The newspaper at the end of the drive

Sunday mornings I stagger out and walk down the drive in the dew filled morning with the Canadian geese honking and my neighbors homes looking less suburban in the christening light of dawn and there on the end of the drive in blue is my newspaper. It is a fat rolled information log of New York Times descent that I scoop up and carry back in for my coffee and pancakes to start my Sunday ritual. That is until about a week ago when the my delivery was unceremoniously halted for nonpayment. The digital age just took another small step into my life.

I had the three day delivery package of Friday Saturday and Sunday. My suburb of Chicago is a bit of a stones throw from NY so I pay a little  more I figure. And I have bounced along paying my roughly forty dollars a month for the extreme pleasure of seeing that blue rolled harbinger of the world at the end of my driveway. I cant tell you how upset I was the few times it did not arrive, harassing some poor customer service rep who assured me it would appear in a few hours. It never did, but that was related to the fifteen or sixteen year old or the mom working the night shift who flung my paper in the wee hours of dawn.

But the reason my delivery stopped was that my bill had grown out of control. I am not sure why but suddenly  I was down one hundred and forty bucks. And the bill had a way of climbing. Maybe late fees, maybe I missed a payment. But suddenly I was coasting toward two hundred bucks for the privilege of having a newspaper at the end my driveway. Times being what they are I let it go and the Times declared my account suspended and my Sunday ritual changed. No longer was the paper there waiting for me and no longer did I feel that excitement when I picked up the voice of the world.

It had been replaced by a nanosecond of anticipation in my Kindle. .99 was the cost for a quick download and just like that the newspaper at the end of my drive had been replaced. I was not crazy about this development but I was used to reading on my Kindle and like everything else it had become driven by economics. Sitting down with my coffee and small screen may not be the same as the spread out newspaper, but it was better than nothing and I could afford it.

I promise myself that I will straighten out my account and pay up and get my delivery fired up again. I do want that moment of seeing the paper lying there waiting for me as a sort of postscript of the week. It had become a marker for one week ending and another beginning. But there is that feeling that this ritual might be historical and I might just get used to the digital paper and never go back.

 I guess I could leave my kindle on the end of the drive and pick that up. Or have the newspaper lady fling it there to give it authenticity. It might work.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Waiting in the Green Room at WGN Chicago

You have glimmers of something passing. Sometimes you just know that what you are seeing might not be around too long. Maybe it was the space reserved for the microphone from the Scopes monkey trial. Maybe it was the foundation of the Chicago Tribune building inscribed on Lower Michigan with Culled in 1920. The slight wisp of snow in the cold darkness as a guard buzzes you into the WGN studio in the bowels of the old Tribune building and you follow a man up to the green room, passing the cases where old microphones reside and black and white pictures of celebrities long passed. Then you sit down and wait and there is no one there in the green room, just you and rows and rows of pictures of people who look curiously human. The celebrity quality is gone and they are just men and women with gray hair, getting old. A thirty minute radio interview on WGN in Chicago is something you want to hang on too. The man doing the interview is the son of a legendary newspaper man from the Chicago Sun Times. You can hear the footfalls and you shake hands and he tells you to relax and do whatever the *&%$ you want. All Chicago old school. Then you are on in front of the WGN microphone telling your story for thirty minutes. You try and imagine people all over Chicago waking up and hearing your voice, but your mind doesn't work that way. All you think is that it is just the two of you talking and it doesn't go near long enough. There are a million things you want to say, but you just can't get it all in and then you are walking back through the silent building and down through the guard room and suddenly outside in the cold. It's barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Chicago is empty and just waking up. You drive through the streets, knowing you have used up one of the moments of your life that will never come back. You hit the city limits, then slip into the past.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January