For most of my life I have considered myself to be a good writer.

When I was in eighth grade, I had a book report due for English class. There was only one problem: I hadn’t read a book for the assignment. So I sat in class and wrote a book report for a nonexistent book, The Mickey Mantle Story. I dredged up all the facts I could recall about my baseball hero and received a “B” for my efforts.

By the time I was in high school I was frequent thorn in the side of the featured columnist for our local newspaper, “Today, Florida’s Space Age Newspaper.” Jerry Greene had the poor judgment to open letters from me and print some of the ones he thought were amusing. I was a prolific writer of letters to the editor, and the parents of my friends were always saying, “Garry, you should write a letter to Today about…”

Watergate came along, and everyone wanted to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. I packed off to the University of Florida, where I majored in journalism and minored in political science. I spent the next 18 years as a reporter, photographer, news editor and/or copy editor for weekly, semi-weekly and daily newspapers in Texas and Florida. Writing was always a big part of my job. I enjoyed being able to do an interview or attend a city or county government meeting and distilling what happened into very readable copy.

So what happened? In 1995, seeking a climate with four seasons, cool nights, no mosquitoes and fewer retirees, my wife and I changed corners of the country and moved 3,000 miles to Spokane, Washington. We left two good jobs for the move, and my wife quickly found work in public relations. As for me, it turned out that the local newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, was such a great place to work that no one ever left. And when someone did leave, they weren’t hiring middle aged white males to replace them. Turned out that they had plenty of those already.

So I moved over to “the dark side” and looked for work in public relations. I was an advertising proofreader and copy editor for a computer retailer and did marketing for an engineering company before going back to school for a certificate in public relations. That helped me get a job with the local chapter of Ronald McDonald House Charities, where I was hired as an administrative assistant but soon was doing quite a bit of communications and graphic design work. My next job was as communications specialist for the Arc of Spokane, where I did quite a bit of writing and graphic design.

I started my current job with the Alzheimer’s Association 11 years ago. I started out as communications and program assistant (a fancy name for administrative assistant) and over the years took on more and more administrative and clerical duties. And soon those administrative tasks left little or no time or energy for writing, despite stories in my head that need to be shared.

I was complimenting a friend today on her blog and her storytelling ability and mentioned how much I missed writing. I said I had even gone so far as to buy a domain and set up a WordPress blog. Her succinct reply was, “Get to it.”

So here I am. Writing is like falling off of a bicycle; if you’ve done it once, you never forget how to fall off again (or something like that). I plan to share some stories and accumulated wisdom from my six decades on this planet, as well as comment on whatever strikes my fancy. Together we’ll see if I’m still as good of a writer as I remember.