I
love newspapers the way other addicts love different pursuits in sensuality. I
am aroused by front page headlines in 144 point type, especially when they
shout in red ink, the kind I used to write.
Traveling
friends have long brought me gifts from faraway places, crinkly copies of the
Jerusalem Post or the Moscow Times, Le Monde or The Scotsman or maybe the Times
of India, PM, or Washington Star. At age 12 I had my own subscription to the
Manchester Guardian Weekly, printed on lightweight paper for transport from
Britain.
A
year or so ago I decided to go cold turkey. After all, I had managed to stop
smoking a couple of decades before that, so I cancelled home delivery of four
daily newspapers. The papers were reachable online, something unimagined when I
was an 18-year-old police reporter. The switch from home delivery to computer
screen was like changing from gourmet meals to a feeding tube, doable if not
recommendable.
Spring
arrived this year with temptations. The New York Times offered weekend delivery,
Friday through Sunday, at a special rate. The Chicago Tribune had an even
better weekend offer, four days including Sunday, all at a low, low cost. There
were other offers, like the aroma of whiskey in the nostrils of a 12-stepper
taking step number 1, from the Wall
Street Journal and the Daily Southtown. These were offers nobody with black ink
in the veins could refuse. I signed up for all four.
It
was a summer of slow breakfasts and the accumulation of facts useful for a
Jeopardy watcher, a summer of newsprint stacks on flat surfaces all over my
home. My companion, OPCA/MSA, has let me gather the newspapers early in the
morning by opening my garage door, gently steering my rollator while using a
gripper mounted on a cane, like a hockey stick with a claw at the end, to pick
up each paper and plunk it into the rollator basket.
This
is no longer working very well and it won’t work at all when Chicagoland’s
season becomes more Chicagolike, with snow, ice and maybe a White Christmas.
Once more I’m cancelling all the newspaper deliveries, and thanking God for
computers, and for the gift of evolution that carried us all from quills to
Windows.
