Where I Live Now

I suppose that any of us might have a few people of whom we would say, "I owe them everything." Maybe it's your parents or a teacher, the person you married, the first manager who gave you a job. One of the very few people to whom I owe everything died today.

His name was Don Forst, and he was 81. Forst was a legendary tabloid editor in New York, the lion of the old New York Newsday ("Ahead of the Times, on top of the News") and later the improbable king of the Village Voice:

''Why did I take this?'' Mr. Forst said of his job the other day. ''Because it was insane. It's what Karl Wallenda said: 'Life is on the wire. All the rest is waiting.'

''Yeah, this is a very exciting place. It's got heterosexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, carnivores, vegetarians, Stalinists, Trotskyites.''

When I met Forst, I was about to get fired in an ownership change at the alt weekly I was editing in Portland, Maine. My fiancee, a native New Yorker, took me out to supper and told me not to worry. She said we would move to New York City and somehow we would get me introduced to Don Forst and he would give me a job at the Voice. She didn't know Forst. She didn't know anyone at the Voice. But she knew that somehow, we would make that happen.

The next day -- the next morning! -- I hadn't been 10 minutes at my desk when the phone rang. This was far enough back in time that not only did the phone ring, but the receptionist was on the line to let me know who was calling. "It's Donald Forst from the Village Voice," she said. He was calling because his wife was traveling to Maine and he needed a map for her. Being a New Yorker and a newspaper editor, he chose to call me, a fellow editor in Maine, rather than walk to the bookstore around the corner from his office.

And thank God he called, because I finished getting fired two days later. Forst threw me onto the staff of a paper the Voice had on Long Island, and then he gave me a job at the big paper in New York.

Don Forst found me when I needed finding, and he taught me so many things -- not all of them useful. He taught me what it meant to be an editor in the old style. He thought of himself as shaping a newspaper, literally its shape and its talent and its coverage. One day I walked into his office and found him sitting there with his hands folded on the desk. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Plotting," he said. "I am plotting."

Forst knew how to plot, but he also knew how to let things grow. In the five years I worked with him, I remember his making just a single line edit. (In the last sentence of the second graph, the word "they" used to be "the guys," a malpractice of rhythm that even Forst at his most laissez faire  could not let pass.)

Forst used to tell me, "Steal with your eyes," which never meant as much to me as it did to him. He used to tell me, "Truth is the ultimate con," which I rely on all the time.

Forst taught me to forgive people for making mistakes, even huge ones, as I had been forgiven myself. He taught me to let other people know better, to bet big, to say thank you, to give some damned praise sometimes because it's free and it helps and people need it.

Without his betting big on me, the course of my life -- literally, the career of me as a human -- would look entirely different. I owe him everything, in a way that cannot be summed and cannot be told. The day he left the paper, I toted the last of his stuff downstairs and opened the door of his cab, because that was what he would have done for me, and also because I loved him.

Just this morning, hours before I got the news of his death, I was thinking of Forst. He had gone on to be a professor upstate, but I think he always dreamed of running another paper. I was remembering the time I recommended him for a job at a "second" paper in a big city, meaning the paper that was not the paper of record. Forst had a gift for running the second paper. He was an artist of the faster, the funnier, the more visceral, the more real, the irreverent, the direct. He ruled from the steps of the temple, where the air remained fresh even if the weather was sometimes uncomfortable.

Once, in a sort of existential fit, I asked Forst why he had gone into newspapering. He, in turn, asked me if I'd ever seen an excellent pool player. He said that the sight of excellent pool player bespoke a wasted life, and so it was with newspapermen like him.

Forst, I just want to say that your life was not wasted on me.

(Wherever you knew Forst from, they're remembering him this weekend over on the New York Newsday Alumni page.)

An Alaska village recently struggling through a food shortage after a miserable walrus-hunting season is now donating tons of meat to other communities. A drastic change in fortunes for the village of Savoonga came about in recent days, after subsistence hunters from the community on remote St. Lawrence Island landed what may be the two biggest whales caught in Alaska this year.

Or at least an apprenticeship?

Back at the shelter, Dasani spends countless hours with her siblings playing games on a Nintendo Wii.

If Dasani could design her own video game, she would call it “Live or Die.” The protagonist would be an 11-year-old girl fighting for her own salvation.

In the first round, she confronts the easy villains — her chores — scrambling to bathe, dress and feed her siblings. She cannot find Baby Lele, who is crying. The baby’s tears turn into lethal rocks that fall from the sky, which the girl must dodge.

Next, she encounters her parents battling social workers in the guise of angry pirates. Chanel tosses magical powers to the girl, who defeats the pirates, melting them to the ground.

In the third round, she goes to school, finding danger and deliverance. Her math teacher is a supervillain whose weapon is numbers. “Ten” turns into 10 charging porcupines. Down the hall, the girl must rescue Miss Hester from giant, rolling cans. “If she dies, all the kids die, too.”

Finally, the girl faces off against her longtime rival from the projects, a purple hulk who picks up cars and hurls them. If the girl survives, she reaches the queen — the principal, Paula Holmes — who decides her future. Winning brings the prize of a new house. Losing means returning to the shelter, “which is death.”

“My goal is to make it to the end, but I keep dying,” Dasani says.

It is right and good to drop everything and read "The Invisible Child," about a homeless girl in New York City.

She likes being small because “I can slip through things.” In the blur of her city’s crowded streets, she is just another face. What people do not see is a homeless girl whose mother succumbed to crack more than once, whose father went to prison for selling drugs, and whose cousins and aunts have become the anonymous casualties of gang shootings, AIDS and domestic violence.

“That’s not gonna be me,” she says. “Nuh-uh. Nope.”

When you're done, look back at "Waiting to Sleep" -- from 2001 -- and ask yourself how many more years and how long, how long. 

[W]hat those children encounter in the system is often hard for them to understand.

For Paris, the security guards loomed large. ''We don't get enough rest, so if there's an empty bench, I sleep on it, and the security guard wakes me up and says, 'Go,' '' he said.

Their grandmother and sole guardian, Arlene Cruz, 55, who gathered them from New Jersey foster homes four years ago, now had to try to deliver them clean, fed and in uniforms to their Manhattan public school, starting from a different shelter each morning. Each afternoon they had to return to the din of the unit, to wait for the late-night bus to another bed.

"You can’t put a dollar value on pet companionship," Kim Wolf says. "A pet can be the sole thing keeping people together."

sgoodyear reports today about a new mission to help people in poor neighborhoods feed their pets. It's on Atlantic Cities.

The homepage of al.com, three days after Auburn beat Alabama in the most amazing Iron Bowl ever dreamed up by God almighty.