Uncovered Treasures

Walking along the cool, sapphire waters of the Pacific. Sunshine glistening on the waves. Sea treasures - oysters, starfish, mussels, sponges, anemones - uncovered by the low tide.

I'm with a friend I met the day we flew to Haiti. Sarah had stayed in Port-au-Prince to run a clinic set up at an orphanage after the earthquake. This is the first time we've seen each other since hugging goodbye under a mango tree.

"Part of it is closure," she says of coming to see our team in California.  Like a book you can't put down, we struggle to close this chapter.

We went to the disaster zone expecting to feel the ache of death and despair.  Instead, for some of us Haiti became a place of rebirth.

"Haiti awakened something inside me," our friend, Kezia tries to explain. "My life hasn't really been the same since."

Sitting under the mango tree at base camp, I'd told Kezia she was meant to be a storyteller, a desire she'd buried long ago. In Haiti she'd let it stir in her heart again. "I felt like I'd been given permission to dream," she said. 

Closed doors. disappointments. failures...our dreams had become ghosts - until Haiti.

Sarah described Haiti as a place "where hugs were bandaids, hands became hope and a song bonded souls." It felt selfish to be with victims who lost so much only to find a song in our souls.

I, too, had abandoned myself to the song.  At times I was a writer, at times a nurse's aide, at times an orphan's playmate.  Limitations were removed. 

I struggle to find words. Kezia does it for me.

"Not being able to express yourself speaks of something new happening inside you. You are letting His purposes be worked out rather than making it fit a model you've seen before," she says. "That is trust."

Walking along the shore, I want to ask Sarah, "It's ok to keep the treasure we found in Haiti, right?"  But words are lost among the riches uncovered by the changing tide.

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Storytellers

It's an overused but true saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Every TV writer's heard a million times, "Write to video." 

I know when I truly got what that means.

I'd written a lead story about an illegal, multistate puppy mill ring. Our news director tore up my script. 

"See these images?" he said, cuing up shots of sad puppies whimpering behind chain link fencing. "Start here. Then go into this sound bite."

He showed me how to turn a good story into an extraordinary one; not being exploitive but using the full impact of the visual medium.  

He also gave me my first big breaks: the anchor desk, top story live shots (threatening to fire me if I screwed up), network stories.

He could be a tyrant, too. When a childhood friend's mom died, he told me not to come back if I left during a critical news time. I walked out, driving six hours in a blizzard to get to the funeral.

He called a few days later demanding to know why I wasn't at work. "You fired me," I said. "Show up," he said. It was his way of saying, "You're still on the team." 

That year we took the station to first in the ratings for the first time in 40 years.

He was fiercely competitive but taught me to use that drive to dig beyond surface facts. He denied me only one title: war correspondent. Despite the risk, I'd wanted to cover history from Iraq's frontlines.

Eventually I'd go to the frontlines of war zones of a different kind - inner cities, disaster zones, Haiti...

Storytellers.  We see the risk, but we also see the chance to tell history. See those images? Start there.

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Champions

Maria Peterson Photography

My childhood friend, Stello, came to visit and we got to talking about junior high. We can remember our first crushes but for the life of us we can't remember why we started calling eachother by our last names - and still do.

We played soccer a lot back then. We can still recall our team's starting lineup:  Stello, me, Missy, Ruthie, Pam...

An undefeated season took us to the district championships against our biggest rival. Coach kept us starters in the whole game but the score stayed tied at zero.  Exhausted, we faced a kickoff.

Each of us remembers that game a little differently. Stello, at center, was held scoreless at the front line. I missed a penalty kick, something that hadn't happened all season. Our goalie let a ball dribble by her. 

And our rival? Well, they made one lousy kickoff point.

We'd bawled unashamedly. We hadn't played just to win a title or to impress a boy on the sidelines. We had played for eachother. I had wanted my teammates to be champions more than I had wanted it for myself and they had wanted the same for me. 

But in the end we'd fallen short. Our season was over.

"Why do we still care about a soccer game so long ago?" I asked Stello before she left.  She thought awhile and then wrote in my notes, "What would the world be like if we cared more about the other's success than our own?"

So decades later defeat finally lost its sting as we imagined a world that looked like it did back on that soccer field.  First crushes included, of course.

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