For her 75th birthday last weekend, my Aunt Linda was presented with a gorgeous gift, perfectly suited to capture the grand scope of the last three quarters of a century. It was a custom-printed, linen-bound book compiling page one of the New York Times from her birthday on every year of her life.
Well, every year except this one. As such books take several weeks to produce and deliver, there’s no way to give the book as a timely birthday gift without omitting that year’s front page. In fact, Aunt Linda opened the present last Saturday afternoon, the day before her birthday, when the Sunday times had yet to go to print.
The next morning — her actual birthday — I woke up in my dad’s Santa Fe guest room. Over coffee, my father and uncle wondered: where does one buy a copy of the New York Times in Santa Fe, New Mexico? The town is replete with free copies of the Santa Fe Reporter, and there are newspaper vending machines, the bright yellow of the state flag, always stuffed with copies of the Santa Fe New Mexican. But the New York Times? For some reason, I (the Millennial!) was the one who was confident that they’d have the paper at a drug store or grocery store, especially on a Sunday. My dad and I drove to the nearest one (a CVS at Devargas Center, if you’re ever in town and in the same predicament). I ran in to check while he circled the parking lot.
Just past the sliding doors on a metal rack, there it was! A neat stack of Sunday NYTs. I snatched up a thick copy and triumphantly stepped up to the self-checkout to pay for it. I was out the door again, scanning for my dad’s Subaru in a sea of Subarus, before I bothered to look at the paper I’d just bought.
Suddenly this didn’t seem like such a terrific birthday surprise.
When she’d opened her book the day before, we’d noted what year the paper switched from black and white to color images on the front page.1 25 years later, here I was, presenting my aunt (on behalf of the family no less) with a full-color photograph of a bloodied survivor being pulled from the wreckage of a bombed-out building in Ukraine. She accepted it graciously of course — I mean, who doesn’t want to complete a set? — but the Grand Presentation of the Newspaper wasn’t exactly a the highlight of the evening.
This isn’t a story about the news being bad right now. The news IS bad, sure, but we all know that even if way less bad shit was going down, the front page of the newspaper would still tout something hard to face — something, shall we say, less than birthday-worthy. That’s kind of what the newspaper is for. Flip through decades of front-pages, as in the bound book, and you get a telling and evocative narrative. You see that some things that have changed and some things, for better and worse, have not.
We can’t credit the exclusion of “today’s” newspaper as a design feature of this book. Nor is it a flaw. It’s just a practical reality (unless one plans on a belated gift). I’m inclined, now, to think of this exclusion as a good thing. Last year’s news is now “olds” — it has already transmorphed into history. History is less anxiety provoking than news. The news is present tense, and brings anxieties of the future. The anxieties of history’s future have already been addressed.
If the presentation of today’s paper was a forgettable aspect of the day’s celebrations, for me, the high point came at the end of the evening. Yes, even after the cake and champagne and fabulous fancy dinner. Eight humans and four dogs, all family, sat in my dad’s living room drinking too-late coffee2. I had originally planned, during this trip, to record an oral history interview of the elder generation3, but I never managed to set up any formal arrangements. Now, I half-apologized for that neglect on my part, saying that it seemed a shame to interrupt our festivities and break out a microphone.
“What kinda questions were you gonna ask?” my aunt wondered.
And so the conversation began. A few minutes passed before I had the presence of mind to start recording on my phone. The resulting half hour voice memo wouldn’t win any audio awards, or substitute for a real, honest-to-god interview, but the recording wasn’t the point. The conversation was.
Still, I love the recording. I listened to some of it last night. At one point, my eldest cousin, Jeff (the only one old enough to remember our grandmother Ruth), recalls this orange tin of cookies she always brought out when he came to visit. Two separate conversations about cookies then broke out, co-existing for several minutes before converging again, only to split apart once more so we could talk to and about the dogs. You can pick which pieces of the simultaneous conversations to listen to, like a choose-your-own-adventure family gabfest.
Confession time: I was having that conversation last Sunday night instead of writing Metaforia. It’s the first week I’ve skipped in a year, but just as it didn’t make sense to break up the family time to hold a formal inquiry, it didn't seem sensical to excuse myself from the party to go record my thoughts about…the party.
If, one year or ten or seventy-five from now, I want to be reminded of what happened on March 20, 2022, I don’t think I’ll seek out an archival image of the New York Times’ Page 1. Instead, I’ll listen to that recording of tangled conversations about childhood trips and cookies and dog butts. None of it will have made the paper, but as I see it, it’s both history and the very best news.
1997
To clarify: the dogs did not have any coffee.
following the example of my Uncles Dan and Jamie and both of their fathers (one on each side of my family)
I've never heard of a dog drinking coffee! BUT(t), this being Vietnam Veterans Day, I thought on - and tried to find in my mind - a cassette tape sent to me while I served by my mom (Linda's stepmom), and all to remind me of the importance of family conversation during wartime. I think it's in storage. I know it's in my heart. Your faithful combat vet,