Well, as an editor said, that sure went fast.

Certainly did.

It seems like just a few weeks ago that I walked into an office in Kirkland and began working at the smallest newspaper I’d been with since graduating from college in the ‘60s. As I wrote then, in August, I was filling in for a reporter who was on medical leave, and he’s recovered, doing fine, and he’s back at work, so I’m not.

As I also wrote then, in pondering the roles of information and newspapers in an age of tiny smartphone screens, the weeks here have been a learning experience, working on a weekly paper in my hometown after a career spent on a big-city metro, The Seattle Times.

I wish I could say I’ve discovered some answers. I haven’t.

In a way, the work turned out to be like what I’d done nearly my entire life. Spell the names right. Make sure the addresses are good. Try to write so someone might read it.

The experiences also solidified my thinking about what’s the basis of reporting, the sense of discovery, the sense of surprise.

A story about what seemed like just a foreclosed house on Seventh Avenue turned out to involve a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars business collapse. An apartment project on Lake Washington Boulevard revolved around the ideas of an engaging guy from Tibet.

But a couple of the major things I thought about weren’t even really in Kirkland, although I was working for the Kirkland Reporter.

One was the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, which makes its Eastside landfall in Medina.

Yet that bridge largely determined Kirkland’s fate, since the city virtually had been destroyed by the Mercer Island Floating Bridge in 1940, allowing Bellevue to eclipse what had been the bigger city to the north.

That bridge, part of SR 520, also largely determined my fate, and the fates of thousands of other drivers who used it daily.

It allowed me to live one place and work in another. At about five hours a week spent in its four lanes, I figure that about five years of my life passed staring at its concrete over more than 40 years.

Because of the profession I was in, 520 also had other profound effects.

A few years ago, I was surprised to be thumbing through some fading clippings at The Times and noticed an article about 520, illustrated with elaborate graphics, of how the state was considering putting in reversible lanes to solve traffic jams.

“Wow!” I thought. “This is pretty interesting. I wonder who wrote this?”

Then I looked at the byline. I wrote it. In 1970. Now, only 44 years later, in 2014, the bridge might be replaced, leading to a certain skepticism about when people say they’re going to do things and when they get done.

There was also another aspect, of other memories, of crooked toll collectors caught pocketing dimes and quarters in the 1970s, of kids in a Saab convertible who died while apparently adjusting the car’s radio on the bridge in 1993, of a thing called the Trans-Lake Study that went on for years in the late 1990s, looking at everything from a tunnel under Lake Washington — one end would have to be at Lake Union and the other in Redmond — to a mythical third lake bridge, which would have dumped eight lanes of traffic at about Juanita Drive.

One event I’ve never been able to erase from my memory took place in September, 1998, when Stephanie Breeding died on the bridge.

She was 17, a passenger in the back of an SUV that went off the bridge near Foster Island, at the west end.

Two young men in front survived. Stephanie, trapped in the back in the shallow water, died.

She’d gone to Lake Washington High School, then transferred to Mt. Si High in Snoqualmie, and I went there to learn about her; inevitably, a receptionist said the school couldn’t divulge anything, because of confidentiality laws.

As I turned to leave, and as I’ll never forget, the receptionist said one more thing.

“I suppose I could tell you about Oprah,” she said.

I turned around, and agreed the Oprah Winfrey show probably wasn’t a secret, and then learned how Stephanie had undergone a heart transplant a year earlier, gone on the Oprah show to tell people not to be discouraged, and I wondered why someone would survive all that and then die on the bridge.

I never learned that answer, either.

In those years, my wife and I also had our own kids going to Lake Washington, and Friday night would come, and they’d say they were going into Seattle, and I’d watch them leave in the old 1986 car we’d bought them, and wonder if we should throw our arms around them and hug them, since we’d possibly never see them again.

We never did that, either. Embarrassment is everywhere. They didn’t die. Sometimes our fears are unfounded.

But it was partly such thoughts that led me to write an article about 520 and its proposed tolls, scheduled to start in December, for the Kirkland Reporter, to try to explain how millions of license-plate pictures and toll transactions will be handled, and how it’s proved to be a daunting task, now a year behind schedule.

I hope it all works, barely a month from now. I’ll be among the people vigorously applauding. I’ve been waiting a long time.

Finally, along with such also-unanswered questions as whether it’s reasonable to print articles on physical paper when they’ve probably been posted on the paper’s Web site days or hours before — something I don’t think anyone in the news business has resolved — there were the truly important stories.

Those are the ones I didn’t write.

Part of those thoughts developed from a visit my wife and I made to some new houses on Rose Hill in about 2004.

The houses were cute. They looked like cottages. They also got all sorts of special breaks to allow them to be built, like 2,000-square-foot lots.

As we went through one of them, I noticed a gas stove in the living room. Then I noticed there was no furnace. The entire house was heated by the gas stove, which worked fine, but which also meant the builder didn’t have to invest in expensive things like ductwork.

Yet when the costs were calculated, the houses came in at over $400 a square foot, even with the shared common spaces and no furnaces.

How, I wondered, could this be considered affordable housing. I even asked some people about that, like my editors and Larry Phillips, chair of the King County Council.

The general answer was that it was all part of the new economy, or probably the state Growth Management Act, which restricted the supply of land. Seattle was special.

The richest guy in the world lived a couple of miles away, in Medina. The Internet was changing the world. In 1992, Fortune magazine put that richest guy, Bill Gates, and Seattle Mayor Norm Rice and others on its cover, naming Seattle the best city in the country for business.

So I didn’t write that story.

Now I’ve just finished a 2009 book titled, “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense,” about the failure of Lehman Brothers in New York in 2008, which set off our present economic despairs.

It’s largely about the housing bubble, and reading it, I thought about how Kirkland houses once cost $40,000, and then they sold for $400,000, and surely it seemed they would never go above that, but then they sold for $800,000, and then $1.5 million in April 2008 — that really happened to one Kirkland house I’m aware of — and how somehow it all seemed natural, that that was the way the world should be, that the streets naturally should be filled with Range Rovers.

As we’re learning now, perhaps it wasn’t so natural.

So, as I ruminate over what’s the right strategy for journalism — maybe somewhere between 10,000-word Sunday New York Times Magazine articles and 140-character Tweets — I think about how with my now-perfect second-guessing, I wish I had written some of the stories I didn’t write, and how there’s certainly something really important occurring right now, but no one sees it.

I think that’s the true value of journalism, and reporters, and newspapers. Sometimes, occasionally, they do see such things, and that’s something good.

I wonder if this article will fit on an iPhone screen.