A millennium ago, when a senior in high school

A millennium ago, when a senior in high school, my senior class prophecy was that I would anchor the evening news. More specifically, as a personal goal, was to be behind the anchor desk at a much earlier hour for NBC’s Today Show, despite what might be described as a face for radio and a deep dislike of 3AM alarm clocks. This week, with a twinkle in my eye and a nod to yesteryear, I sat down to watch Apple TV’s The Morning Show. While the series’ initial run began in 2019, I’ve looked at the show with some hesitancy.  Entertainment has forgotten its “feel good” qualities, and knowing that the premise would be mildly political, revolving around the #MeToo movement, I decided to choose peace over modernity’s chaos and division. So, I waited to watch. It didn’t take long to feel the tingle of my would-be home.  I was immediately sucked into the competitive world of the broadcast medium. In fact, I was a bit giddy.  While my life and career have seen a multitude of turns, the bends of failures and successes, few have actually entailed broadcasting, an extravaganza of mass communications that I fell in love with  as a young boy, built – it must have been – by all those mornings with Bryant Gumbel and Joan Lunden, Katie Couric  and Charlie Gibson drinking in morning television with my maternal grandparents. The idea of it, as a career path, took a few and major unexpected turns, though I managed to be the HAY98 School News anchor during high school and survived the newsroom on the campus of the University of the Cumberlands. At one point, desperately wanting to toss aside the anchor chair – in some Jane Pauley/Deborah Norville explosive recast – to  be a war correspondent and chase bombs and gunfire across foreign soil. It all seemed rousing and exciting.

As years pass, we begin to realize that time is a wicked friend and some dreams slip further and further from our reach; something that, I’d contend, is a reality for all of us, on and off air, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t still appeal to me and make my heart pump and adrenaline roar. Unbeknownst to him, the four year old sitting glued to Good Morning America had found something that made him feel alive; that would provide in him an innate feeling that is both unconquerable and indescribable. A television camera has the power to make your heart flutter with excitement.  When the light goes on, it’s a sudden test of will.  In an instant, you sink or you swim. As summer vacation slinks into the inevitable and millions of kids go back to school and think about their own futures, that would be my advice: strive for something that does that for you. Adjust your sails when necessary, as life’s winds inevitably blow you to and fro, but stay the course and chase the dream. In the end, the walls of small towns and naysaying minds, from which “can’t” so often springs, are meant to be shattered by aspirations so large their levies cannot hold.

“Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it, too,” reminded the legendary Diane Sawyer. “Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.”