It has been said that things you have lived through always look different when you look back on them. After this Tuesday night – I know now more then ever that this is indeed a true statement. I had to get some clips of my past work together for an interview I had on Wednesday. So on Tuesday night, I went into the closet in my home office to go through the almost six foot high stack of newspapers that chronicle my five years as a journalist. From my first published article in The Brooklyn Skyline in 1994, to the last published article I wrote in The Ale Street News in 1998 – every single word I have written and every single article I have had published is in that stack – which serves as a silent monument of my days as a member of the Fourth Estate. As I flipped through the now yellow pages of the dozens of papers sitting in my closet – I seemed to re-live those days with each paper I picked up. As I flipped through the pages of each paper, I recalled happy moments, funny moments – and sad moments during my five year tenure as a journalist.

Now that I am a member of the Giuliani Administration – and that I have not been a journalist for close to three years – it’s very strange to think that I spent 1994 to 1998 as a newspaper reporter writing over six hundred articles in almost a dozen different papers. During those five long years, I invested so much time, effort, energy, blood, sweat, tears, hopes and dreams into each paper I worked for – and in return – I got some rewards, learned a few lessons – and had many battles along the way.

As I came across certain issues, I recalled what went into getting them to print. As I saw certain stories, I remembered where I was when I wrote them – and as I saw certain pictures of people I used to know, work with – and even date – I remembered the good times and bad times I shared with them.

More then just newspapers, what I flipped through on Tuesday was a printed record of five years of my life – much the way this column is now. Sure those newspapers contain articles I wrote – but they contain much more then that. They hold, in their yellowed pages, a dated record of my life and all I had at that stage in my life. And now, as I look back on that period of my life and remember the good and the bad, the ups and the downs – and the successes and failures that went along with it – I look back on it with absolutely no regrets. I enjoyed that five years of my life and would re-live it all over again never changing a thing. Yes, there were bad times, but they taught me valuable lessons. Sure, there were happy times, and they made it enjoyable – and for certain those days are long gone never to come again – but they will never be forgotten – as long as I can look back at them through yellowed pages of memories.