Newspaper Obit

We don’t often think of technologies as characters who shaped us, friends we’ve lost touch with, mentors who remade our minds, but they are. 

I can’t remember when I first read a newspaper. They were part of the ordinary furnishings of my world before I knew what a newspaper was exactly and before I ever read one.  I recall when I was nine noticing a story on the latest expansion of human lifespans. It said that women lived longer than men. The paper had been lying on the dining table at home. I looked up from it and asked my mother in the kitchen, was it true women lived longer than men? Why? Her answer combined something to do with smoking rates and the way God made us. I was satisfied and even pleased because my father didn’t smoke and my mother was several years older than my father, so I guessed they’d come out about even in the end. 

In the actual end, my father died a dozen years before my mother anyway, and wouldn’t you know it, his lungs did him in. But back in 1971, things seemed satisfactory, and I didn’t apply the news to myself because, well, what was old age to me then? It’s not that I thought I was immortal. I was nine. I knew I could die. I knew a bus could hit me when I crossed the street. Adults were reminding me of things like that all the time, especially in our Baptist church. But age? Age is irrelevant to death when you are nine.

The next faint snapshot of a specific encounter with a newspaper that I have still in my mind is of a political cartoon that came out the following year. I spotted it at my grandparents’ house. My grandfather had left his daily paper folded to the Opinions section, and the cartoon caught my eye. It was not a clever cartoon. It depended on a stupid pun. It was a drawing of a giant heap of wooden poles and a small bird with the head of a man pecking at the base of the heap. The bird’s human head was a caricature of the Democrat’s candidate for president, George McGovern, who was in the midst of a losing campaign against the incumbent, Richard Nixon, a caricature of whom was sitting smugly on top of the pile. The caption read, “All the polls.”

I didn’t read a paper often until I was in high school, at which point I got in the habit of checking the sports and weather in the papers hanging on wooden spindles racked in the school library. I don’t know why the weather section intrigued me. In the mid/late seventies, the newspaper weather consisted of a small black-and-white map of isobars laid over an outline of the United States. The part that fascinated me was below the map, where historic temperature and precipitation highs and lows for the date and the month were updated. For some reason, I had an apocalyptic craving for the onset of a new ice age. After a particularly stormy winter on Long Island my sophomore year, I read a magazine article speculating on the possibility of the return of ice ages, and I was hooked on fantasies of encroaching glacial sheets. Of course, I was to be sorely disappointed, as the whole world warmed around me for the rest of my life.

In college, I read the daily campus paper mostly for any articles with the bylines of my friends. Two friends were dedicated contributors, one rising to editor and moving on to a career in journalism, editing a paper in Miami for many years. It never occurred to me to write for the paper myself, although I was majoring in English. I thought deejaying midnight shows at the campus radio station and doing theater were cooler.

A year of working in a cubicle at a giant New Jersey insurance firm confirmed me in the habit of daily paper reading, although I spent more time on science magazines. I read pretty much anything to cleanse my palate of the piles of insurance documents. That’s where I began the habit of reading poetry and Proust on my breaks and it was there I began stealthily composing poems at my desk.

Once I repaired to the graduate program in creative writing at the U of Montana, I made acquaintances with other students who wrote for either the Kaiman or the Daily Missoulian, both of which I read religiously. Being rather skimpy papers, I got in the habit of reading them end to end. Other people complain of newsprint getting on their fingers, but I have dry hands and never had that problem. I began following comic strips and regular opinion columnists. I lived above a coffee shop and assembled the day's paper from the leftover sections scattered around. To this day, I have a soft spot for the memory of leafing through the news in a quiet cafe on a snowy morning.

I learned that almost everyone felt obliged to complain about the local paper. When I began studying at Emory, I applied my obsessive reading habits to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a more substantive paper that even garnered the occasional Pulitzer Prize, but people spoke as dismissively of it as Missoulians had spoken of the Missoulian. The same would prove true for the Birmingham News in Birmingham and the Salt Lake Tribune in Salt Lake. It was practically a citizenship requirement to disparage the local paper, regardless of politics.

I wouldn’t say I loved them all, but I found something to love about each of them. Although I read national and international papers of record as well, and although I perused whatever got shoved under the door of rooms at hotels when I traveled, I was most interested in the local rag wherever I lived. Over in central Pennsylvania, one of my brothers-in-law even made a late-twentieth century career as a printing press operator for the papers of the towns near him. Whenever I landed in a new place, short term or long, I checked out the local press.

At each stop of my life, a different section of the local paper would attract my most intense attention. In Salt Lake it became the obituaries. Mormons have a distinctive language to their obituaries, involving stakes and missions, sealings “for time and eternity,” and they themselves tend to be long-lived and fecund. For a while I would check the Trib religiously for any centenarians and to find that day’s leader for the most surviving descendants. Some of the numbers were quite impressive. Humans prove most Darwinian when they fancy themselves anti-Darwinian.

By the time I reached my forties, I had a subscription and a set ritual, at least when I was home. As soon as I got up, I would get the Trib from outside my front door and spread it on the breakfast table. I would fillet the meaningful sections, separating out the advertising inserts. After making my tea and breakfast, I sat down to read the whole thing from back to front, then returned to whip through the crossword. I kept scissors handy for any clippings I thought I could use in a class. The rest went straight into the recycling bin. The next morning, I’d do it again. For a while, my wife was a regular contributor to the neighborhood section, posting stories on the solar house up the road or the activists around the corner. Once in a while, I’d spot a letter or an Op Ed piece by an acquaintance or a colleague. Once I wrote a letter in myself, in response to a rather unfortunate tirade against archaeologists who challenged the accuracy of the Book of Mormon. My excommunicated LDS academic colleagues were gleeful, but I only nudged that beehive once.

I would read the occasional doom-&-gloom piece about the dying of great newspapers and their traditions, and I could see the way more and more provincial papers were being snapped up and bundled by national corporations. But I still savored the ritual of my morning paper and still loathed getting news from any sort of screen. I didn’t see myself giving up on newsprint or magazines, ever, but personal events, as much as shifting technologies, shifted me. 

After I was early and unexpectedly widowed, I had a different reason for reading the obits one week. It felt like I had stepped through the looking glass to see the words I had written for my late wife printed there in the paper on my breakfast table. And then, for a long time, I lost interest in reading the obits again. I continued to read the daily Trib for a little while, but more disruptions followed. A month after being widowed, I was hospitalized after a severe, open femur fracture. Scarcely two months later, I fell again and had a slew of fractures requiring surgery on three limbs simultaneously. In the midst of all this, I fell improbably in love.

That was spring. It was summer, suddenly. I was in a wheelchair but constantly traveling. My new love, your mother, disdained newspapers, in part because she was much younger than me. I took a sabbatical leave from my university. We spent a year traveling the Southern Hemisphere. We were rarely in any location for more than a few weeks. There’s a picture your mother took of me reading a local paper in a hotel lobby in New Zealand a month or two before we got engaged, but by and large we either ignored the news or read it on our laptops when we could.

We married in Namibia the following spring. The next summer we spent in a village in British Columbia where the local paper was free and published only fortnightly, although we looked through each issue assiduously. That autumn we moved to a hamlet in the south Utah desert and there was no local paper there, no newspaper delivery. I still received the Trib or sometimes the Deseret News in my hotel room during the school year, when I commuted four hours each way, each week to teach at my university. Years passed that way. You were born. We relocated and I took a new position at another university that wasn’t so far that I couldn’t come home in the evenings. My first year at my new job there were free paper copies of the New York Times in the foyer of my office, along with the campus weekly, but those were discontinued by my second year.

One day I realized I was reading the news from half a dozen sources every morning on my iPhone, and the last time I’d read a paper was on a visit to my in-laws, your grandparents in Salt Lake City. That was two or three years ago, and that’s been the case ever since.

The other morning I sat with your Grandpa Joe at his breakfast table, sharing sections of the Sunday paper and discussing the demise of print. He was studying the sports pages and I’d just read through the comics and obituaries. But while our conversation was lively, our reading was desultory, there being really nothing newsworthy in the paper we hadn’t seen or read in more detail elsewhere. That was until Joe called my attention to the front-page notice of the death of a wealthy Salt Lake businessman who had once hired me to do some research for him. I read the article thoroughly, and told Joe a few anecdotes about the man himself as I’d known him. Then I found a pair of scissors and cut the article out carefully. 

Now I don’t have a clue what to do with that clipping, the first I’ve cut in nearly a decade. I can’t forward it to anyone directly. I may take a picture of it with my phone and then toss the pointless paper scrap. There's no genuine obituary for newsprint yet, despite all the preemptive requiems for the technology, but it dawns on me that my once-faithful companion the newspaper is already all but lost to me.