Opinion

We had the opportunity to speak with a few members of the Navarre Krewe of Jesters last week and I was glad we did. It was certainly a lesson for both of us. We, of course, know what time of year the Mardi Gras parade is, but we don’t necessarily know when all the events are.

Eight years have come and gone. My first set of stories for the paper during the first week of February in 2015 included a story on Michael Carter and the recruiting attention that was just beginning to heat up with offers from Florida, Florida Atlantic and Tennessee.

The little girl’s face wrinkled up with incredulity and mild horror. “You drink sink water?!” she gasped. My wife was drawing water from the tap at the kitchen sink, “Yes, don’t you?” “No!” the girl replied as if being asked if she drank from a toilet bowl.

In the 20-plus years I have been a journalist, I have covered hundreds of events, written thousands of stories. However, the story that had probably the biggest impact on my life wasn’t even a story that I wrote. In October 2016, I was the editor of two different weekly newspapers, one that sadly isn’t around any longer and the other is not the paper that it used to be because of budget cuts, which is just as sad. That was when we found out that Alaqua Animal Refuge had rescued dozens of Great Danes.