No Point in Rushing the End Times

That is a dreaded sight!
An empty driveway;
not a newspaper in sight.

What is morning without coffee and a couple of newspapers?
The New York Times and the Arizona Daily Star?
The latest in a long line of newsprint stretching back sixty years?

I know, although I will not admit it,
that news by newsprint is morbid.
I first subscribed to the NYT when, in the early sixties,
a Western Edition was first printed in Los Angeles.
Almost always, ever since, there have been at least two, and sometimes three,
newspapers in our driveway every morning.

I am not opposed to electronic print media.
I am altogether too familiar with logging on to online editions
of newspapers I have become familiar with,
only to have the screen lurch in protest that I have not paid to read them digitally,
so they go go blank, and then present me with gobs of guilt at being a freeloader,
and then proffer redemption by credit card subscription.
There is no admission that I have, often for decades,
paid for their paper editions even when they were hardly worth reading,
full of local sports and second-hand national news.

What is morning without coffee and a couple of newspapers?
No matter that I might already have gotten up in the middle of the night
for one reason or another and, since I was already up,
stumbled to the computer for news, should there be some.

Morning is coffee and a couple of newspapers,
and Mari across the table, finishing a letter or two,
clearing our throats with caffeine,
gradually finding the pitch together,
antiphonally weaving what we have read into a tune.

"Codger!", I hum to myself when we pause.
"I am an old codger who believes in newsprint,
who believes in coffee and ceremony and printed liturgy."

"Let there be newspapers on the driveway! Amen, and Amen!"

Comments

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