This may be of limited interest here, but I thought I'd post it anyway because it turned out pretty much like I wanted it to.  This is my goodbye column for my paper.  I'm not going away from here, and I'll still be doing a weekly column for the paper, but it's sort of my last thoughts as a (relatively) longtime resident:

It’s been a few years since I’ve had to say goodbye to this many people at once.

In fact, there are a lot of people I won’t see before I blow town early next week, so I wanted to take this opportunity to do that in print.

As I said before, I’ll still be doing this column from my new home in Missouri, but it’s going to be a while before I see Fargo-Moorhead again.  At the earliest, it’ll be this spring, when my son graduates from pharmacy school.

But even then, I won’t be here long; I’ll have long since moved on physically and (mostly) psychologically.

But some part of me will always be here.  I lived in Fargo-Moorhead just shy of 24 years, by far the longest time I've lived anywhere.  I came here in my late 20s, as a young man with a young family.  I leave here as a middle-aged man, no longer married, with grown children, one of them himself married.  I came here to work on the largest paper I’d ever worked on and leave having worked on the smallest.

And I’ve seen this city go from a relatively isolated backwater where you couldn’t buy certain things on Sunday to a growing, much more diverse city that is dealing with both the opportunities and problems such growth brings.  Streets once filled largely with stolid Scandinavian-Americans are now home to a polyglot collection of ethnicities, faiths and ideas.

I don’t want to overstate how cosmopolitan Fargo has become.  We’re still pretty isolated; hell, just recently, we made national news when a candy company sent its sales force here basically as punishment for not making their goals.  But believe me, things have changed.

So what will I miss?

Well, my kids, Harrison and Spencer, and Spencer’s wife, Laura.  I don’t see my sons nearly as often as I’d like, but they’ve both turned out to be tremendous people – smart, funny and, most importantly, good-hearted.  Their mother and I were pretty good parents, but to the extent that it takes a village, I’m glad I got a chance to raise my kids in a city where they could walk down the street without having to worry about the myriad horrors that endanger children elsewhere.  And the schools were tremendous; kids here get a public education that requires people elsewhere to pay thousands of dollars to private schools.

I’ll miss my friends, from co-workers and former co-workers to people like my ex-wife, Lori, and the various folks I’ve met over two decades of helping chronicle the community’s life.  I won’t name names, but there are people here of whom I’m tremendously fond.

On second thought, there is one person I want to mention by name.  That would be Publisher Kolness.  John is one of my oldest friends and the best boss I’ve ever had (he’s certainly the most decent publisher I’ve ever worked for, although that’s kind of like saying someone is the nicest serial killer you’ve ever met).  I do want to say this publicly:  After The Forum invited me to leave, I thought my newspaper career was over.  He gave it back to me and in doing so gave me more than he’ll ever know.  I will be eternally grateful.  And besides, he’s one of the kindest, most decent men I’ve ever known.

While I’m at it, I’ll also miss my current co-workers, all the folks here at Extra Media and the FM Extra.  It’s a cliché to say “we’re like a family,” and it’s often untrue, but in this case it’s not.  Because we’re a small, relatively strapped operation, we’ve grown close as only people in that situation can – with all the love and dysfunction that implies.  I’m not only tremendously proud of what we’ve done, I’m proud of everybody here and love ‘em to death.  They’re a great bunch.

I’ll miss the kind of easy familiarity that comes with living somewhere nearly half your life.  The little inside jokes that residents anywhere share, the memories and stories, those are things one builds up in the course of living.  I’ll probably never know – really know – anyplace as well as I know Fargo-Moorhead.

So what won’t I miss?  Well, there are things.

There’s the smug insularity some exhibit here, which, oddly enough, is combined with a sort of upper Midwest inferiority complex.  People here so want to be taken seriously as potential big-timers, but they tend to act like hicks at times when a little sophistication would go a long way. 

A good example is probably the repeated contretemps over the University of North Dakota’s Sioux nickname.  It’s amazing that anybody would give a second thought to the name of a few sports teams, but too many people here not only give it a second thought, but a third, fourth, fifth one until it borders on a weird obsession. And they defend it based on appeals to Sacred Tradition, as though it were that important. It’s not.  It’s a logo, folks.  If you think of it as more than that, you have a problem.

And the things we should feel inferior about, like the abysmal wage scales here, we don’t.  We tell ourselves that we have a great work ethic, but if you talk to anybody who isn’t a cheerleader, they’ll tell you that people here are hard workers because it takes hard work and long hours just to make a decent living.  We don’t have all that much unemployment here, but underemployment is a huge problem.

Likewise, “Minnesota nice” is grossly overrated.  It’s really a mile wide and an inch deep.  The really good things people do here – like those guys that help you move your car when it’s stuck in a snowbank – aren’t a matter of “Minnesota nice.”  In fact, to call that kind of deed by that name cheapens the act.  It’s simply being very decent.  “Minnesota nice,” on the other hand, is the pinched smile, the damning with faint praise, the strained, insincere compliment that is really a cutting remark.  It’s hard to see that if you’ve lived here for a while, but just ask a recent arrival in this area.  We could do with a whole lot less “Minnesota nice” and more honesty.

I’m sure the things about living here that rankle me will have their equivalents in Missouri.  Every place has its strengths and weaknesses.  Maybe the Missouri version of “Minnesota nice” is “Missouri taciturn” or something.  I’ll just have to see.  After all, that’s part of the adventure.

And leaving here is part of the cost.

Goodbye, Fargo-Moorhead.