EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK:

Since I am a poet in my other life — or at least try to be — I’ll begin this farewell by citing one of the greats:

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

That’s from Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” in which a man looks back on his life’s work — symbolized by a giant tree with “ten thousand thousand fruit to touch” — and ponders the years he spent on the ladder trying to pick every last one. As sleep sets in, he reasons that he’s mostly satisfied, but can’t help but think of the few apples he dropped and those few ripe ones still waiting on the bough.

When I started to clean out my desk at the Daily Pilot this week — a job that I would have happily traded for picking apples, considering how much dusty paper I’ve accumulated over 3 1/2 years — I had a little of the feeling Frost does in that poem. Each folder or notebook or loose page brought back a memory of some place I had visited, some person I had spent a day or more with. And even though nearly every memory brought back a smile, I was left with a little regret as well.

There are some people whose work is never done, and reporters are among them. Every time we cover a fascinating story, there are countless others that we’re letting pass by. Sometimes, we can double back to catch the ones we missed, but with the fast pace at which news travels, a few gems always fall through the cracks.

So this is a restless farewell to Newport-Mesa, which I am leaving this week to serve as city editor of our sister papers the Glendale News-Press and Burbank Leader. Tuesday marked my last day at the Pilot, and as I began clearing my desk for someone who will hopefully keep it much tidier than I did, I pondered the people I might have called, the doors I might have knocked on, the schools or businesses I might have visited.

As I said, the work of covering a community is never done. But that aside, I have few regrets going out.

I arrived here in February 2005 after driving cross-country from Connecticut, my hands still freezing from the recent New England blizzard and looking forward to covering the education beat in a more forgiving climate. The first few weeks on the beat, like the first few weeks of any beat, were brutal. The Newport-Mesa Unified School District, OCC and the other sites around town were nothing but names to me, and there’s nothing more humbling for a reporter than knowing less about your subject than your readers.

After two years, I had learned more about the Newport-Mesa education world than I ever imagined I would, and I moved on to the business beat — more names, more institutions, more places to memorize. Not all of that is exhilarating, of course, not when you’re pounding out two stories a day and attending meetings that drag late into the night. But along the way, you meet some remarkable characters, and Newport-Mesa didn’t disappoint me in that regard.

One object I found when cleaning out my desk was a book lent to me by the family of Tyler Norman, a former OCC student who battled autism his entire life and emerged as a skilled documentary filmmaker. The first time I saw Norman, he spoke at a Newport-Mesa special education meeting and declared, in highly articulate terms, his dream to make a new film version of “The Ten Commandments.” I tracked him over the next few months and learned a lot about autism, a lot about overcoming obstacles and, in tribute to Norman’s ambition, even more about shooting documentaries.

Other names jumped out as I sifted through those old files. There was Dan Marcheano, the Arches Restaurant owner who turned his business into a virtual shrine to the U.S. Marines. There was Ryan Strassburg, who worked at a Christmas tree lot to help supplement his music career. There was Werner Escher, the international marketing director for South Coast Plaza, who once took me to lunch at a swank restaurant and then eloquently explained that his property was not classified as a “mall,” no matter what Wikipedia claimed.

It’s people like these that make reporting a fun job, and in 3 1/2 in Newport-Mesa, I’ve only touched on a few. But as Frost wrote in another poem, “way leads on to way.” Now another community beckons, and it’s time for me to step aside and leave the Pilot in other capable hands.

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com.