I had already settled into bed last Tuesday evening when my cell phone started to ring.
Looking below the number, I saw Greenville and assumed that it was the Greenville just a few miles to the west of me.
I answered it, and I was surprised to learn that the person on the other end was actually from Greenville, Tennessee.
Confused for just a moment, I listened to what the man on the other end had to say.
“I’m trying to reach Bryan Davis,” he said. “This is he,” I replied.
Turns out, the older gentleman on the other end of the line was a retired newspaper man from that Tennessee town.
About a decade ago, I was doing some job hunting during my first stint at the Daily Times Leader in West Point. I was sports editor then.
I was about to get married and was chasing money, something I learned not to do later on in life.
I applied for a number of positions across the Southeast, and apparently one of my portfolios went to the newspaper in Greenville, Tennessee, which was advertising for a managing editor at the time.
I wanted to impress whoever was there, so I put a large portfolio of my work together in a three-ring binder, which included newspaper clippings and entire copies of the sports magazines I had worked on when I was sports editor at The Yazoo Herald.
I didn’t get the job, but apparently the portfolio did impress the gentleman who was now on the other end of the phone a decade later.
“You were a serious contender for that job,” he told me. “But it ended up going to somebody else. I kept that binder around, and the other day, when I was cleaning out some things in my home, I came across it.”
He dialed the number that was on the resume, and thankfully it was still the same one I have today.
I remember sending some portfolios back then, but I didn’t really recall what was in them, so when he asked me if I wanted it back, I of course said, “Yes.”
A few days later, a box showed up on my doorstep, and it was the portfolio.
It was a pretty fun trip down memory lane.
There were so many clippings that had been lost over the years that I though I would never see again.
There were a lot of articles from my first job out of college, photos I had taken throughout my time as sports editor in West Point and all of those old magazines that I no longer had copies of.
Plus, there was a fun interview I did on Dan Mullen when Mississippi Scoreboard first launched its magazine.
I would eventually decide to leave the journalism field and pursue my Master of Arts in teaching from Delta State University, which included a year of teaching in my hometown of Yazoo City.
I’ve written extensively about how miserable teaching was for me and how fast I returned to the journalism field after that contract was over.
Who knows what would have happened if I had received an offer from the Tennessee folks?
Maybe I would have eventually landed back home in the Mississippi Delta, in Indianola, but perhaps I would have ended up living outside of this state for the rest of my life.
If I was indeed a serious contender for that job, as the gentleman explained, perhaps the good Lord intervened, whether it was on my behalf or that paper’s.
There are millions of Americans who are searching for jobs today, and so many get disheartened when they send out resumes and portfolios and they don’t get as much as a response from the prospective employer.
It doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a good fit there. It could mean that your life is heading down a different road, one that you haven’t even conceived in your mind. That’s what happened to me.
And who knows. Maybe ten years from now, you’ll be laying in bed, and you’ll get a call from someone who was touched by your body of work years before, and you’ll get a chance to reunite with a relic from the past you never thought you would ever see again.
That happened to me too.
