Passing Rain

Rain overnight.  Woke to soothing sound of dripping eaves.  All rain collection units filled now, water we will use for plants through the dry times.  One lone fisherman on the beach, working with a headlamp in the amber chill.  I will wet a line when the water gets above sixty degrees.  The guys you see out here now are all snow birds, for whom this weather is balmy.  It’s not.  I know it and the fish know it.

Managed an early run on the beach in spite of aching knees.  Saw many dead starfish; some immature Laughing Gulls; a substantial gang of Gray Gulls with a single Skimmer in their midst, looking lost.  Rolls of somehow comforting Payne’s Gray clouds, deepening in hue miles out where the rain still fell.

***

And now to the business at hand.  This is a bit like writing your own obituary; there’s no stiff yet, but there are large chunks of memory now inaccessible, and you’re starting to smell a little, so you make an effort to condense your life down to a few paragraphs, so your family, in their bottomless grief, won’t get it all wrong when you’re gone.  With that literary license in hand, I want to talk about newspapers, an elegy, if you will, somewhat premature, perhaps, but not by much.

I love newspapers.  I have a genetic predisposition to newspapers.  My great-grandfather was an early editor of the Tampa Tribune, in the city in which I was born.  He left a remarkable account of late 19th century Tampa in a series of remembrances he wrote and published in the paper late in life.  I didn’t know all that as a child, of course, and he was long dead by the time I was born, but I do remember my grandfather reading the morning Tribune in the extraordinary luminescence of the sun porch of their house on Watrous Avenue.  He read every page of every section in absolute silence and concentration.  In the evening, before supper, he read the Tampa Daily Times, which published every afternoon until 1958, when it was bought out by the Tribune.  Two daily newspapers, delivered to the door.  Amazing.

We had the Tribune delivered to our house as well, but not the Times, as I remember.  On Sundays there was a local radio program featuring a man who read the Trib comics aloud while you followed along.  Imagine that.

I have tried to read newspapers everywhere I’ve lived, and as my respect for the craft of news writing deepened, some newspaper writers have crept into my personal Pantheon of literary heroes.  Chief among those is one Herb Caen, who wrote a daily column– I said daily– for The San Francisco Chronicle from 1938 until 1996.  It was, and is, some of the best writing anywhere, particularly given how little turnaround there was for each piece, a penetrating and lovingly wrought portrait of the beautiful, grand, mundane and ugly elements of one of the world’s great cities.  Along the way Caen had considerable influence on culture and language, coining the term “beatnik,” and popularizing the term “hippie,” neither of which could have come from anywhere other than San Francisco.  I was fortunate to have lived in San Francisco near the end of Mr. Caen’s long career, and count among my greatest experiences reading his column over a cup or two of cappuccino in Malvina’s on Washington Square, before trudging back up Union Street, both humbled and inspired, to wrestle with my own imagery.

All of which leads us to the practice of a morning ritual here on the skinny island.  Rising before the sun each day, my wife and I adhere to this practice with little variation.  Whomever makes it to the little galley kitchen first starts the coffee, and feeds Pico, the inside cat.  (More on Pico in a later posting; there is some contention over how he spells his name.)  Then, one or the other of us will take food outside for Melba, the outside cat, and pick up the News-Journal, our local paper.

The coffee now ready, we settle into side by side chairs separated by a small table, and divide the paper.  My wife almost always begins with the main section, while I start in sports, moving quickly through Local and Accent, in that order, finishing those before she has completed the main.  More often than not, after completing his morning business in the litter box, the concrete evidence of which will later be dispatched in the paper’s plastic delivery bag, Pico will climb up on the table between us for a head scratch while I await the rest of the paper.

That’s it; nothing earth-shaking, really, just another thing mostly older people do the rest of the world can properly do without.  I get that, and though I personally lament the demise of newspapers around the country, (ours survives, but shrinks almost weekly,) the cutting of staffs and bureaus, the condensation of much of what remains into glib flashes and bad writing, I also understand the inevitability of change.  Perhaps unbelievably to some, I am learning to embrace social networking, and clearly have leapt feet first into blogging.  Lamenting change is generational; we all do it.  The problem, I think, lies not in lamenting change, but in finding it evil.  They are not the same.  Fast-paced technology and newspapers are not mutually exclusive, but there is only so much money and attention to go around.

I like holding a newspaper.  When you’re done you can wrap mullet in it, line a puppy box, or put it down for a drop cloth when painting.  Newspapers are compostable.  So, I will not read a newspaper on-line, not just yet.  And anyway, it will probably work out that newspapers will finally disappear for good about the time us codgers do.  That is fitting.  In the meantime, I have a morning ritual I want to keep, a lamentable loss, when it occurs, and this is an elegy.