I have started getting the Valley News on weekends. They called me repeatedly until I relented. I used to work for a newspaper, and I know how hard it is for papers these days, they need subscribers, and guess I felt guilty. But weekends is all I have time for.
I took my Sunday paper out to the Woodstock Village Green in front of my apartment. I sat there on a shady bench with some very, very strong coffee I made and carried out in my brand-new “Vermont: We were green before green was cool” aluminum travel mug. I only drink one cup of coffee anymore, most days. And I can’t drink it later than 9:30 or 10 a.m. or I won’t sleep that night. I’m getting old. Back in college I drank coffee all day and night. Well, then again I make the coffee so strong now that one cup of mine is worth almost three normal cups anywhere else.
Right away I turned to news on the World Cup. I felt so sorry for Argentina. Something was going on at the end of the Green. A band playing guitar and a woman singing some folk-rock thing that was pretty good; lots of people with kids and dogs; at one point a huge pack of kids ran around the street that circles the Green, and I saw they all had American flags in their hair. I have no idea what that was about. I live in this town yet its goings-on are a total mystery to me.
After I figure out what to eat for lunch (which in my present state of non-appetite is a major hurdle), I’m going back out there with my laptop–I have a couple stories to finish up and tons of proofreading to do for the October issue of Celebration. I hope my battery lasts. But I can’t stay in here because even with all the shades open, my apartment is so dark it’s just depressing. There is also the danger that if I sit at my computer with Internet access, I will be lured away to watch Transformers cartoons. I am supposed to be using this weekend to catch up with work and chores. Now is not the time to decide I need to get acquainted with “Beast Wars”–a franchise that passed me by in the ’90s while I wrote undergraduate papers on Everyman, French Film and Decapitation in Japanese History.
So you broke down and subscribed to the local paper…think of it as helping some budding journalist get a start in their chosen career. We get the local paper too. There is usually a story about a car crash on the front page that I scan for names I may recognize. There are the obituaries, which I never used to read, but now do to see how many people I have outlived. Sometimes there are zany editorial entries that are amusing and give me a glimpse of some local issue I was not aware of. And then there is the daily Sudoku puzzle which I do over coffee. Is that worth $11 per month…right now it is.
Love, Dad
I started reading the obituaries to see, on average, how much longer I might have…
I always calculate how many famous people I’ve outlived. Right now I am neck-and-neck with Mozart, who did not quite make it to 36.
Dad, I still remember that front-page story in the Shawnee News-Star about the rusting culverts plaguing the city. Front-page, I tell you. Complete with huge photo of one of the culverts. Nothing that exciting has happened here, though there was a story about some local guy who built a giant wooden brontosaurus-shaped structure on his front lawn.