By MARY CATLETT
Staff Writer

There might be a few of you who remember me. The name, at least, could ring some bells for you. If so, I have one question:
Did you miss me?
Now, be careful how you answer that. And if you're a little shaky on my Boone connections, try these reminders on for size.
My father ran a shoe repair here in the 80s and early 90s on Ninth Street. If you ever wandered by during his Pufferbilly Days family reunion, you were treated as family and fed accordingly - usually brats and lots...of his family, that is, as well as food. We took up the sidewalk and had a great vantage point for the parade as we visited and dodged generic Barney with a color wheel problem.
Before that, my family had a shoe repair in Madrid, either under my grandfather Pittman or Catlett. We used to have a "pick up site" in Boone at Sherbon's Barbershop and my sister and I even placed third, as I recall, in the county fair parade. (I was the shoe repairman, she was the fancy lady customer).
That's the ancient history portion of today's program.
The hip, happenin' and wonderful portion starts now: My sister and her husband managed two different sets of apartment buildings in Boone in the mid '90s when I moved back to Iowa and lived independently upstairs at the family home in Madrid. I was fresh off the turnip truck from nine years in Chicago. I finished my English degree at ISU and joined the Boone News-Republican the first time in Oct. 2000.
And if none of this rings a bell for you, then you may be part of the era that recalls my niece Jessica who is now a junior at Roland-Story High School and continues to play every sport known, and then some.
She's taller than me. It is just not fair. But I'll leave that for another time.
During my first go round at BNR, I was a reporter for managing editor Chuck Hackenmiller and owner Bob and Jeannine Schaub. I learned a lot and wrote a lot. I even succeeded him as managing editor with only two weeks of training. Friends thought I had left town because my by-line no longer appeared. That was good for a laugh. But I could feel a change coming on. Something big -- I didn't know what.
One day I got a call from the emergency room. Dad had been undergoing tests all week when he suddenly turned yellow. I walked out of the Boone News-Republican offices on Keeler - well, ran is more like it - and I never returned again.
Until yesterday.
My departure or staying away had nothing to do with the paper, of course. Dad was diagnosed with the rare and aggressive bile duct cancer. They said he might have two years.
He did.
It was a very stressful two years and I call myself a "recovering caregiver." Dad was difficult and stuck in the anger phase, to say the least. I remember the pain and feelings of hopelessness, of course, but I love to talk about the humor and the discoveries of the experience.
It was my job to make certain he was comfortable and had his every wish granted to the closest extent that I could do it. How well I recall feeling like I'd hit one brick wall too many and that I couldn't find a way to accomplish something that needed to be done. I would give in to the feelings of negativity, still turning the problem over in my mind but surely defeated. And then the answer would come to me. Of course! It was all so simple.
Moreover, Dad would always marvel to others about how easily certain things happened. To him it was magic. But I was the one behind the curtain.
After he died in 2003, I took some time off, then worked for a radio station in Perry. Good people, bad boss. He was dying, too, it turns out. I sort of stumbled back into newspapers with the last year spent covering the city councils, school boards and events of the towns of Woodward, Granger, Dallas Center, Grimes, Bouton, Minburn and Perry for the weekly Northeast Dallas County Record, That same office also publishes the Dallas County News and Waukee Today.
I even got some awards early this month.
They say write what you know, and frankly I'm ready to know you - either again or for the first time - and write about that. Seriously. I'd be interested in hearing your stories, past, present or ongoing, whether you are a caregiver or mechanic.
And I'm ready for your tips and story ideas.
So.
Did you miss me?