Work & Achievement · A Decembers list
Every time your name landed in print
The Little League photo where you're squinting into the sun. The write-up when the plant closed. A quote in the business section you never saw coming. Somewhere there's a clipping, gone soft and yellow at the folds.
This is the list for each of those. One line per appearance — what it was, and how you wound up in it.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Say "the anniversary feature" out loud and the whole day comes back — the reporter's notebook, the smell of newsprint, your mother clipping it out and mailing it to your sister.
A newspaper morgue can tell you the date and the headline, and maybe hold a scan of the page. What it can't tell you is that you almost missed the interview, or that the photographer made you stand by the window for twenty minutes, or that the reporter got one detail wrong and you've wanted to correct it ever since. The clipping is a record of the fact. It is not a record of what it felt like to open the paper and see yourself in it.
So the piece gets tucked in a drawer or a Bible or a shoebox, and the story around it never gets told. Writing a whole account feels like too much for a photo the size of a playing card. But a single line is not too much. Name the appearance, say what it showed and how you ended up in front of that lens or that notebook, and it's kept. The next one is its own line. That's how a list gets written when a book never does.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The kinds of appearances that end up here
The photo you didn't pose for
A candid caught at a parade, a groundbreaking, a crowd shot at the fair. You didn't know a camera was pointed your way until the paper landed on the porch. Sometimes the caption named you, sometimes it just said "local residents."
The write-up with your name in it
A quote in a story about the school budget or the road work. A mention when you got the promotion, made Eagle Scout, or retired after thirty years. The kind of thing someone at church or the diner brought up before you'd even seen it.
The feature that was actually about you
A reporter came out, sat with you, took notes. The business turning fifty, the collection in your garage, the volunteer work nobody had ever thanked you for. A photo staged just so, and a headline with your name across the top.
Where the story ran
- Local paper
- The hometown weekly or daily, where team photos, honor rolls, and the occasional feature put nearly everyone in town on a page at least once.
- Big-city daily
- The metro paper, where a mention meant your story reached past the county line — a business section quote or a photo from a bigger event.
- School page
- The education section or the school's own bulletin, where science fairs, sports, and graduations landed you or your kids in print.
- Trade magazine
- The industry publication for your line of work, where a project, a promotion, or an award got noticed by people who understood exactly what it took.
- Church or club news
- The parish bulletin, the union newsletter, the Rotary or VFW writeup — small circulation, but clipped and kept by people who knew you.
- Wire pickup
- The rare time a local story got picked up and ran in papers you'd never heard of, sometimes reaching relatives two states away.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every time the wider world took notice
Somewhere between the clipping in the drawer and the memory of the day it ran, there's a story. Start with the one appearance you remember best, and put it down as a single line.