This 2025 is marks the first time my wife Amy and I have been together for the begning of the new year for 20 straight years. Oh, we habe been married for 45 years but holidays, annivrfsrties or birthdays were often missed because one oo the other o fus wer somewherw else on those days.
Often, I was somewhere else in the world covering news, often in violent places. Sometimes, we managed to celebrate New Year on the road together, like London, where the celebrations at Piccadilly Circus made the madness in Tiomes Squate in Manhattan feel like a church social.
One year, I called her from Manila in the Philipines, where the New Year arrived just before i climbed on a plane to head home and we crossed the International Date Line and arrived at Dulles International Airport in Washington just before New Year arrived in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, 13 hours after I watched it in the Philipines.
Sometimes, Amu would be away from home directing a play or participant in events like celebrating the works of director Lee Strasberg. Her life in entertainment gave her exciting times.
I kept a “go bag” of camera equipment, an updated passport and prroof of vacinations in one pocket to respond to phone calls for much of my 50 years as a newspaperman and photojournalist. When left Washington in 2004 for qhat we thought would be a quieter life in the mountains in Southwestern Virginia, it was awakened one morning by a phone call from an assignment editor in Washington, asking if iIwas close enough to Virginia tTech to cover a shooter that became a massacre.
I’ve also shot video of hurricanes abd violent weather in North Carolina for CNN and MSNBC, political candidates for TV stations ad cable networks and of academic sports at high schools and colleges.
But I was home for holidays, birthdays anniversaries and New Years. Most of my days away form home have been in hospitals as a patient for a bad motorcycle accident in 2011 and the past years abd a half because of a wound that had trouble healting.
Covid closed down much of my work on news events and what I cover now iis some part-time work for our local paper, not as a job but as a contribution to the community.
However, the go back remains in the closet…just in case.
1 thought on “Twenty years of staying home from assignments”
Doug, you’re not acquainted with me though your grandmother, Aunt Zella McPeake and my Dad, Waitman C. Keith were brother and sister, thru social media I have learned a lot about you and your adventurous life. A bit about me: I am Brenda, the oldest daughter, I loved your grandmother dearly, she was so kind to us growing up, I have a healthy curiosity on family history but I know little about my dads side of the family, being he married later in life (34), most of his siblings were making their own by then-just want to wish you and yours well~
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