Sometimes the smallest moments have the biggest impact, so I like to write about the tiny things that felt huge to me.
Also, I love sharing my grandmother's journals, tiny books full of a life that was of huge importance to me.
Print newspapers may be dying, but they’re not dead yet — and neither are their readers, I’m pleased to report.
In fact, there’s enough people that still read actual newspapers that I often lose out to them when I want to treat myself to a copy of the New York Times. Like one Saturday when my husband and I embarked on a quest to buy one, but found every copy sold out at every store we visited.
That was cool.
Why? Because even though I came home without a newspaper to read that day, I loved learning that there are plenty of other people who still want them, including another couple who was far more dedicated to their purchase than my husband and I were.
“They take turns getting here at 5 a.m. to make sure they get a copy, one morning the husband is here, the next the wife is,” the manager of a Bay Area grocery store told me when I asked how many copies they stock: “Five, and they go fast.”
I don’t know why that couple was so determined to get a newspaper, as I wasn’t getting up before dawn to track them down and ask, but I loved learning that they exist, and still smile every time I think about them.
I also loved learning how many avid newspaper fans live in my hometown of Santa Cruz, where the bookshop downtown stocks nine copies of the daily NYT and 40 of the Sunday edition, “and we sell out every day,” the manager told me.
Best of all, though, is how many newspaper fans are in Ukiah, because there are just enough that I can usually find a copy of the NYT at our downtown bookshop without getting up before the sun.
But why do I want a printed newspaper at all, when it’s so much easier to read news online? Well, I need a break from screens, for one, but mostly it’s because I love newspapers. Print
journalism is not only my chosen profession, it is a craft I admire,
done by people I admire.
And why the NYT? Because I enjoy it, have ever since it was assigned to me as required reading for a journalism course in college. And, frankly, just like a chef who doesn’t care
to cook at home after working in the kitchen all day, I prefer sitting down to read a newspaper that I had absolutely no part in putting out.
Like
the mornings I rode the ferry to my newspaper job across
the water from Seattle, a commute I spent reading the Post-Intelligencer
cover-to-cover. Not just because I was a captive audience, but
because that paper featured of the best writers I've ever read, and I am
still sad that it stopped printing for good 15 years ago.
But for me, the P-I, and every other newspaper that has stopped printing, still lives on. Just as many believe that a person doesn’t truly die until the last person who knew them dies, I believe that print newspapers aren’t dead as long as people like me are here
to remember them. And even if everyone stopped printing newspapers tomorrow,
they won’t truly be dead until everyone who loves them dies.
Like me, and like this reader who wrote me recently:
“Two very solid human interest stories on today’s front page, thank you for sharing those pieces with the readers. The valor piece was especially noteworthy in depth and the soul factor.
I believe so much in having a local paper and I've been subscribing to the UDJ print version since the early 1990s. I still love print and the labor that goes into creating it.”
That was super cool.
So, for now, and many years to come, I declare that “print is not dead, long live print!”
And what’s even better than reading a newspaper? Watching one being printed!
Meet my grandmother: a very persnickety and frugal
woman who liked both opera and fast food, ice skating and football — and writing down everything she did each day in tiny notebooks that I love reading.
The details she shares make me laugh, give me comfort, and, most importantly, finally let me inside the mind of the woman who served as my North Star, a guiding, stabilizing light that I very much needed with both of my parents gone by the time I was 20.
But much like a star, she
offered me light without warmth, assurance without affection, keeping her vulnerable side hidden from me, only sharing her most human thoughts and feelings with
her journals.
So finding those notebooks after she died was doubly wonderful, because they not only gave me my North Star back, they gave me something she never could: Her.
That was cool.
The entries included below are from May of 1999, when she was 83 and living in a mobile home
park in Santa Cruz, Calif, which she chose because it was near the
popular surfing spot Pleasure Point, where she loved to walk by most
days to watch the waves and surfers.
I wrote more about her life in this post, or you can hear it and see her notebooks in this video:
The first half of May she was in Paris, a city she liked to visit every year in trips she usually made by herself, though one year she invited me. (Read both of our journal entries during that trip here.) Once she got back to Santa Cruz, grandma went back to walking “on the cliff,” also known as East Cliff Drive, keeping tabs on her next-door neighbor Larry for someone named Loretta, and searching many department stores for a 34D bra she could send to her sister-in-law in Ohio.
More on these entries: I
found a bag full of small Mead notebooks after my grandmother died,
only learning then that for decades my grandmother wrote down every day when
she woke, what she ate, what movie she went to see, any mail and calls
she received, then what she read and watched on TV before bed. I find the details of her days fascinating, fun and very soothing to read.
More on my grandmother: Though she never lived with another person or even a pet when I knew her, I also never knew her to be lonely. She was an extremely independent
woman who did not marry my grandfather when she became pregnant in
1943, and instead raised my mother on her own in 1950s Los Angeles.
