Remembering Suzan Nightingale Suzan wrote richly into all our lives, every day I must have been one of the first people in Anchorage to be impressed by Suzan Nightingale. As a young reporter at the Daily News in the mid-70s I couldn't help noticing the stylish new writer who had come to work at the Anchorage Times, so I called and invited her out for a drink. We met in a cheap bar that sold big hamburgers. She brought some guy with her. He's long gone, but Suzan stuck around. Before too long we were colleagues at the Daily News, and then neighbors across Cook Street up on Government Hill. We shared a cabin on Kachemak Bay and endless conversations about the right way to end a column. Over the years I traded laughs and tears with Suzan. I conspired with her boyfriend to substitute a column of his words for hers one morning so he could pop the question and wait with all the rest of Anchorage for her answer. It was yes, and I got to walk her down the aisle and into John McKay's arms. She told me later that all she could think about kneeling there at the front of the biggest cathedral in town was whether she'd taken the SALE tag off the bottom of her new shoes. I edited Suzan carefully -- partly because she was one tough red-head when she wanted to be, but mainly because I knew the authenticity of her voice was a pearl beyond price. The best thing for her editor to do most times was get out of the way, let her suffer through to the end and then print it. Suzan said she intended to put away her typewriter after she first became a mother, leaving her job as editor of the editorial page at the Daily News to spend more time with Martin. I knew she'd be a splendid mom, but I told her then that she'd be back to face down the deadlines she hated so much. I also predicted in a farewell column the week she left that her decision would give her a better shot at maintaining her "A" average in the her APU masters program and "probably will result in a best-seller of some kind in the not too distant future." I was right on all counts. The things I wrote the week she left the paper in 1990 seem especially poignant now: "We'll be without that weekly dose of common sense and eloquent observation that has come to seem like an old friend. Sue's editorial voice was unique among Alaska columnists and writers, and she spoke about subjects that are too often unaddressed in other parts of the paper. "Her interests mirrored her readers' with steady, sometimes uncanny precision. She usually knew which column would spark that outpouring of gratitude and appreciation -- and she probably wound up on more refrigerator doors than Garfield and the Far Side put together ... "Her reporting ... focused less on the affairs of state and more on the front lines of the daily battle for sanity and survival. In that focus, too, there is a lesson for those of us left here to carry on: Pay attention to the things that really matter in people's lives, and the big deals in the legislature or assembly chamber can probably take care of themselves." Whether it was a column worrying about how to confront a shopper stealing grapes, or another admitting that she'd reached the point whether she'd rather fly in a sweat suit than look stylish, Suzan gave voice to thoughts a thousand of us have shared. She was always alert to the insults plain people suffered from big institutions. She was an advocate for the 98-pound weakling in us all. Suzan told us some time ago she was very sick, and I had a chance to visit only a week or so ago. Still, there's no way to prepare for the sudden, crushing sense of loss -- the realization that we'll never finish the conversation we left hanging, that we can't ever show her the guest room in our new house in California. The typewriter she used in the old days had a Latin inscription taped above the keyboard. Translated, it said, "Never a day without a line." Though she left the job of daily columnist behind in 1990, her life was a continuing story of aspiration and ideals and she wrote rich lines in all our lives, every day. The night I met Suzan that first time at Goldies, we were both broke young reporters without much more than the price of a few cheap pitchers between us. After we had spent it all and decided to head home, I found a twenty dollar bill on a barstool. We stayed and drank that up, of course, and I thought at the time it was a lucky omen. So it was. And the good luck always goes away too soon.