The Lay-Off

Nineteen years ago in December, I began playing APBA's baseball game. After 21 years prior of playing the company's other games - football, basketball and hockey - I felt it was finally time to try out APBA's most popular product.

Eight months earlier I began work as the northeast Arkansas bureau correspondent for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It was a good time in my life. I had a good, stable, reputable job and a new hobby.

I began work at the newspaper a month after two children pulled a fire alarm at the Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Ark., and fatally shot four students and a teacher as they exited the school building. It was the biggest story I'd ever cover and I competed with national media. It was nerve-wracking and stressful, but I held my ground and realized I could do that job.

I began replaying the 1998 baseball season on Dec., 28, 1998, replicating the steroid-laced home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. McGwire ended up hitting 77 home runs in my game, I recall. The Yankees beat the Braves in seven games in my World Series.

The newspaper and game became synonymous. When the stress of work got too much, I found the game provided a relaxing escape, a respite from the bad news I'd seen during the day.

The newspaper and the game. One of those venues ended recently. It wasn't the game.

On Oct. 24, the powers-that-be at the newspaper decided to lay off 27 people. I was one of them. In the declining economic world of journalism, the employees cut were seen as financial burdens, not enhancers. My editor drove from Little Rock to Jonesboro and sat outside the office that morning waiting for me. I was surprised to see him, but more surprised, of course, when he told me why he had come.

Nineteen and a half years gone in a blink. The editor took my laptop and company-provided cell phone and within about three hours of my notification, I was out. I was stunned, lost, confused.

The paper was really all I had and was the only identity I knew. When my wife died in 2006, I returned to work three days after her funeral- too soon, I later realized - but only to try to regain some sense of routine and normalcy. Now, that routine was shattered.

The next morning, for the first time in nearly two decades, I didn't have anywhere to go. I went through the five stages of grief identified by Kubler-Ross: Anger, Denial, Depression, Bargaining and Acceptance. I wavered among them, mostly depression and anger.

I realized, though, that the 26 others who were laid off also felt the same. And there've been so many more over the years. Hundreds of newspaper reporters all cut because of finances. It's a dying business. The paper was in my driveway the following morning. Life was going on; the paper still came out despite my absence; I was a blip, there and gone in its history.

I filed for unemployment a week later on Halloween, which was fitting. "Trick or Treat. Give me something good to live on." Holly had gone back to Illinois to visit her mother that week and I slunk home alone that evening, avoiding the trick or treaters that proliferated the neighborhood. I didn't want to see them at the door; the only difference between them and me was that the horror on their faces were masks. Mine was my own.

But, like APBA game players do so often, I returned to the game for the only semblance of peace I could find. That first night, while worrying what I was going to do next, I rolled a few games in my 1991 baseball replay. Boston beat Baltimore, 8-7, despite two home runs from Orioles' DH Sam Horn. The Red Sox won it in the eighth when Wade Boggs doubled in shortstop Luis Rivera. And Pittsburgh edged Montreal, 3-1, continuing the Expos' woes as the worst team in the replay and dropping them to a record of 21-52.

I'm looking for a new job now, but I also keep playing the game, I resurrected this blog, perhaps, as a way to still feel a writing deadline of sorts. I've not completely stepped away from the keyboard. I've also written some pieces for magazines and I had a thing published recently in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. And I covered a first-degree murder trial as a stringer for the very paper that dumped me a few weeks ago. Wells Fargo Home Mortgage doesn't care where the house payment comes from as long as it is made, I've found.

So, I seek employment in this area and contemplate moving somewhere else if necessary and feel lost. But the game, the APBA dice and cards game, provides at least once thing that is stable and lasting.