2011-01-13 - 1:10 p.m.
I was in Oslo when our current president was inaugurated, and so I grabbed all the newspapers there and brought them home with me. The president was on the cover of each of them, the images covering nearly the entirety of the page ones. I'd packed the two-year-old newspapers in some boxes but last night I found them. I've always liked newspapers. As a kid, I picked up the Times-News to scan the front page, to see if the Pirates had won and to see if Dad had written anything. His Sunday column ran on his Outdoors page, but he was a regular reporter, too, and so I'd see his reports from city council meetings and feature stories about sled-dog teams and long-lost second cousins visiting from Ireland. When Ryan got older, he delivered the paper to our neighborhood and if he was sick, I'd get up at 4:30, in the cold and the dark, and throw the papers at each of the 92 front doors. Sometimes, if they were up, Dad would drive me around, or Mom would.
After I graduated from college, it took me a little while but I got the job I wanted, which was to be a reporter at a small newspaper just outside the city. For a while, I loved it, those days of 40 phone calls and a handful of interviews and entire days of nothing but subjects, verbs, commas, quotation marks. I loved newspapers, too. I read many of them, big ones, small ones. I always had ink on my fingers.
I also read about newspapers. I read that John Updike had gotten his start at a newspaper and that made my heart skip a beat. I read The Sun Also Rises and paid close attention to the parts about the newspaper work, the passages that happened just before Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn and that guy Mike got drunk. I applied to go to graduate school for newspapers but instead one day lost my love for newspapers and quit the business altogether. That was a little while ago.
I don't think about newspapers as much as I used to, but I can't help but notice, now and then. They're in movies, in novels, in Beatles' songs. Newspapers are in photographs: folded up on cafe tables, spread out and catching the wind on someone's lunch break, folded and hiding a gun in another kind of movie. Their white is a beautiful kind of white. Their folds are luxurious. Folded-over once and jabbed in the crook of the arm, they are all possiblity, the news not yet read. Splayed out on a picnic table, they are old, spent, near-trash.
What I'm saying is that I know they're going to die one day and I don't want them to. My dad has been at the paper since 1979, and he's still there, and, sure, he's got some years left doing just what he's been doing. And it won't be tomorrow and not the next day but, still, things will keep getting faster and faster. And one day, of course, newspapers are going to die, just go away, and maybe that means something about my dad, too, and some days the only thing I'm sure about is that I don't want newspapers to die.
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