Bob, Meet the Future; Future, Meet Bob!

“And you know what? They were coming after me.”

(Our son writes his first story on a Trash 80)

You never know when you’re going to meet the future. I once saw it in the light of a waning crescent moon, just off a rutted dirt road outside of St. George, Grenada.

This was in 1983, immediately after the U.S. invaded Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean. Reuters had sent me to neighboring Barbados, which was sort of the Grenada Waiting Room. It was as close as we could get to the action.

Within a couple of days of my Barbados arrival, though, the military began letting journalists actually go to Grenada to do reporting. The problem was that communications, which had been completely cut during the invasion, were still unstable.

Each news organization was allowed only a three-minute call per day to deliver our stories off-island by dictating them. We sounded like fast-talking auctioneers, frantically blurting our notes into the phone until we were abruptly cut off at the three-minute mark. .