John Grogan - Life Is Like a Sailboat: Selected Writings on Life and Living from The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Table of Contents

Coming Homeand Moving On

The young woman waits just beyond the security checkpoint, craning her neck as disembarking passengers approach.

She is small and birdlike with short brown hair and a pretty, unadorned face that shows her emotions plain as a roadmap. She reminds me of a startled fawn, all senses on high alert.

I am waiting for a flight in the tiny airport in Columbus, Georgia, near the Alabama border. Columbus is home to the armys sprawling Fort Benning, a major deployment point for U.S. troops abroad. Soldiers are everywhere, coming and going. They stream through the security exit in their standard-issue camouflage.

The woman rises on tiptoes and looks past every one of them. Then she sees him, the soldier she has been waiting for. He spots her at almost the same instant and rushes forward.

He drops his duffel and pulls her into his arms. She surrenders without protest. They are blocking foot traffic. They do not care. They do not seem to even notice. They are lost in each other.

I wonder where he has arrived fromIraq? Afghanistan?and how long he has been gone. What is obvious is it has been too long.

A Silent Embrace

They hug silently for the longest time, rocking slightly on their feet, her face buried in his chest.

No words. None needed.

A full minute rolls by, and still they stand together in silent embrace. Finally, he pulls back and takes her face in his hands. And then they are kissing. Kissing like high school kids in the parking lot on prom night.

It is hard not to stare, not because of the scenes prurience but because of its beauty. A soldier has come home in one piece and this is his homecoming. In the age of the scripted media event, I have stumbled upon just the opposite: real Americans in the real America.

For most of us, Americas warrior class remains comfortably out of sight. We go about our busy lives as the warriors fight and those who love them wait and worry.

We vaguely keep track of the bleak numbersmore than three thousand Americans killed, thousands more maimed and wounded, tens of thousands deployed halfway around the globe.

Yet it hardly seems real. Watching the couple, there is no denying reality.

As they kiss, the womans shoulders begin to heave, and you can tell she is crying. Her soldier pulls back, wipes her cheeks with his hands and grins as if to say, What are you crying for, silly girl? Im home now.

He tosses his duffel over his shoulder and wraps his other arm around his girl. She leans against him, her towering oak. Through the glass doors, they disappear into the sunshine.

Welcome home, soldier.

A New Chapter

And now, a personal note.

Like that soldier stepping off the plane into another life, Im stepping out of one role and into another. Today is my last as an Inquirer staff columnist. I am hanging up column writing to concentrate full time on book projects.

Publisher Brian Tierney and my editors want you to know that I was not a casualty of layoffs or cutbacks or any other fate. The decision was mine alone.

Those of you who have been following the last fifteen months of my life, in the wake of the surprise success of my book Marley & Me, know Ive been trying to juggle essentially two full-time jobs, travel, and a family, not always very well. The bottom line: I am spread too thin.

There is another reason, albeit a secondary one: I love newspapers, especially this one. I believe in their value and future. But I dont know if I have the fortitude to stomach the dramatic cutbacks they are being forced to make in order to survive.

Thats not to say I wont try to drop in occasionally with a guest commentary. I also invite you to visit my blog at www.marleyandme.com.

A writer without readers is not quite whole. You, Inquirer readers, have blessed me with the kind of audience every columnist covets: smart, opinionated, engaged. Right from the start, when I arrived here in 2002, you made me feel welcome. Many of you have come to be my friends.

Thank you for inviting me into your homes, your lives, and, on the best days, your hearts. It has been an honor.

Have a Litter-Less Little Christmas

I have good news for the Bag Lady of Roxborough. She is not alone.

Diane Bones is not really a bag lady. She is an employed, proud resident of the citys Roxborough section. But she is sometimes mistaken for a scavenger because of her habit of picking up trash along Ridge Avenue.

I called Bones a one-woman anti-litter campaign. I now know thats not the case. In the two weeks since I wrote about her, I have heard from dozens of like-minded eco-citizens who take it upon themselves to bend over and clean up after societys slovenly piggies.

Theyre fighting back one beer can, one cigarette pack, at a time.

I heard from Jonathan Haight of Downingtown, who reported: As a member of a town-home community, I spend part of each week cleaning up around the court. Sometimes my neighbors laugh at me and call me crazy. I told one group of boys to pick up some chip bags they had dropped, and one just looked at me and said I was a litter-freak.

Jonathan, I hope you replied, Youre right, I am. Now pick it up before I rub your nose in it.

I heard from Joseph McCloskey, who wrote: I am from Fox Chase, and I have been attending to the ritual of disposing litter during walks. I instruct my children that if you see trash, pick it up and take pride in your community.

Trash Attracts Trash

And from Alan Warren, who has been making daily litter pickups around his Chester County neighborhood since he retired eight years ago: One of my motivations is the belief that trash attracts trash, he said.

There was Pauline Rosenberg from Filthadelphia, as she heard a visitor call it, who wrote: I do the same in Overbrook but with something called a grabber, which you can get in a hardware store and allows you to pick up trash without bending over or dirtying your hands.

Judy Rubin cant pass by trash in her Mount Airy neighborhood without scooping it up. She commented: Imagine the revenue the city would take in if it enforced the litter laws. I took a picture of a pole that had a sign, $300 fine for littering. Around the pole was trash a mile high!

M. G. Phipps of Manayunk, frustrated by the citys refusal to replace a trash can that had disappeared from a neighborhood park, began tying a trash bag to the park fence, and changing it as needed.

Before moving recently, Allison McCool adopted four blocks around her home in the Fox Chase section of the city. I wore thick gloves and wasnt afraid to pick up the broken glass or yucky items. I would keep going until my large trash bag was full. The local 7-Eleven allowed me to put the full bag into their bin.

Fighting Back

Boris Weinstein, seventy-five, of Pittsburgh, has dedicated much of his retirement to keeping forty blocks of his city litter-free. Weinstein began alone, and now has seventy volunteers scouring the streets daily. As he put it, People who care must pick up for people who dont care.

Inspired by this army of do-gooders, I decided to give it a try.

As I headed out on a walk the other day, I spotted a plastic shopping bag in the weeds. Picked it up. Then began filling it. I scoured a stretch of road about the length of a football field. Heres what I nabbed:

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