This is my last column for the Duluth News Tribune. The newspaper has decided it wants to feature other voices on this page. So be it.
The metrics are interesting -- at least to me. I was 34 years old when I started this column. Now, I am 68. So I have been writing this column for half my lifetime. The columns average about 600 words each, and I averaged about 50 a year. That produces about 30,000 words per year. In 34 years, it amounts to some 1,020,000 words.
The infamously long Russian novel "War and Peace" contains 560,000 words in English translation. So total word count of these columns is a few less than "War and Peace" doubled. No wonder they made Tolstoy a count.
Lots of words, lots of fun, sometimes lots of struggle to come up with ideas. Many people have asked where I get my ideas, and I always say the same thing: "In the shower." Some showed it -- all wet.
But so many readers over the years have been supportive, writing me, coming up to me on the street, calling, e-mailing. They have no idea how gratifying that has been, and I thank them.
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Before I depart these pages, I should sew up a few loose ends, one of them involving mean, old Blanche, always identified as the little big woman at our house who sat around all day in a recliner wearing a muu-muu, smoking cigarettes and munching munchies. I still frequently get asked what became of Blanche.
Blanche drowned several years ago in a sea of political correctness. But she had a great sendoff. She was carried off in a coffin that resembled a package of Virginia Slims and hoisted onto a flatbed truck with a forklift driven by a guy in a tuxedo borrowed from a symphony contrabassoon player. There wasn't a wet eye in the crowd when the crane lowered her into her final resting place, the kids being in the penitentiary.
Then there's the Ethnic Editor -- that's me. I have always been proud to be the dean of Twin Ports ethnic editors, but we are a dying breed. With the newspaper industry in decline, I doubt that an ethnic editor will be appointed to succeed me. It means, of course, that our good Northland Swedes will have to defend themselves against the slings and arrows of those uppity Norwegians without any help from me. Lots of luck.
Finally, I sign off with the last two verses of a poem I wrote years ago that turned out to be the most popular column of all 1,700 of them. It was called "Cooler Near the Lake," which needs no elaboration. Here's how it ended:
I know the day is coming when
The real God's country beckons,
And when St. Peter meets me there,
He'll ask my home,
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I reckon.
And when I tell him it's Duluth,
He'll say, "For heaven's sake,
Ain't that the place everyone says
Is cooler near the lake?"
"That's it," I'll cry, "oh kindly saint,
And in this realm please spare,
From chilly off-lake breezes,
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And winter underwear."
"If it's heat you want," he'll reply,
"In the other place you'll bake."
"Fine, send me any place except
Where it's cooler near the lake."
Amen.
E-mail Jim Heffernan at vheffernan@earthlink.net . To read previous columns go to duluth newstribune.com.
