The Big-Time Newspaper Man: Chapter III of When the Dogwood Blooms

Ray sat holding his knobby knees close together. Hopefully this posture would restrain any fidgeting in the lower limbs of his six-foot height, because perhaps already he had acquired too great of a morning reliance on the American morning beverage of choice. That morning he had in fact indulged in one too many cups of coffee before the mid-morning interview. Regardless, the resulting bodily urgency had not yet manifested itself within the introspective 24-year-old, as in later years. He sat motionless in a hard-seated, gray metal, green-vinyl upholstered office chair, facing Roy King, the Managing Editor of the Waco Sun Times. The double-jowl Texas newsman was bald on the top front of a round head, that was creased by a half dozen horizontal lines. These lines were accentuated by time, rather than a cartoonist's pen, though they were much like those across the top of South Park Cartman's round head, across a pale-skin forehead, with a light, intricate web over the remainder of a face that featured eyes, nose and mouth, like those of a Texas Ranger colonel in a 1955 Western.

With a white goldilocks wig covering his thinning, jet-black hair, one might have cast this officious face in a cinematic depiction of a 19th century magistrate of the English crown, glaring down his disgusted, crinkled nose at a piece of Dickensian Irish, Scottish, or English scum, pounding his gavel and shouting, "For the theft of Councilman Howard's mare, relocation to New South Wales, and be grateful not a hanging!"

Ray was being interviewed for a reporter job at the Waco paper his grandfather had gotten in the morning and evening every day up until the death of his grandfather, the last practicing EENT, an ENT specialist MD with the eyes thrown in, a year before. So begins The Big-Time Newspaper Man, Chapter III of When the Dogwood Blooms.