A 55-year news veteran on the fruits of his labor

THERE’S a joke about a guy who travels the world looking for someone to explain the meaning of life to him. He finally finds a guru in a cave high up in the mountains of Tibet to whom he asks the question. After considerable thought, the guru responds, “Life is a lemon tree.” Period.

The man is clearly disappointed and not a little angry. “I spend a fortune and give up years of my life to have the question answered by one of the great gurus of our age and you say, ‘Life is a lemon tree’? What kind of nonsense is that?”

The guru shrugs and says, “OK, then life isn’t a lemon tree.”

I was thinking about that when I went outside this morning to pick some of the lemons off our tree. The fruit, illuminated by the early rays of the sun, seemed to glow with an inner light, hanging like jewels from the tangled branches of their host. There were maybe a dozen or so of the current crop remaining, of which I picked six, leaving the others to ornament a section of the garden on a hillside overlooking the house.

Picking lemons is not a part of my daily routine, but there is a connection of sorts between the persistence of life in nature and the uncertainty of a career in newspapering. I used to rush out in the morning to get the paper for the news; now I go out to see if it is still being published. On Mondays and Fridays I check to make sure I am still in it.

Regardless of how the future finally shakes out for the L.A. by God Times, these are not good days for those of us who stew in the uncertainty of our careers. Entrepreneurs do not buy newspapers for the people’s right to know. They do not buy newspapers to perpetuate the grand traditions of print journalism. They buy newspapers if they think they can make a buck out of them.

If it doesn’t work out, they sell them and buy oil stock or pharmaceutical companies or insurance agencies, organizations that can stick it to the people and get away with it.

Whoever ends up owning us, there will be staff reductions, page reductions and probably quality reductions. The bottom line is contingent upon a kind of amorality that permits a distance between owner and worker, allowing for layoffs and forced buyouts without a lot of owner tears being shed.

So I don’t rush out to get the paper anymore by dawn’s early light. I stop to admire the lemons, shimmering in the glow that the sun allows them. Or maybe I just sit in the gazebo and stare off over the wondrous garden that my wife has created. Then I pick up the paper and read about the pending deals or the done deals or the probable deals that involve the product I hold in my hands, the product that holds me in its hands.

I promised myself when The Times, a conveyor of news, became an object of the news that I would avoid writing about the convulsions of its shaky existence. I would leave that to those whose job, talent or inclination have made them the chroniclers of the chronicle, like interpreters untangling the mysteries of an archaic language. But we have achieved such a place in the headlines that we have become the news, and everyone who cares wants to know what’s going to happen next.

Like the aging guru, I am asked often what our future might be, both as an institution and as an individual product. What changes will enhance our longevity?

Rarely in the 55 years I have been a journalist has anyone cared enough to ask about the functions or problems of a newspaper until now, except when a reporter has been caught faking a story and editors have had to beg forgiveness.

The convulsions currently attending our existence augur change, and owners and editors are busy tinkering with the product in an effort to enhance its popularity. We don’t appear to know what’s selling these days, and seem clueless about whether we ought to continue to be a player on the national stage or give it up for the fun of a Hollywood sound stage.

Unlike the radiant lemons remaining on our sunlit tree, we have lost our inner glow. We see endings to our existence, and like dreamers searching for eternal life, there is a note of desperation in our current disposition. The product changes we’re making, all the perky bells and whistles, don’t appear to be working. So now what? Beats me.

But I do know that the remaining lemons on the tree will be allowed to remain where they are until birds pick them into nubs or raccoons get them or they simply wither and drop while the tree falls into hibernation until nature calls it once more into bloom. It will undergo these stages in the seasons to come, spring after spring and winter after winter, until time, fire or pestilence sweeps them from the dark earth.

Even after a half-century of writing and reporting, and only a few years of observing fruit trees, I know more about lemons than I do about newspapers. Maybe life is just a lemon tree after all.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.