Listeners to The Ticket know Gordon Keith as the unconventional poet laureate of their favorite sports radio station. Readers of The Dallas Morning News know him as someone who regularly touched their heart in the nine years he wrote a regular column for the newspaper. Three years since that last column appeared, we still hear from subscribers who want to know, "where's Gordon?" When his former editor posed that question to him, Gordon offered some solid life lessons wrapped in his trademark story-telling.

It's been almost exactly three years since you took a break from column writing, a decision that coincided with your mother becoming quite ill. Her death was followed by your father's passing. What have you learned about yourself during this leave of absence?

I'm a bit tender that I come across as talking so much about my parents' deaths -- that's just been my variable. For others, it could be divorce, loss of a job. It's not about me and my situation, but about being human and how we respond to tragedy.

It's not really death I'm talking about, it's living.

Witnessing my parents' decline, witnessing their death, and caring for them in the way I cared for them divested me of the immortality delusion that I think gets most of us through the day.

Their end is my end too. Watching a loved one die is a portal into the future. If I can watch this Superman die, then what chance do I have of living for forever? The experience put me directly into hand-to-hand combat with my own mortality.

Your parents die and you lose that person who is out on the vanguard protecting you against death, because they are in line before you, and then you realize, "Oh wait, now I'm at the front of the line."

Some people respond well to that and some people don't. Some people blossom under tragedy; in my case, I withered. That's a very embarrassing thing because I'd like to think that I'm a person of grit. Instead, I found myself in a paralytic depression.

So it was a combination of the deaths and the ensuing depression that choked off the writing?

My chief enemy that keeps me from writing has always been me. And when my parents died, the sharp edges of my mind just got worn off and I became dulled. I couldn't think and therefore I couldn't write.

That's what depression is, when it becomes a herculean effort to do anything. I expended all my energy just getting up in the morning. And compounding it all was the guilt I felt about my situation. Other people have it so much worse. I had parents who died at a dying age. So you feel guilty for feeling depressed. And then that creates its own suffering.

When you are watching two beloved people dying right at your fingertips, in a slow and unfolding way, you are in triage mode, and so I deferred my emotions. When they actually did die -- all those cans I had kicked down the road? - I ran smack dab into them. And it leveled me.

Gordon Keith and his mother, Christmas 2013, Â two months after her cancer diagnosis.

So how did you cope with the depression?

Because my position on the air is one of such jocularity, I tend to hide that depressive side. But, yeah, I think that I've always been prone to it most of my life. I don't know how anyone else experiences it, but this is how I experienced it: I felt depressed and tired and unenthusiastic and a general low level of sadness that pervaded everything.

And then I would be aware of my depression and then I would feel guilty that here I am depressed over something that is natural and the circle of life. These weren't tragic deaths to the world, but they were to my world.

People react to that in different ways. I wish I had reacted by going off and climbing mountains -- choosing this life of adventure. But I didn't.

Instead you bought typewriters.

Yes, my reaction, probably unique to parental death, was to collect typewriters. And that goes back to writing.

When I don't feel like writing, what do I do? I start collecting typewriters or find the best mechanical pencil or try this new paper they have in Japan. It's circling around doing the thing.

So after my father died, I started ordering typewriters off Ebay or getting them from Goodwill. I would clean them, get them in working order, resurrect them. I would just be by myself for hours at a time. For whatever reason, that monkey work was very soothing to me because there was no emotional content to it.

A lot of people in my life got frustrated with me: Why aren't you talking to me about your grief? Don't you want to talk and make it better? It was a hard explanation to convey that that didn't make it better for me.

I wanted to do something that took me out of that deep pit of roiling emotions. I wanted to do something simple, mechanical, me in a room.

Something you find out about grief is that one of the unintended injuries is you end up having to be the therapist for the other person's grief. They want to help you, to feel useful to you. In return, you have to make sure you are making the consolers feel that they were helpful. And that depletes you.

I had to remove myself from other people to survive. I had delayed so much heartbreak that when my parents were finally in the ground that wall came a tumbling and I was buried under all that stuff. I just wanted to stay in the rubble and work on typewriters, not be out on some stage shaking hands in a grief receiving line.

Gordon Keith has collected nearly 200 typewriters, including the Olivetti Studio 44 (pictured) and refurbishes them himself by hand. He remembers using typewriters as a child with his sister Kristin for creating family newspapers. Keith is holding a typewriter once used by The Dallas Morning News sports writer Blackie Sherrod in the 1950s. Keith is a local radio broadcaster. He was photographed in Dallas on Wednesday, November 15, 2017. (Andy Jacobsohn/The Dallas Morning News) (Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer)

How did you manage to work on-air at The Ticket through that time?

How was I able to wake up each morning and go to work when I wasn't able to take a used Diet Coke can 20 feet to the garbage for weeks on end? My only explanation, and I've thought about that a lot, is that it was just so early in the morning that it was a successful series of stumbles.

Stumble out of bed. Stumble over to the toothbrush. Stumble over to the shower. Stumble into the car. Get to work in the dark of night. I was there before I had a chance to think about it too much. And once I was at work I would just do the thing that was in front of me.

By the time 10 a.m. rolled around and the show was over, I went right back to being wordless for the rest of the day. That's very strange for a person who talks for a living, but I had hit my word quota at 10 a.m.

Then I could go to those typewriters that were once so full of words and so full of stories. No telling what life went through the rollers of those machines. Dear John letters. Love letters. Resumes. Novels. Grocery lists.

It was a way to feel connected to lives that had left. Those typewriters represent ancient technology that no one uses anymore. It almost felt like these ancient machines were old people with stories that they couldn't tell me anymore, which of course I came to recognize later was metaphorical for my parents.

Gordon Keith has collected nearly 200 typewriters and refurbishes them himself by hand. He remembers using typewriters as a child with his sister Kristin for creating family newspapers. Keith is holding a typewriter once used by The Dallas Morning News sports writer Blackie Sherrod in the 1950s. Keith is a local radio broadcaster. He was photographed in Dallas on Wednesday, November 15, 2017. (Andy Jacobsohn/The Dallas Morning News) (Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer)

In recent months, your life is again bigger than typewriter repair and radio. What flipped for you?

I talked with therapists and other professionals. And a lot of it came down to wisdom I already knew.

There's nothing new under the sun. In all my investigations, including the ones after my parents' death, it feels like life does just boil down to the Serenity Prayer. It's comprehensive and up in cross-stitch in everybody's home. But if you want to know how to live a happy life, read the Serenity Prayer and learn how to be in the moment. Those two things cover it all.

I knew this before the deaths, but one of the unique things about being human is that you have to rediscover the same wisdom you learned just last week. You keep relearning it all.

The only epiphany that aided in bringing about the end of The Typewriter Empire was an expletive-laced "I'm out of room!" sometime after the typewriter inventory hit triple digits. Once I got on the other end of that experience, I could see that I was running a conveyor belt to nowhere. I'd do one machine, set it aside and do the next one. But there was no one receiving them on the other end.

Not only was I running out of room, the need to do it had slowly abated. And then, this is where depression may have helped me because I was still depressed -- something had shifted -- and I thought, "I don't want to go out front and get another typewriter off the stoop. I'd rather do the Diet Coke can now."

I had exhausted the experience.

But I was really grateful those typewriters were there because I'm the kind of person who is prone to drinking and self-destructive behavior, and I don't drink right now and I didn't start drinking when my parents died.

So while typewriter restoration was about the most unhip vice you can have, I'm glad I didn't turn to one of those things that would have caused me real physical damage.

So today what does life up ahead look like?

If I were to pick the two words that describe the first part of my life they would be "over" and "mismanaged."

But when you are post-parent-death, that earlier part dies too and you are born again. So now as I recalibrate, I'm asking those questions that are fundamental to all of us: What do you want out of this life? What's meaningful in my life? I have a limited number of days on this earth; what do I want to spend them on?

You don't want to spend them on nonsense. Relationships we don't want to be in. Work we don't want to do. Endeavors that are relatively meaningless. Some of the drudgery I have to do, but I won't turn my time over to things that don't bring meaning or joy to my life.

I started letting go of things I used to feel so attached to. Belongings began to feel like a big sack of rocks that got too heavy if I had to drag it all with me — whether physical objects or emotional ones. It's not that I'm in special place right now, but I have the clarity of the task in front of me.

What do you mean when you say the task in front of you?

Shedding yourself of things that don't work, things that hold you down and embracing things that make you fly. It's paring down your life. You spend the first half of your life trying to build a Big Life and then it's the Big Life that breaks your shoulders. So I find myself craving a simple life, which is probably not great for a career. But I just want to do something that's meaningful.

Both you and our newspaper heard from scores of readers who were deeply touched by your columns. What was the magic there?

It just boils down to the power of vulnerability. So much in the paper we are reading about people defending positions at all costs and the ideological wars that have led us to get so rigid. Some people like reading that stuff and it's no doubt important.

But for me personally, I like things that move me, and I think a lot of other people do too. When someone comes along and tells a story with vulnerability, and it's not a hero story, but just a human story, that's the thing that appeals to me.

Maybe it's navel-gazing, but it's useful navel-gazing. And I get suspicious when people criticize others about navel gazing. Why is that so offensive? Every great song that's ever been written starts with a writer's navel-gazing. Does that disqualify it from being inspirational work?

I know that when my parents physically passed from the world and I looked at all they had gathered in their lifetime, what were the things that were most important? Their voices, their stories, those pieces of paper with a diary entry or half a thought.

When will you be ready to write again?

My most accurate assessment of that is that I'll never be ready to write again. Here's some old writer wisdom that I could have read a million times, but once again I have to rediscover it: You don't sit around waiting for inspiration. You need to give yourself an assignment. It's like exercise - some people have to do it every day to get their day going.

I'm not that kind of writer. I don't know that I'll ever be ready to do it, but I know I need to do it. I think writing is my purpose. That's the way I've been more meaningful to those around me.

This may sound hokey to people, at one point it would be hokey to me: We all have callings. We all have something that fits our particular soul. And I think a lot of our emotional, spiritual and psychological suffering is caused by avoiding your calling. When in doubt, and feeling bad about myself, if I just do what I'm supposed to do, I'll feel better.

But it's amazing how much energy I will expend to avoid doing what I'm supposed to do. Whether it's writing 800 words or disposing of a Diet Coke can. If I'd just do it, I'd feel so much better on the other side.

This Q&A was conducted and edited by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Sharon Grigsby. Email: sgrigsby@dallasnews.com

Writer and broadcaster Gordon Keith can be heard weekdays 5:30-10 a.m. on Sportsradio 1310/96.7 FM The Ticket. Email: gkeithcolumn@gmail.com

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