Back from the Dead

Even in a digital age, most newspaper copy is ephemeral, destined for the recycling bin. I’ve written thousands of stories, millions of words, and most have effectively evaporated. My hard-copy files are increasingly brown and brittle, and I’m weighing whether to weed them before our move to Seattle.

A kind reader surprised me with a link to one of my stories dating from around 1996. It was published in The Daily Gazette, in Schenectady, N.Y., where I worked from 1994 to 1999. It’s a feature about the largest collection of film scripts in the world, housed in the New York State Museum in Albany, N.Y. Rereading the story felt like visiting a ghost – one who didn’t embarrass me too much.