Catching Up

A lot has happened over the last few years.

The Trophy Wife and I just celebrated our 26th Anniversary. Our daughter is getting married this summer. The Heir graduated college with honors and is looking at law school. The Young Prince is in college.

That's amazing, given what the last four years have been like, adjusting to the "new normal" of our lives post-accident. But it also reminds us that no matter what events happen that consume us, or that seems to require all of our focus and energy, or that pushes everything else into the background - life does go on.

Which is good. All these "normal" things of celebrations and weddings and graduations and such don't stop, and they shouldn't. Oh, when you're in the middle of something that changes your life forever (on so many ways), you may not get to enjoy those "normal" things as much as you'd like. On the other hand, maybe those "normal" things take on more significance because they are escapes - reminders, if you will, of other times.

In the past four years, I have lived in Gulfport. Then it seems like I spent most of a year living in the Hyatt Regency Superdome in New Orleans. Then I changed jobs and wound up with an apartment in Brookhaven, Mississippi. We sold our house in Birmingham because it looked like we'd never get back there, and The Trophy Wife moved to take care of her father the last year or so while he was dying of cancer.

And then, I got a call that brought me back to Birmingham to work; my father-in-law passed away (sad, but what a relief for him); and suddenly The Trophy Wife and I were back together on a daily basis, living in Birmingham. I have to say, as much as I loved the Gulf Coast (and I did), and particularly the people of Mississippi (which I really enjoyed), every weekend that I'd drive back to Birmingham (when I did) and I hit those rolling hills and see the trees and terrain, it just felt like home.

I know Leo the Dog was happy. He was living with me in Mississippi, and on weekends we'd load up the car for the drive to St. Louis, where The Trophy Wife was living and taking care of her father. It got where every Friday it got harder and harder to get Leo in the car for the trip (of course, his being almost 15-years-old may have had something to do with that). Or maybe that's me projecting, and it just got harder and harder for me to leave the South. I have always known I was a Southern boy, for better or worse, and belong with my feet planted on the red clay of Georgia or the black dirt of the Mississippi delta or the rock-hard hills of central Alabama.

And I needed to get back with TW (as I'll refer to the Trophy Wife). She'd had, at last count, nine surgeries in three years. The last was one of the hardest - a tendon transfer to alleviate the drop-foot that was a result of the accident. It required her to basically be on her back for three months, in a boot, with her leg elevated. That lack of activity set her back in all the other ways she'd moved forward in three years of physical therapy and exercise. It was one of the hardest times since the first year after the accident.

So it was truly an answer to prayer that I was offered the chance to come home. I'm not a sportswriter or sports journalist anymore, and it's always funny when people see me and I get that look like, "Didn't you used to be ...?" It's amazing how many people will say, "I watch you on The Zone all the time,'' and when I say I haven't been on The Zone in four years, they can't believe it. That's the power of TV, though. I have a good friend who left the local Birmingham TV market in the 1980s, and 10 years later he'd be in town and somebody would yell out, "Hey, great show last night" or "I watch you all the time!"

I quit writing this blog, too. I didn't quit writing, but just quit posting stuff here. Don't ask me why. In some respects, I was blown away by the response I received from writing about the ordeal with The Trophy Wife, by the incredible numbers of people who read it every day, who contacted me to talk about what we were going through, from seeing that people in Russia and Germany and Indonesia and other far-off places were reading daily (13 people in, of all places, Germany?) I started feeling like if I started writing about other stuff, I would be letting people down. The journey of recovery was not over, the "new normal" of our lives continues to change even now, but one time the TW said, "I don't want to be known as that woman who had the accident." She is so much more than that, and always has been and continues to be even now.

Or maybe I just got lazy.

But I did have a few friends who told me they had been reading my blog before the accident, enjoyed it, and urged me to continue. So I'm going to try. Besides, what's one more blog in a universe - blogosphere - where everybody has a blog? Just one more voice in a sea of words, written and spoken, that allow us to live in this new age of information isolation (we can ignore what we don't want to read or hear and just look for the stuff that agrees with us).

I saw where 60 percent of millennials get their news from Facebook. That shocked me, because I'd heard Facebook was only for old people now (same poll said 30 percent of Baby Boomers, of which I am one, say Facebook is now their primary source of news).

That's scary. But it's also, I believe, part of the reason why society is changing so rapidly. A "movement" that used to take months or years to gain steam and impact the far corners of the country can now pick up steam overnight. Think of the social changes of the past decade (good or bad). Internet media is driven by "clicks" (the number of times their site and their stories are 'clicked' on by readers). That rewards outrageous or outlandish or just plan bizarre stories. I'm not saying journalists were ever impartial, but way back when we did have gatekeepers that judged what was 'newsworthy' and what wasn't; what was worth telling in the limited amount of time (broadcast) or space (newspaper)that media was allowed. Now, time and space are limitless on the world wide web. So no opinion or story or idea is un-newsworthy, particularly if it can get a 'click.'

I attended a high school graduation the other day. It occurred to me that this generation has access to more information than any in the history of mankind, but that this generation has been lied to more than any previous generation, too. And it will catch up to them.

We used to value truth as an absolute. Even if we weren't sure what it was, we knew there was some objective truth out there that was universal. Unfortunately, more and more it seems people want to argue that nothing is "universal'' and there are no absolutes (which I believe there are). Our educators preach teaching "critical thinking skills,'' but it seems they do a much better job teaching "critical" than "thinking."

As George Orwell once said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."

We have to learn what is the truth, if for no other reason than it's the only way we can learn to do what is right.