The Paper Chase

A little while ago, my sister, Paula, posted a lament on Facebook related to the skyrocketing cost of her daily paper.  She has been reading the San Francisco Chronicle, cover to cover, every day for as long as I can remember.  Like me, she doesn’t particularly like e-readers, and prefers the real thing in periodicals, newspapers, and books.  Plus, that paper has contributed to some of her best tales (like running out to get it in her coat over a slip, one day, before work, and then forgetting that was all she had on, and almost going to work like that). I may have gotten that story a little bit twisted, but I think I’m close. Anyway, she decided to fork over the funds and continue receiving her paper each day, despite the exorbitant price.

In a similar vein, I was at a home show a month or so ago, and the Seattle Times had a booth there.  I decided to sign up for the daily paper, since our local rags don’t publish daily (not do they have lots of national news).  I have grown weary of watching news on TV; it’s just the same 30 seconds over and over and over again (except for PBS Newshour, which I do love). 

I love everything about the newspaper: the feel of the pages, the rustling noise they make when I turn them, the more-in-depth information I can get from them…and the non-news bits.

 When I was a child, my dad tried to come home from work every day around 4:00 pm.  He and I would go downstairs to the family room, have a little drink together (I mentioned this in a previous blog post, and will again say that having a little bit of bourbon in the late afternoon with my father from the time I was about nine years old never seemed to hurt anyone), and watch chat shows while he read the paper.  I would wait (not so) patiently while he went through the “boring parts” (news) until he got to the section with comics and puzzles.  At that point, we would read the comics together, me perched on the arm of his big easy chair, and then we’d do the Jumble.  I think the comics page and those puzzles probably played a decent role in my early reading skills (that, plus my sister forcing me to read “Stage Coach Days,” which I bet Paula still has in her vast library).  I would even ask him to do the Bridge puzzle with me, but I didn’t have a clue what all of the information meant, and I’m not sure my dad even knew how to play bridge.  We typically skipped that one.

So, once my Seattle Times started showing up on my doorstep each morning, I dove right in and was reunited with all of my old friends, including the comics and the puzzles.  Now, when I turn the pages in the news sections, I think of my sister, and wonder if she’s having her morning cup of hot water and reading her beloved Chronicle at the same time that I am having my coffee and reading my Times.  I think of my brother’s house in Idaho, when we visit each summer, and how much I love coming downstairs, hearing the rustling even before I hit the landing,  and seeing the kitchen table with the paper on it, and Marc or Janet (my brother and sister-in-law) there reading through glasses, neither of them having yet put in their contacts.  But mostly, I think of my dad and doing the Jumble and reading comics with him every day for years.

Last summer, when we were visiting with Marc and Janet, my brother and I did the Jumble together.  Again, I was transported back in time.  It was heavenly.

So, I hope that Paula is reading this, and Janet, too.  Keep getting the real paper.  It’s not just about the news; it’s about a way of life that is valuable and so easily remembered.  It’s about comfort and happiness and warmth.  Not a bad investment, if you ask me.

Mission: Aborted

Sometimes, our differences are brought to light only during shared experiences.  And, those experiences can help to teach us that differences don’t indicate that one person is wrong and the other right; we can simply be different.  The good news is that these little life experiments can really shed some light into the minds and experiences of others.

Recently, my spousal equivalent and I decided to spend a couple months in California.  We could visit my kids, I could work in some much-needed meetings with my non-prof clients-to-be, and we could actually see some sunshine and feel some warmer temperatures.  We’d do all of this from the comfort (a relative term) of the AirStream Ambassador that Ron has owned for a number of years, but which we have not used since we met each other five years ago.  The silver twinkie has been in storage for quite a while, and Ron had the floor and counters replaced last winter in anticipation of spending some quality time in RV parks and campgrounds.

We really should have had a test run, even if in our own driveway.

Based on Ron’s assurances that we’d have plenty of space and all the comforts necessary for happy living, I flew down to Sacramento (as I had a commitment there that we necessitated a quick travel time), and Ron met me down there on a Sunday night with Lucy, the trailer.

And, it was there in a trailer park in Loomis, California, that we were made glaringly aware of a number of things that caused the experiment to fail.  We do have high hopes of making some adjustments (some to the trailer, some to each of our attitudes and expectations) that will allow us to use Lucy again in the future, but this journey was definitely not great, and so we came back home to our cold, cloudy, spacious home.  (Spacious is a key word here).

Here are some differences in our general needs and lifestyles that we became aware of:

       One of us is modest, and the other is, well, not.  I don’t like to even imagine having to walk through a public space (trailer park) in a robe in order to get a hot shower.  Since it happened forty years ago, I will freely admit that I somehow made it through four years of high school without ONCE taking a shower in P.E.  I also can’t be anything close to comfortable, to this day, taking showers in communal areas.  Not even the local YMCA, where most of the women there are twenty years older than I am, and gravity has caused all of their sexually-oriented body parts to be centrally located.  Can’t do it.  Ron, on the other hand, is rumored to have come upon a snowmelt stream once while hiking and, having hurt his knee and needing some of the icy water’s healing properties, simply stripped naked on the trail in front of a lot of people and waded into the waters.  I have also witnessed his “dropping trou” outside a backpacking tent at a crowded campground in order to crawl in and not have to undress in the tiny space inside.  I see this as total insanity, while he thinks it’s just normal.  Since the trailer, on that first night, had NO window covering up in the tiny bath area, I couldn’t pee comfortably, even in the dark.  Egads.

    One of us camped extensively from a young age, and the other did not.  Ron started going out on horseback for weeks at a time with his grandfather before he even started kindergarten, to bounty hunt stock-killing critters (cougars, coyotes, etc) in eastern Nevada.  I didn’t even sleep in a tent until I was in my late twenties, and then it was in tents in which I could easily stand up, get dressed, etc.

    One of us is a human heater, and the other has Reynaud’s Syndrome.  Ron routinely was throwing off the comforter at night, and my hands and feet just never seemed to get warm at all.

    One of us is seriously organized, and is thrilled by order.  The other is more disorganized, and lacks the ability to ever throw anything away.  Case in point: rather than add our aluminum cans to our municipal recycling, we save them in huge plastic bags and then bring them down to California like so many Santa’s bags full of clanging metal, because the localities up here do not have “paying” recycling plants.  The result of keeping a jillion aluminum cans in bags littering the garage for a year: $48.  I have now announced that I will hand Ron 50 bucks in cash each January 1, and put the f^%$* cans in the recycling each week.

    One of us is clumsier than the other.  Having to walk sideways like a fiddler crab to get past a bed to the bathroom area or a closet (which, incidentally, will NOT open if the bed is made up; don’t get me started) resulted in my having multiple bruises on my legs from running into corners of things, and finally a blue, painful lump an inch HIGH next to my elbow from ramming my arm into a wall corner.

    One of us is much more annoyed by water being on the floor from an unnamed leak in the roof, while the other just flops an area rug over it and calls it good.

You get the drift….

So, we decided to come home.  We also discussed the fact that compromise is lovely when each person is giving something up, but if my compromising means being more uncomfortable and his compromising means being LESS uncomfortable, it’s not really a compromise.  And, lastly, we got to laughingly talk about how we love our house SO MUCH that neither of us is really all that disappointed to be home.

So, we’ll fix the leak, make sure all the windows are covered, change the bed formation just enough that I can get the closets open when it’s out, and I will put childproof cushioning on all those nasty wall corners that keep wanting to reach out and hurt me.  Then, we’ll try again.  But, next time, we’ll try it out for two or three days instead of two months, so that we can discover issues and return home and fix things without having to travel 1500 miles to do it.  We have also both agreed that my maximum survival time in Lucy is probably a week or less.

Live and learn…now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go take some Advil and put ice on my elbow.  😊