AUGUST 6, 2020 – After a two-week break from breaking news, I read many anxiety-enhancing articles in today’s paper version of . . . the paper.
Our delivery person never lands The Times close to our doorstep. Instead, the person randomly flings the paper at our front yard, where “All the News That’s Fit to Print” often falls among the shrubs.
Back when I was a young kid, the newspaper was delivered by one of the older Larkin boys. (One of their sisters was in my kindergarten class, and I often stopped by their house on the way home from school. The inside was dimly lit and filled with the chaos created by what seemed like a dozen other Larkin kids, though the total was probably closer to half a dozen.)
The Larkins rode old, off-brand bikes that reminded me of beat-up pick-up trucks, next to the newer, sleeker bicycles in the neighborhood. But despite living in loud, crowded quarters and riding clunker bikes, the Larkins delivered the Minneapolis Star on time, on target, every day, rain or shine, hot or cold. Every fortnight they stopped by in the evening “to collect,” and in exchange for payment, they’d hand my mom a receipt in the form of a small, perforated ticket separated carefully from a hard-bound subscription book.
The Star was a decent newspaper, or so it seemed, since my parents read it faithfully and thoroughly, and so I judged from the wide range of “funnies” and the sports section, when I was old enough to be a rabid Twins fan. By eighth grade—1967—I was reading serious articles. Johnson’s War was escalating and not a day passed when Vietnam didn’t command a headline. As the conflict dragged on, I wondered if it’d end before I turned 18, five years away.
Eventually, U.S. troops were withdrawn—five months after I’d turned 18.
With the drawdown of our forces in Vietnam, so declined the Minneapolis Star—according to my dad, a strident conservative. He dropped our subscription to that “liberal rag,” and replaced it with The Wall Street Journal, which he continued for the next 37 years. The Journal came by mail. I would’ve felt bad for the Larkins, except by that time, their family had moved.
I missed the “funnies” and baseball articles but learned to savor the summary of “big picture” news in the “World Wide” column under the front-page heading, “What’s News.” Gradually, I delved further into The Journal and found it broader and deeper than the local “liberal rag.”
To an aging Boomer, nothing’s more gripping than poring over an old-fashioned newspaper spread generously across a large table—instead of the living room floor, where I’d read in my youth. Back then news of the Vietnam War furrowed my brow. Now what give me anxiety are numerous catastrophes—each described in detail across pages far larger than any smartphone or tablet/laptop screen.
Perhaps my displeasure with our delivery person is misplaced. Maybe I owe the person a debt of gratitude . . . for trying to hide bad news writ large.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
