I laid in bed with tears streaming down my face yesterday morning.  As Charles Osgood relayed a romantic eulogy for Charles Schulz at the top of CBS Sunday Morning,  the final shot of the story was from a book, "Snoopy, Come Home".  I thought of my tattered copy of the hardback on the bottom shelf of the living room bookcase. 

It was one of my first books.  I can remember being three or four sitting on the kitchen floor, unable to read but still telling my Mom stories about Snoopy based on the pictures in my book.  Storytelling through pictures...hmmm,  I used to do that.   My first inclination was to get up, get dressed and run outside into my neighborhood with my camera and catch people picking their Sunday papers off the front lawn, snapping off the rubberband and cracking it open to the Comics.  After I would get to the station, I would call people in the Raleigh phone book named Charlie Brown and let them reflect on the childhood torture of sharing their name with a cartoon character.  But instead I put on a pot of coffee and crawled back in bed.    I don't know where my inspiration has gone.  Well, I do, and I don't know where to find a new source.  Over the past few months my special little television station, renowned for doing things right, no matter what the cost decided it was time to tighten it's belt.  It is a hard core reality of the television news business, and that is what it is---a business.  I had forgotten that for a while. 

In between incredible trips to live out news stories and play with technological toys that 99 percent of TV news photographers will not see for another five years, I secretly knew it was too good to be true. Five TV stations, 15 news directors, hundreds of co-workers, experience has taught me this would not last, but a romantic part of me hoped it would have hung on a little longer.  It is cliche, but the honeymoon is over.  It is like being married and realizing you don't need each other for your life to go on, but you can't walk out because you made a commitment to be in it and you have not been given a compelling reason to leave, but you are wondering if this is how it is going to be forever.  You know it will never be as good as it was at the beginning, but you have to live on the hope that it will get better.   Don't get me wrong, I have graceful moments from time to time and I still love what I do and cannot imagine doing anything else.  It is just the lack of joy around me, people in fear of their jobs,  people being forced to do things they did not get into this to do, not getting to tell people's stories.   A few weeks ago during the paralyzing snow storm you probably saw on the national news, I set out in search of a story.  It was Sunday morning.  Almost every church in the area cancelled services that day.  I was determined to find a church that was convening despite the snow.  After banging on the doors of nine north Raleigh churches, I saw a small brick church with several cars in the parking lot.  It was 11:30 and I knew services would be ending soon.  I decided to take a gamble and just barge in with my camera and tripod and hopefully they would accept my presence.  I pushed open the doors and the service sounded strange in the small foyer.  I poked my head in the sanctuary and realized I had just happened upon the Vietnamese Baptist Church.  My first reaction was to find another church, I was not sure of their customs, I could not understand what they were saying and I did not know how disruptive I would be.  I picked up my tripod to leave, the voice in my head said, "No, this is the church God gave you today."  I could not fight that, so I turned around and walked into the sanctuary. 

Every head whipped around and the pastor's voice cracked, I felt my face turn crimson.  I smiled gingerly and several people smiled back.  During the rest of the service the congregation was very preoccupied with my presence. Immediately after the service ended most of the congregation gathered around the camera.  I explained to the pastor that his church was one of only a very few having services that day in the Triangle.  He then told me how special it was to have me there, not because of the camera, but because I did not speak the language and did not understand the service in Vietnamese but I sat there hanging on his every word regardless. He then told me this was the first time his son had preached to a congregation since graduating from the seminary in South Carolina and it was also the first birthday of the youngest member of the congregation. I had picked such a special day to them and made it even bigger by my presence.      

I got in the car completely perplexed but light hearted from the experience, I can never recall anyone happy to see me instead of my camera.  I got back to the station very excited about my bizarre experience.  The producers of the 6, 10, and 11 shows looked at me and shrugged their shoulders, "I don't want it, I have something similar in there, I don't have the time."

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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