A good friend called and wondered where I'd been. She said I'd been strangely quiet.
Now, this being the 21st Century, she wasn't wondering where I'd been physically, or that I'd been strangely quiet vocally.
She was wondering from a virtual standpoint - as in, where I had been from a social media standpoint.
So here is a quick summary of June.
I said good-bye to BP.
We sold our house.
MG had another surgery; hip replacement.
I started a new job.
We moved.
And now it's July.
I haven't said much, because each of those items is a story in itself.
First, BP.
I've been asked how I wound up working for BP in the first place. It was either a "God thing" or an amazing coincidence; it depends on your perspective.
In 2010, the buy-outs from the newspapers were getting smaller while salaries were being cut and employees were given unpaid furloughs. I never dreamed I'd ever leave the newspaper business. But if I were ever going to do anything different, I knew it was time.
We - the family - had decided to take a leap of faith move to St. Louis, where MG would go to work for her brothers and I had already lined up freelance jobs staying in sports. A friend in the trucking business offered us a truck to move our stuff, and The Heir and I were getting ready to pack up the house to make the move. However, that friend in the trucking business called and said if we could wait a week, he could get us a bigger truck for the same price.
So on the day I was supposed to be driving to St. Louis, I was free to go to the church parking lot where The Princess and the Young Prince were leaving for a week-long mission trip. While there, a friend whose son was going on the same trip told me BP needed media help on the Coast (the Deepwater Horizon accident occurred April 21st and this was June) and asked if I knew anyone who might be interested. I was - it was the biggest story of the year - but I thought MG had her heart set on St. Louis to be with her family again, so I told my friend to let me think about it.
Later, at home, I mentioned the conversation to MG and she said, "Why don't you do it? It's the biggest story of the year; you know you'd love to be in the middle of it."
Did I say I had the greatest wife in the world?
So on Monday, I emailed my resume to Ayana McIntosh-Lee, who would end up being the General Manager of BP in Alabama. On Tuesday, we had a phone interview. On Wednesday, I was in Mobile to "check things out,'' not sure if I really wanted to do this or not.
That first day, I met a young named Justin Saia, who would eventually become a great friend. His uncle, Vince, had been a friend for years but I'd never met Justin. We walked into the Incident Command Center in Mobile on the same day, recognized a press center that seemed to have no real plan, and sat down to start organizing how to reach out to local media.
That afternoon, I had taken a query from a member of the media, researched and written an appropriate answer, and said to Ayana, "I'm going to deliver this response to the media. Who do you want me to say said it?"
"You,'' Ayana said. "You're a BP spokesman."
I hadn't even actually accepted the job. What I knew about BP as a company consisted primarily of regular stops at the station near my house for gas and a breakfast of Diet Coke and Dunkin' Sticks (this was during one of my health food crazes).
And just like that, I was an official spokesman for the fifth largest company in the world, an international company based in Great Britain, facing perhaps the largest environmental/industrial disaster in modern history.
Pretty cool, huh?
Eventually, I got to work with a couple of actual, official BP "spokespeople" (Marti Powers and Dawn Patience), who were terrific. They not only organized a true BP Press Office but were tremendously helpful to me, offering encouragement and became great resources. Still, it was pretty much trial by fire. There was no handbook for crafting statements; in the beginning there was no legal review. It was just "hey, how does this sound?' to the team in the press room - Georgia and Justin and either Marti or Dawn - and then deliver the message.
All of us had very different backgrounds, but all those backgrounds offered a different area of expertise that worked. My buddy George, for example, had been an advance man in the White House. He taught me about planning, organization, and controlling the environment of a press conference or photo opportunity, things I was certainly aware of but never really thought that mucha bout.
And so I made the transition from one side of the notepad to the other. This was graduate school in the real world, working 24/7, sometimes 12 hours a day, through the summer and into the fall.
And I had a blast.
Eventually, BP decided to establish state offices, I was asked to move to Gulfport, Mississippi, as Director of Media and Communications. Again, it was a great team led by Heidi Grether. We did great work. I was allowed to do more than just respond to media, and met some terrific people with BP. It was seven years of experience in three and completed my real-world graduate degree in media relations, crisis communication, community relations, governmental relations, and response.
In the beginning I was dealing with local, national, and even international media. I took media on fly-overs of the well site; to barrier islands; up and down the beaches of Alabama and Mississippi. I worked what was basically a technology fair in the parking lot of Gulf State Park, where inventors came to show off their solutions for the oil spill. I got to be the "national spokesperson" for a project where recovered tar balls were recycled into car parts (I put national spokesperson in quotation marks because, quire frankly, it wasn't like it got a lot of attention. But I did do radio interviews all over the country).
I was part of meetings with govenors, members of congress, and mayors, sitting in on negotiations and updates, hearing their concerns and developing appropriate responses. There were some great moments and some boondoggles, stories that in some cases you just to be there to believe. But by and large I worked with people who were committed to the response, who sincerely wanted nothing more than to do the right thing and to do it well, and felt a real responsibility to the people of the Gulf Coast.
Maybe someday I'll share some of the more specific stories, like the report of a cat being run over by a Sandshark - a beach-cleaning machine that couldn't move faster than 2 mph, which means that cat had to be the slowest cat on the face of the earth; or the bar fight on Dauphin Island that ended with one guy getting hit in the head with a baseball bat and guns being drawn on both sides like an Old West standoff.
Toward the end, interest slowed down. We can argue whether things really returned to normal, but I do believe other than perception, things are very close to pre-spill condition. The federal government, in the form of the United States Coast Guard, recently determined the three states of Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were essentially back to normal, and quite naturally the determination was made that there was no longer a need for a press officer stationed permanently on the Coast.
So I began to look for another job. Fortunately, my resume got a considerable amount of attention from a wide range of companies, attention I'd never have received if not for the experience with BP. Now, I have never trusted my own judgement and have always prayed that God would close every door except the right one. At one time, there were four jobs I thought - no, I knew - I had a really good shot at. In one case, the job was actually created for me!
But one incredible thing after another shut those doors - I'm talking about presidents and CEOs of companies getting fired or forced into early retirement; in fact, on three occasions top executives who wanted to hire me left the company, prompting on HR friend to ask me if I'd stop being his friend.
In the end it came down to Georgia-Pacific, a job that when I first applied for I didn't really consider but mainly wanted to get on the Georgia-Pacific radar for future opportunities. Then I interviewed and visited the plant in Mississippi and really liked the possibilities. I told MG, "I wish this job were in Birmingham. It would be my first choice."
Then, it became my first choice. My only choice. What I believe is the "right" choice.
The house: we'd tried to sell the house three years ago and had a contract on it, but the contract fell through. Lately, given all that had happened over the past year, we'd talked about whether we should sell. We loved the house; we'd gutted and rebuilt it to MG's specifications. Our kids basically grew up in that house. But after The Accident and with my travel schedule, the house was looking too big.
So one day, out of the blue, we get a call from a real estate agent who had a client who wanted our house. I said, "here's the price, take it as is, take it or leave it." They took it. I'd always heard stories like that and thought them too good to be true.
So we began to move back to the house we'd kept in Cahaba Heights, that we'd been renting out. It has taken a lot of work, and it's not finished, but thankfully we had a place to go. We have been trying to cram 10 years of stuff into a house half the size of the one we left. It's been a sacrifice on the kids. But it's a great house. A great location. We were happy there before and I believe we can be happy there again for as long as we choose to live there.
Surgery: In the midst of all of that, MG had hip replacement. After the accident, when her pelvis was broken on all four sides (if a pelvis can have four sides) and the left hip shattered ("like an egg wrapped in duct tape smashed by a hammer" said the doctor), the hope was the orthopedist had put things back together to get maybe 10 years out of that hip before MG would need a replacement. A replacement hip was never a matter of "if" but ''when,'' and since January it was clear the "when" was "sooner rather than later."
It was disappointing, because in the fall MG was really doing (relatively) well. She was walking and doing physical therapy and even some exercises to strengthen her core. We saw a doctor in St. Louis who still believes she can make MG's drop foot better.
Understand, I'm a pessimist because down deep I'm a hopeless optimist who is terrified that if I give voice to my optimism I'll jinx it. But the truth is, from the day MG came out of the coma, I believed that in a year she'd be fine.
Then a year came and went, and she was not fine. In fact, her condition had regressed (primarily because of the hip). April was particularly hard for both of us. The reality hit both of us that this might be as good as it was going to get.
But we found a terrific surgeon who was experienced in putting artificial hips into patients with injuries like MG's, into a pelvis loaded with screws and plates. And the blessing was that when it was over, Dr. Moore told us that he hadn't even had to cut into any metal, and there was enough bone left so that if MG should ever need another replacement - if this hip should ever wear out - there was room to do another one.
Did the surgery make things better? You'd have to ask MG. I think the pain in her hip was certainly relieved, but the real problem is her lower back. The doctors have told us that her pelvis was put back together as well as humanly possible, but it wasn't put together the way God created it. All we could do was - as it says at the end of the Count of Monte Cristo - "wait and hope."
And I know we are people of hope.
I still wonder why. I still wonder why things haven't been worse. I still feel incredibly blessed - to still have The Trophy Wife with me, for my kids, to have a home, and to have a job I enjoy. I know so many people who have lost some or all of the above, so why we should be so fortunate ... I can only call it a "God thing."
Let me try to sum up some of what I've learned about God through this: I have known God was not a jack-in-the-box kind of God that just pops up by surprise at appropriate times in my turn-the-handle life. But over the last year, I've discovered what so many Old Testament writers seemed to say: that God is a wild thing, unpredictable, sometimes showing up with a roar and other times in the faintest whisper,
In the book of Jeremiah God says "I will surely save you" (30:10). That doesn't mean He doesn't allow us to get to the brink, or even at times feel like we've gone over the brink. The Children of Israel (to whom God was speaking in Jeremiah) certainly had gone over the brink a number of times. But God was/is faithful.
Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying "I am convinced (God) does not play dice." There is no gamble involved. He will surely save His people.
How?
God knows.
And as frustrating as that may be for me, at the end of the day that's about the best I've got.
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