Farewell for a short while …
My New Year’s plan is to take a break from the nearly five years of writing “Memo from the Middle.”
Allow me to me tell you why I’m taking a short time away, in the hope you’ll understand the reasons for my absence. I plan to return soon to doing a Sunday column for the Reno Gazette Journal — and in so doing, hearing from many of you on your thoughts about the political issues of the time we live in, and the fascinating people that make up the place we inhabit, Nevada.
My reason for taking time away is to write a book I’ve wanted to do for a long time. My wife and I are nearing our 50th wedding anniversary, and I want my gift to her to be the love story of our relationship for these past five decades together. Having left her country of South Korea to be here with me in mine, I’m titling the book: “Myung-Hee — Her American Life.”
This seems like the best time for me to finish such a project.
After all, 2024 was a very long year — longer and more eventful than some of us may wish to remember. There were certainly plenty of things (in politics and in our troubled world) we’d all just as soon forget.
Like how long the presidential campaign lasted, and how bitter and disheartening many of the heated battles were that led up to Election Day. Most Americans are glad presidential politics are behind us for the time being — at least for that short holiday grace period before partisans from both sides of the political aisle re-arm themselves to do battle in a public square that increasingly resembles the Roman Coliseum.
Tired of all the drama, many Nevadans welcome the holiday season as a respite from the onslaught of media coverage that depicts the country as being in a very uncivil war. Many of us both believe and hope that somehow can change.
Hope has a way of working its way into the American psyche come January 1st. From poets to presidents, many offer up resolutions for renewal at the beginning of every new year. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” Lyricist T.S. Eliot penned, “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.”
Would that different voices would speak to us in 2025, other than the constant onslaught of social media skullduggery that has become about as unsettling as drones in the New Jersey night skies.
While taking time to focus on what my soul companion has meant to me for the past 50 years, I’m also choosing to turn off the clatter of the one social media account, Twitter/X, that has taken up too much of my time for the past 15 years. I first signed up while a member of the Nevada Legislature, in hopes of learning what was going on in other legislative committees in Carson City. Now it seems my Twitter feed consists mainly of brutal fights, either physically or politically, that I’m no longer in need of knowing or really caring about.
I’m “turning off and dropping out” of social media this Dec. 31. There are so many other personal voices I’d rather hear from over coffee or a sandwich, as opposed to vicariously over the internet. It’s too easy to disagree when your adversary is in the ether and not across the table. I look forward to those face-to-face discussions — even when we disagree.
Nature too, has plenty to occupy me — as my hikes around the Sierra have shown me ever since COVID sent me out hiking. I’d rather be in nature in all its grandeur (and toughness) than gaze at it through the screen on my iPhone (or even the incredible Sphere on the Vegas Strip).
I’m going to miss for the next few months communicating with you, my fellow Northern Nevadans. I look forward to returning refreshed from reflecting on the love of my life, and my life with the one I love.
Please don’t hesitate to send me your thoughts and ideas of what I should write about when I return.
Not everyone has been afforded the opportunity to communicate with people like yourself every week. It’s something I have to thank you and the RGJ for. I know I will miss uploading a column from my laptop every Monday morning.
I hope you’ll miss me too. At least enough to welcome me back.
Happy New Year. Please email me at: [email protected].
"Memo from the Middle" is an opinion column written by RGJ columnist Pat Hickey, a member of the Nevada Legislature from 1996 to 2016.