Tuesday, September 20, 2011

No news is bad news

Thank god for the newspaper and the pleasure it brings my parents. Every day it arrives (or rather they arrive—the Chronicle and the Times) looking nearly the same as the day before: the big banner name the same, the march of vertical columns the same, the fold across the middle the same. But in the fine print, lies adventure. And every day, my parents eagerly pick it up and read it and clip it and argue about it. One will lose the section he or she was reading and accuse the other of taking it. And, oh, the joy, when it is found (though the recriminations continue)! The rustle and the crunch are the music of their lives. The sad sorting into recycling (how hard to let last Sunday’s edition go!) is the backbone of their calendar. And even before the daily reading is done, they look forward eagerly to the evening news on TV so they can relive it and savor it. Without the newspaper, I think they would die of boredom.

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