In Which a Reclusive Housewife Gets Good News

I was minding my own business, watching a few minutes of a TiVoed two-hour documentary about Johnny Cash that I’d been trying to find time to watch for about a week, when the phone rang. Caller ID just said, “Out of Area,” so I let the machine get it.
I didn’t expect to hear the heavy New York accent on my answering machine, and at first my son Henry and I both thought the voice said he was calling from Geico, which thrilled Henry because he and his twin bro love that Geico gecko on the TV commercials. Of course, the cockney gecko can’t compete with the “freecreditreport.com” dude who laments his career singing in a pirate restaurant.
Suddenly, I jumped up. The New Yawker hadn’t said “Geico.” He had said “Guideposts.” I felt lightheaded. This was no telemarketer. This was an editor from Guideposts magazine calling to tell me I had been chosen as one of 15 participants in the 2008 Guideposts Writers Workshop! Immediately I felt like Steve Martin as Navin Johnson in The Jerk, running around with the new phone book in his hand and yelling, “I’m somebody now!”
Upon hearing my insane whooping, all three boys and our dog ran toward me and jumped around me. “What?! Who was it?” “What did he say?” “Woof!” “What did he SAY?!!”
I think my explanation was anticlimactic. I did not mention a Lamborghini, Holiday World, a free beach condo, delayed school start or anything else that would have interested them.
“That writing contest. I won! They picked me! I’m going to New York,” I tried to explain. I don’t think my sons even remembered that I had entered this summer. They know about Guideposts, the little religious magazine, because we subscribe to it and because I interned at their New York offices in the summer of 1989 as part of the American Society of Magazine Editors program.
Back then, when I found out that I would be spending the summer working for Guideposts, I was not thrilled. With grand expectations for my career in journalism, I had expressed on my application my preference for some of the sexier magazines on the list, including Architectural Digest, Glamour and Time. I got Guideposts, the only religious magazine of the bunch.
Two weeks into that summer, though, discontent began to spread around the NYU dorms where all the interns lived. Most of the jobs were not as sexy as we all had assumed. My roommates were doing true intern work – making copies and fetching coffee at Popular Science and Seventeen. On the other hand, I had an actual office with a view of the actual Chrysler Building. I didn’t have to put my hair in a bun and recite Bible verses at work. I sat in on meetings with creative, fun and funny professionals who asked my opinions, gave me small writing assignments, and taught me about finding the inspirational in the mundane.
My kids don’t get it yet, but the fact that most of those editors are still working there says the most to me about the benefits of working at the seemingly unglamorous Guideposts.
I can’t wait to see them all again.