She asked to loosen my top button. I said it had been a long time since anyone wanted to do that and laughed. She didn’t. As her hands rose toward my chest, my mind went somersaulting back decades to another woman, another shirt.

She rushed through the door and strode toward the only open seat at the bar, the stool next to mine. Just like the boss said she would. She was in her mid-twenties. Short hair accenting her oval face. Audrey Hepburn cheekbones. Anya Taylor-Joy eyes. Tiny mole left of her lips. No obvious piercings or tattoos. A kind aura.

Some days I hate my job.

Before dawn on a cold January day in 1979, I reported for my first day of work at the Coffeyville Journal in Kansas. That started a journey that has included covering presidential visits and planning and zoning hearings; the stuff that makes national headlines and the daily goings on of a community.

Miller shouted his racist views. He wrote a book, “A White Man Speaks.” He ran for Congress. ... Once, he mailed me a cartoon depicting a tree of freedom. Swinging from nooses attached to a branch were figures labeled government and journalists.

When he called a few days later, I told him I wouldn’t talk to him after that threat. He seemed surprised. The drawing was from some book, he explained. It wasn’t personal.

Openness is good. The more information in people’s hands, the more they can protect themselves – or insist that their government do the things it should to protect them. Protecting our rights to access information is also good. Chipping away at those protections is dangerous.