The 500th Column
Ok, that headline was just to get your attention as this is not the 500th column. It’s actually the 504th since I started numbering the columns. And I only started numbering them 10 years ago so this is likely column six hundred something.
That’s a lot of
columns. And a lot of words. A safe estimate of the number of words in all the
published columns is about 250,000 - 300,000 words. I should have written a
book instead. Although, in more than 10 years I still wrote less than half of
the words Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace so maybe not. Boy, he must have had a
great laptop battery.
I didn’t think the
Daddy Days column would make it this long. Partly because the quantity of
diaper and poop jokes in the early years was excessive (albeit an accurate
representation of what was going on in our house) and also because I didn’t
think I would keep writing the column after our oldest hit 13.
Honestly, I never
thought I would write this column at all.
When I was in
college I took a journalism class and had the opportunity to go to the Austin
American-Statesman newsroom. I ended up shadowing legendary Statesman columnist
John Kelso for part of the day. After hanging out with him and reading some of
his columns I knew what I wanted to do after graduating college.
And then I
promptly didn’t do that.
It turns out
newspapers don’t hire smart aleck graduates to full time jobs writing humor
columns. They do sometimes reach out to professors at local colleges and ask if
they have any students or graduates that may want to write a guest column or
two though. And when Professor Oskam at Texas State University armed me with a
recommendation and the contact info for the then editor of the Round Rock
Leader — I reached out to offer my services.
He gave me the
option to write about whatever I wanted and I sent in my first Daddy Days
column a few days later. I just kept sending him columns and in a couple years
the column went from a once or twice a month thing to a weekly column. One fun
fact (yeah, you should hear that in the semi-pedantic quasi-annoying sing-song
tone of a seasoned dad) is that none of the Daddy Days columns has ever been an
assigned topic. I’ve (my kids) have been generating the content and I’ve just
been sending it in with no direction. Perhaps in more way than one.
I don’t know how
much longer Daddy days will continue to run before I run out of gas, my editor runs
out of patience, or I make enough readers mad. But for now I plan to keep
chugging along.