Dear Ken,

As reporters, we're quite aware that everybody views the same event through the distortions of their owns lens. So it is that when you have introduced me as the person who gave you your first job in journalism, as if I'd bestowed a great gift upon you, I invariably shrug. Just as Ray Owen would if I said the same of him. He needed someone to do a job, just as I did. The best anyone can do for anyone else is show a little faith.

Besides, maybe I didn't do you any favor. The idealists in journalism are destined to get their hearts broken from time to time.

We've had dissimilar careers, my hopsctoching the country from job to job, never staying long enough to get weighed down with too much responsibility. I have quit three jobs without knowing what I would do next, only that leaving was the right thing to do. I have, painfully, left people the same way.

You, more comfortable with responsibility perhaps, have proved the worth of staying power. You had a lot of people who remain behind through some difficult terrain over the years. I wasn't there for the most part, but saw the result: a good newspaper.

No doubt I am saying here some of the same things others have said in person. Had I been at your farewell party I would have hoisted a glass to your integrity and talent, to the drollest of observes of the human predicament, to the pleasure of receiving hard truths coated in your soft delta drawl, to a superlative writer and selfless champion of other writers.

We have little idea how the arc of our lives will look once our arthritic fingers no longer can command a keyboard. Maybe you will be reborn in some unforeseen way, become a Royals fan, set to work on a Ph.D. You are a born journalist but you have taught others much by example. Others will learn from the course you choose. I know now some of their names.

Sometimes I think expectations are the source of all disappointment in life. We should give them up for Lent and just let them go forever. Forrest Gump's mother likens life to a box of chocolates -- you never know what you're going to get.

If you like chocolate, you can't go wrong.

The only expectation I've known to be valid is that circumstances will change. And that the great void will provide something that, with perspective, turns out to be just what you need.

It was faith, in the future I guess, that allowed me to leave jobs and loved ones. It's expressed in some lines, magically suspended on my refrigerator door, by that greatest of all writers, Anonymous.

"When you have come to the edge

of all the light you know,

And are about to step off

into the darkness of the unknown,

Faith is knowing

one of two things will happen:

There will be something solid to stand on,

or you will be taught how to fly."

Sure, it's a little melty around the edges. Chocolate usually is.

Sam