Hardly a heap of trouble

If you get a chance, stop by a newspaper’s newsroom. Not a TV station’s newsroom.  Or a radio station’s newsroom (if it has one).  But a newspaper’s.

Because in it, you will witness marvelous feats of construction and architecture that defy not just gravity but common sense.

There will be desk after desk belonging to reporters and editors, of course. 

But here’s the miracle: On these desks, at odd angles, sit stacks upon stacks of books, folded-back magazines, notebooks, file folders, loose company memos, research papers, more file folders, greasy napkins, occasional coupons, some secret documents, still more file folders, old newspapers, love and hate letters, Slim Jim wrappers and unopened saltine packs, and envelopes – lots of envelopes – all at shaky heights that, could you climb them, would give you nosebleeds.

Look across the expanse of a newsroom, squint a bit, and you swear it’s the Rocky Mountains

At The Kansas City Star, we’re at least blessed with stable terrain.  I don’t know how they manage at the San Francisco Chronicle.  Perhaps their stacks, like their buildings, meet a higher engineering standard.

Newspaper reporters and editors are pack rats. That’s a given. I know for a fact that, by night, most newspaper people live quiet, austere lives in simple homes kept neat and tidy.  By day, though, the gods of hoarding descend.

It’s not a bad thing at all.  Ask any reporter for something specific in the towers of paper around him, and he’ll find it in an instant. It’s actually a very efficient and economical system.  Yes, each reporter and editor is allocated drawer space for filing purposes.  But that fills up on the first day.  So why not use the open air all around for continual, ever-expanding storage?

All this talk today about storing information in the “cloud” makes me laugh. We’ve been doing it for years.

It can be a touchy subject.  I remember when the Springfield, Ill., newspaper where I worked moved from a smallish, century-old brick structure to a dazzling, pristine, modern edifice of low ceilings, carpeted floors, indirect lighting and sound-absorbing work stations.  Oh, and we all got chairs that could actually adjust up or down.

The proud publisher, in turn, moved from a coffin-like confine to an immense one-room manse of fine wood trim, thick carpets and a commanding view of the state capitol building. 

It would have shown well in House Beautiful magazine.  Perhaps it did.

Anyway, the publisher decreed that the newsroom could no longer stack papers to the ceiling.  Worse, reporters and editors could no longer eat at their desks.

Wars have started over less, of course.  And if I recall, the cloud eventually descended there as well.  Perhaps the publisher, who had a business degree from Harvard, realized that productivity was at risk.

I mention this because the cloud has followed me home. I’m no longer in the Kansas City newsroom.  I work in my own office a floor below.  And my desk, generally, is pretty neat.

But the opposite seems to have happened with me at the house … though I’m tidy by day, the gods of hoarding are my best buds at night.

The photo at right seems to be proof.  It shows my side of the bed and my nightstand shortly after rising.

It’s a mix of newspapers, magazines and stacks of books sprinkled with other odd things … a flashlight, a stuffed white tiger (can’t recall how that got there), a TV controller, a paper weight – yeah, it’s there, but you have to really look for it; let’s play Where’s Waldo! – and under the nightstand is a canvas bin deemed an “organizer” that’s packed like a sausage with even more reading material.

Unlike the guys in the newsroom, I’m not quite sure what is where.  There could be a fortune in that bin and I don’t know it.

An astute observer would conclude that I do a lot of reading at bedtime. While that’s true, the more astute observer – a Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, or Monk – would also detect that:

-       I buy more books than I read.

-       I read multiple books at one time.

-       Some books go unfinished.

-       I’m addicted to news.

-       I keep magazines well beyond their publication months.

-       I love the Wall Street Journal but dislike its opinion pages.

-       I’m not very good at making the bed. 

Cindy, who knows me best, would vouch for all of these things.

(You Holmesians out there might be wondering … how could one conclude from the photo that I dislike the Journal’s opinion pages?  It’s elementary:  The other Journal sections are neatly folded to their original state, with the front pages at the front; the opinion section, which rests under the red Time magazine, remains in disarray, its pages still turned back. It’s clear that I saw something there that angered me and I tossed it over the side like a dead fish.)

As any newsroom guy will tell you, there’s no cure for this affliction. And I don’t want one anyway. It is who I am, and it’s served me well through the years.

I know it has its consequences. I try to be sensitive to others and pick up occasionally.

In fact, during the recent spate of thunderstorms and tornadoes, dog Linus decided to spend the night under the bed. In the morning, his nose emerged right between the nightstand and that stack of books.

He was so panicked to get out – morning biscuit time! – that he almost knocked those books upon his head. It might have done him in.
 

No problem, I thought. 

 

I moved the books about an inch.

A soft hand

At last a chance to write.

Work and life have conspired to keep me from the laptop.  But not this morning.

Today’s topic, in fact, is the written word, a mother’s letter and the power of paper.

‘Tis a lot!

My mother wrote me a letter. Actually, it wasn’t to me.  It was to her parents.  But it was about me, and so – with her and her parents now gone – I consider it sort of mine.

My sister Barb sent it to me.  I guess Mom had found and retrieved it after her father died. Thanks, sis! 

“Dearest Dad and Mother,” she wrote on Saturday, Dec. 11^th, 1954.  I was born the prior Thursday. She was writing from her bed in Deaconess Hospital in St. Louis.

“Well, as George Gobel says, ‘Here I am!’ or  ‘Here we are!’ – and it looks like I surprised everyone, including myself!!”

The surprise was that I had arrived early – nine days, according to the letter. Odd, because I’ve found myself consistently late for so much else since.

It’s interesting to read letters like this.  First, my mother was a journalist, so her writing was always lively, conversational, unpretentious, upbeat … just like herself.  Second, and selfishly more interesting to me, was her reporting of my arrival.

“Douglas Gordon is a mighty cute little boy and looks like a potential football player, just like Bill.”

Ah, Mom, thanks. (Bill’s my brother.)

I tried football in junior high, by the way, but quit after some ox knocked the wind out of me and left me wheezing like a ruptured accordion.  

“He weighed 8 lbs 10 ozs, so I hate to think what he would have weighed if I’d held out nine days longer – probably would have been a 10-lb baby!!”

And even chubbier, I bet.

“He has coal-black hair and a round little face.”

The hair’s gray now but the face is still a bit round.

“His arms and legs are relatively thin but very long, and his fingers are long, too.”

She then speculated that, because of the long digits, perhaps I’d be an engineer like my father.  I'm not  sure why one would lead to the other.  But we know that didn’t work out anyway.

She then went into detail of how the early arrival played out … labor pains starting on Wednesday, up all night worrying I’d pop out before breakfast, the pains growing closer  by 9 a.m., then the rush to the hospital with siblings Linda, Mary Ann and Bill wrapped in blankets in the car’s backseat.  Then in to the delivery room, then a couple of injections of something from the doc to “speed things up,”  then – ta da! – at 10:50 a.m. little Dougie came into the world.

Mom went on to call me a blockhead – “at first his head looked almost as wide as long” – but also a quick learner when it came to grub – “he comes in at feeding time with eyes wide open and crying lustily.” 

That still happens today if I’ve missed lunch.

“He’s all-boy and healthy!” she concluded.

The interesting thing is that these details are all facts I didn’t know of until now. Okay, the all-boy part I figured out long ago.  But the rest is news. 

And that’s the point.  Without the letter, this part of my past would have disappeared like Mom herself.

We don’t write letters anymore.  Oh, sure, we write emails, we text, we tweet, we share pictures and even videos.  But it’s all electronic, in the “cloud” or stashed byte by byte in our computers and phones.  Rarely do we see the clues to personality or mood found in another’s handwriting.  Emoticons hardly do the trick.

And this isn’t necessarily new. I remember the hot, humid days of Boy Scout camp, where by the second week we ached for word from home.  At last a letter from Mom arrived … cheerful, comforting, written in her relaxed script.  My tent mate received a typed letter from his father, a banker … typed by his secretary.  Heartfelt? Maybe. Sterile?  Yes.

Okay, we can print out a thoughtful email – emoticons and all – and save it.  But do you?  I don’t.

I suspect we write more to each other now than any previous generation. But this vital correspondence usually is deleted … lost to the ages. 

I have a friend near Indianapolis.  He’s a high-school English teacher.  He’s also a calligraphist. Each Christmas, he sends us best wishes in a letter written with a fountain pen, each word a piece of art itself, each sentence perfectly formed, cogent and informative.

The letter is beautiful in so many ways.

Just about a year ago, he joined Facebook.  His posts were sporadic, yes, but he hung in there – mainly because, I think, his former students loved to chat.

His last post was Jan. 26th.  Friends’ inquiries aren’t acknowledged.  He’s offline.

My guess is the attraction wore thin.  He’s a man of paper, favoring books that smell of ink, where every single letter and word matters, where his power comes, indeed, from his fruitful pen.

My mother always liked my friend.

I’m no Luddite. I love my iPhone.  But it’s moments like this that give me pause.

Thanks, Mom, for the new memories.  I especially like the square-head thing.  I’m glad you wrote so many letters.  They amount to love, shared, still today.

By the way, my mother concluded her missive to her parents with this:

“Every time I get a letter from you and Dad I feel all teary-eyed reading it.”

Letters can do that … especially when written with a soft hand and full heart.