 2017, when I was still with the Times-Gazette, I represented the newspaper at Rotary Club of Shelbyville’s annual Career Day, presenting several different sessions about journalism as a career to students from Bedford County’s three public high schools.

This is actually a photo of me from the 2016 Career Day; I could not find one from 2017. This photo was taken by the late Jason Reynolds, who was my co-worker at the time. (Times-Gazette website photo)

I did this several different times over the course of my 34 1/2 years at the T-G. The teenagers get to specify which sessions they’d like to attend, and while they always get their first choice, sometimes they spend part of the day in sessions that maybe weren’t as high on their list. So when you are leading a session, sometimes you have a room full of interested and engaged teens, and sometimes you… don’t.

My sessions had gone fairly well that day, as I recall, but I didn’t think of them as anything special.

Later that day, though, the Rev. Ann Meece, a local pastor, messaged me on Facebook to tell me how much her daughter had enjoyed the session. She said her daughter was too shy to introduce herself to me after the session but had really gotten a lot out of it. That made my day, and I posted about it on Facebook.

As I posted a few weeks ago, in my new volunteer role with the United Methodist Church, I am participating…