Old Bill Miller
In last night’s dream I had started a new job at The Missourian, at my present age, more or less—returning to my first real job. Back where I started after a life in the outside world.
The Missourian was now a large company employing a whole new generation of newspaper people. My editor, Bill Miller, was very old now, and had suffered significant cognitive decline. He lived in the Missourian building and wore pajamas all day. He would wander around the office, starting conversations on odd topics, an emeritus member of the company, always treated with respect, but cuckoo.
My sister Kathy had started working there shortly before, but because of my newspaper experience, she was hoping I would be the one to help her find a footing in the new workplace. But I was having my own uphill battle. I couldn’t remember what I needed to know about picas and inches, about font sizes, about the rules of capitalization in headlines. So I was asking a lot of questions myself, of this new generation of journalists. It seemed to me that half the time their answers were wrong. I wasn’t sure, because my memory of the technicalities was dim, but it seemed to me this modern-day staff lacked the training and rigor of the old time. I had a sick feeling that journalism had declined into something almost not professional or journalistic at all. That I might have waited too long to show the world a second time what a journalist I am.
I wanted to get a moment with Bill, to share a fond greeting with my old boss, to thank him for hiring me the first time and for hiring me again. It was hard to get an audience, because he was always in a crowd, entertaining the young people with various odd enthusiasms. Bill had become much more talkative and recreational since our time of working together. He wasn’t all news and short sentences now. He would go around the place expounding at length, laughing with pleasure, on various odd theories and pseudo-facts. It was sad and it was charming. It was life continuing on.
As I caught him coming towards me in a hallway, I extended my hand.
“Hello, Bill. Just wanted to say thanks for bringing me back on.”
He was shorter than he used to be, by a foot or more. He was dressed in the pajamas I mentioned above. His face was older. But he was otherwise the Bill I remembered, white haired and distinguished and genial. He said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are.”’
It was disappointing, but for goodness sake, he was very old now. Thirty years beyond middle age. I had hoped to experience a miracle of timelessness, a reunion of two younger selves. It had been more wish than hope. “Tom Beaver, Union News Reporter from the mid-80s,” I said.
“Oh, Tom! Nice to see you again!”
It was happening! The Bill of old. The sharp newspaperman alertness, the modest smile, the mentor graciousness. And he did remember. His expression, frankly pleased, fully the Bill I had known, was proof that my young self had remained for nearly half a lifetime in this other human mind. The thrill of it is with me even now, though I’m awake, though I only dreamt it.
But the lucidness only lasted for, what—three seconds? Then a different Bill Miller came to the surface, blotting out that flicker of the old one, physically remaking him. In an instant he shrank to toy size, becoming a kind of box with a spring on the bottom, and shooting all around the hallway, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a ballistic jack-in-the-box out of its casing. As this dehumanized Bill Miller popped about, it made loony sound effects with its mouth—similar to the zany sounds of a pinball machine. Bill Miller had gone insane, and passed beyond ordinary aging into a physical cartoon. It was grotesque. And heartbreaking.
This took place in the old Missourian building, which I had the dreamlike pleasure of wakingly touring last fall before the new owners gutted and remade it. Because The Missourian no longer exists in that building. It sold itself, I mean its location, after more than half a century downtown, and moved to a unit in the industrial park, a step towards non-existence. And Bill is no longer editor. Two years back (in actuality) there was a kind of local revolution, in which a little mob of left-wing radicals and some of Bill’s children joined forces to oust him from his editorship; indeed, from the company, for his hard swing to an idiotic variety of conservative of politics—the culmination being his choice to publish a blatantly racist editorial cartoon. Bill had gone loony in real life, too. I had missed my long-contemplated chance to visit my first post-college employer, my first professional mentor, in the office space where we’d served together. Missed that chance to thank him and reminisce with him on hallowed ground. To sit across from him again at his lifelong desk in that upstairs space we reporters and editors inhabited all those days and nights in the 80s, in the heady years of my 20s, practically living there, astronauts of a special kind in our low-orbit space station, making our quick trips down to the planet and its towns, then coming back up to write and submit our not quite vital but still important reports, heroes in that adventure.