It was a store-bought cake with a row of candles and a message in sugary script. Excited young voices filled the room in a third-floor apartment at the crest of the hill that rises behind New Hampshire’s statehouse. As the candles were lit, one of the party’s hosts quieted the crowd and said it was obvious who should have the honor: me.

Blushing and beaming, I stepped forward and blew out the candles. Then, rather than make a speech, I simply recited the message on the cake: “It’s Over, Bitches.” Why the expletive was necessary, and why this particular expletive, I didn’t exactly get. But everyone else seemed to get it, which was good enough for me.

Of course, I knew what was over. It was the New Hampshire presidential primary, my eighth and last as the editor of the Concord Monitor, the twenty-thousand-circulation daily in the state capital. The party celebrated the Monitor staff’s work on a story that had consumed our time and energy for weeks, rising to a crescendo and a surprise ending in the first days of 2008.

I had witnessed plenty of campaigns and surprises in thirty years at the paper. What was different this time was that rather than run the show, I had left the corner office in the Monitor newsroom to become a reporter, columnist, and writer. The idea came to me last spring. I had decided to retire in June 2008, a decision that focused my thinking. More than forty-five years ago, I got into journalism to write, but I had run the Monitor’s newsroom for nearly thirty of those years and been editor of some kind for thirty-five. Having moved from sportswriter to sports editor to city editor to managing editor to editor, I had never been a...

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