I Thought It Was a Butter Knife

I gashed my left index finger open while slicing a bagel Monday. Perhaps low on concentration after the 3:30 a.m. wakeup call to report traffic on WFTS that morning. It looked like a closed eye weeping blood.

It felt like I had gashed my finger open with a knife.

I was visiting my parents at the time and luckily my mother has more Band-Aids than Walgreen's. A little Neosporin first and I was good to go. You can golf without your left index finger. At least you can do my approximation of golf without it. Same for playing piano.

Guitar? Not so much.

No such mishaps on the air at WFTS, though. That was the good news. I had a highlight during one of the local cut-ins we do during ABC's Good Morning America. A semi truck had crashed, overturned and caught fire on I-75 near Brooksville, about 50 miles north of Tampa. The wreckage blocked both the southbound lanes all morning.

The station's helicopter pilot had done reports from the scene but had to fly back to Tampa to refuel. The earpiece that lets the producer talk to me was working intermittently so I caught only that "we don't have Captain Al." I knew we had recorded video but didn't know if I was supposed to talk about it or not.

The anchor tosses to me. I show the location of the accident on the map and say casually, "we may have video of the scene." That's a cue to them to roll tape if they have it but I keep going in case they don't. A couple seconds later, the tape pops up and I smoothly explain that the cleanup continues as well as the investigation into the crash that killed the truck driver.

It looked it went according to script. Only there was no script.

I still know how to do this.

Progress on the family documentary project I'm trying to write is slow. I don't know why. I still know how to do this, too, but it's a task making myself sit there and plow through it. I don't have a deadline but I do need to get the project done so I can add excerpts to my Personal-Documentary.com website.

It's time to get going on this.