Soooo 2006

Just when I was feeling guilty about not blogging for a week or two, along comes a study by the Pew Research Center saying blogging is for old folks anyhow.
Instead of being cutting edge, it seems bashing out a blog is something you do in between bouts of mindless dribbling onto your Zimmer frame.
Of course I have no idea what the Pew Research Center is. I assume it has nothing to do with those hard benches people sit on in church, although it's been so long since I last went into the House of God, that they probably sit on bean bags now.
Back to that study. The D.C. nonprofit think tank was designed to gauge the online habits of America's "millennial generation," a demographic group that is considered a bellwether of the nation's future technology trends.
And as someone who works in a media industry that is changing by the day, I coudn't possibly admit to not being someone who is sliding up and down on the cutting edge of technology. I'd never admit to anyone that I really don't know the difference between an ipod and an iphone, although I know a bit about the I Ching.
The results of the study indicate blogging has become so 2006, when 28 percent of the two groups studied, teens 12 to 17 and young adults 18 to 29, actively blogged.
By the fall of 2009, that percentage dropped off to only 14 percent of teens and 15 percent of young adults as blogging "lost its luster for many young users," said Amanda Lenhart, one of the report's authors.
Lenhart said one reason for the shift might have come from the rapid ascent of Facebook over MySpace to the top of the social media charts in the past year.
The MySpace format encourages members to blog, while Facebook instead features short status updates, she said.
So next time a colleague starts banging on about having to write their blog, just turn around, fix them with a withering eye and say: "Dude - that's soooo 2006."

The Great Dismal Swamp

As visitor attractions go the Great Dismal Swamp doesn't always feel like the most rewarding place to visit.
If you go to the Grand Canyon you drive into a parking lot, get out of your car and peer over the edge at a vast chasm and a multi-colored wonderland of buttes and mesas.
The Great Dismal Swamp that straddles the border of Virginia and North Carolina, doesn't have the same must-see appeal. If you wander into the Great Dismal Swamp you find a crazy tangle of trees, a maze of water filled ditches and a confused haven for nests of snakes and multitudes of tics.
People seldom come here to find something; they are more likely to want to lose themselves in the overgrown mirk of the place. During the days of slavery underground railroads ran through the swamp and slaves eked out an existence here in desperate colonies to evade their erstwhile masters.
It was so vast and so thick that some who entered never returned.
The young poet Robert Frost, despondent over a broken heart, came here to "disappear" but changed his mind. As the November night fell over the swamp, Frost was put off by the bottomless waterways that swallowed even the light of the moon and headed for home the next day.
If the swamp has a focus it's the spherical Lake Drummond at its heart. But you can lose the skin on your feet and your will to live not to mention the occasional friendship on the four mile long trudge down a ramrod staight path down the Washington Ditch trail.
But if you keep on trudging, you turn a sudden dogleg to the right and Lake Drummond opens up like a glittering jewel in the most inhospitable of places. There's certainly something magical about this empty and untouched expanse of hourglass water fringed with cypress and tupelo trees in the heart of a ragged wilderness.
A new state park beside the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina now affords a new access to the swamp but it's a long haul for walkers to get into the heart of the swamp.
Fortunately the new park includes a boardwalk for visitors who want to check out the swamp without getting blisters.

Characters are welcome

Newspapers in the 21st Century barely resemble the place I was first introduced to when I worked on my local paper at school.
The Gloucester Citizen used to be crammed into offices down a narrow Medieval lane. On the upper floor the journalists bashed out copy on bulky typewriters the size of modern photocopiers and chain smoked in murky corners.
Below them the 'inkies' toiled away in a mini print works. By 2 p.m. all the court copy, minor crime and council material had been transformed, by a mysterious process from messy and double typed pieces of paper sprewed from the hukling typewriters into newspapers that rolled out by 3.30 p.m.
By 4 p.m. I were on the bus home, clutching a copy, with page 4 prominently displayed in the hope fellow passengers would pick up on my by-line.
It's one of the fallacies of rookie journalists that members of the public actually care who writes a story. In reality you could use the by-line "Adolph Hitler" and few would pick up on it.
By time I took a journalism diploma the industry was already changing. Although we showed up in Cardiff with our typewriters, which would be left in a drop zone in the middle of the "Woodie" pub during extensive after course drinking sessions, an online newsroom arrived half way through the course.
For a couple of weeks I found it almost impossible to write copy directly onto a computer. I missed those tiny pieces of paper that meant stories were segmented up into their constituent parts. But finally the small blue typewriter was abandoned in favor of new technology.
Some time earlier modern technology had hit the industry like a digita tsunami. In great secrecy media mogul Rupert Murdoch had moved his London papers to a vast East End compound in Wapping, dispensing with hundreds of 'inkies' in the process sparking a virtual siege by the trade unions.
The industry was becoming a lot cleaner and a good deal more clinical.
Still the characters from the old days lingered on.
One of them was Alan Coles, a formidable former sub (or copy) editor on the Daily Mirror, who had been hired to teach on our course.
Coles had a face that was made for East End pubs. Pitted and gaunt with dark eye sockets Coles conjured up images of darts, overflowing ash trays and the collective mutter when the last orders bell was rung.
Coles was the guy you didn't want editing your copy. Except here he was taking home all of our pathetic, fledgling efforts at news.
Unlike the other tutors Alan didn't shield us from the withering intolerance of Fleet Street. Copy was returned with so much red pen on it, it was difficult to read the original words.
If you had "boring, boring, boring" written on your story, you breathed a sigh of relief.
One of my friends had a story on a golf game returned with: "What a load of balls" written on the top.
When the course tutors posed as emergency service works on the end of the phone, the two words: "Fireman Coles" were enough to send the reporter into a fit of paralysis and to leave the conversation without getting details of the fire. Coles would occasionally break from character and burst through the door to scream: "Ain't you going to ask about the fire then?"
I knew Coles was losing it to some extent when he presented a lecture on measuring copy with a ruler. I may not be the most techni-savvy reporter, but even I realized you could probably do that on the computer.
Eventually his contract wasn't renewed. Some of the women on the course took exception to Coles. The time when he said they should smoke because everyone in the newsroom would be dragging on a cigarette seemed to be the turning point.
When I started work on a newspaper Coles lived nearby and he would call me occasionally. Although he put the fear of God into people I missed him in a way. He represented the industry back in the days when Britney Spears' fashion faux pars did not a story make.
Coles wouldn't last five minutes in today's politically correct newspaper world. I can imagine him waving his ruler around and yelling: "What the fack is Twitter?"
But in a world when we can spend eight hours lost in the depths of the internet and not talk to any colleagues before we head home, characters are welcome.
And I can still hear his voice now when I write certain things that wouldn't pass the Coles test.
"Emerge. You don't emerge. How does a person emerge into something?"

Sear hell

Over the weekend, or at the weekend as we say in the UK, I was unlucky enough to find myself in Sears.
I’m not sure how this happened. The plan was to have lunch and visit somewhere picturesque such as Smithfield so as at least we could look at some fairly old buildings as hypothermia set in.
But the mother-in-law had apparently seen a stroller system for $75 and as we only have two months to go until our new arrival we thought it was a prudent idea to check it out.
In saying that I had forgotten that Sears is like one of those vast department stores from the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era. Somebody had a vision a long time ago but nobody can remember who or when. In the British context it’s one of those jack of all trades places like Woolworths, that recently folded because nobody could remember why the stores were there, apart from the pick ‘n mix candies.
After fighting our way through sections of ‘man tools’ and dung brown ‘man jackets’ to match the ‘man tools’ we finally found the desultory infant section. The labeling wasn’t clear but it looked like my mother-in-law had made a mistake and the $75 price tag referred to a cot beneath the stroller.
In any case the wheels had been removed from the strollers and they looked like nobody had bought one since the Punic Wars.
Foolishly we persevered and tried to find a member of staff to give us a price check, which is not a straightforward task in Sears where staff pretend to be members of the public to avoid awkward customer questions.
We finally found one lady who admitted, under heavy cross examination, to being a member of staff.
She immediately looked panicked and about 200 miles out of her comfort zone at being asked to discover the price of an item in a different department.
Had we asked her if she could unravel the Da Vinci Code we might have had a more positive reaction.
Finally she showed up by the stroller with a cumbersome hand held gadget. She proceeded to press some buttons. And she pressed more buttons and frowned. After 10 futile minutes she left to get help. She returned with the same cumbersome hand held gadget, pressed the same buttons and frowned again.
After an age of grunting and fumbling during which even my daughter got tired of pressing the buttons and flashing lights on the vibrating baby seats, the store worker went to seek out a manager.
Another 10 minutes later a harried, unsmiling woman with the complexion of a disaffected veal calf, arrived to tell us she had no idea how much the stroller was either. She disappeared into a sinister looking back room and finally told us it was $170, with the air of someone who had plucked the figure out of mid air.
My wife told me she had encountered the same manager a few days earlier in the women’s restrooms when she had managed an unpleasant blockage situation.
The woman told my wife the men’s washrooms were always a lot worse.
I was about as dubious about this information as I was at the price of the stroller.
It’s never a great feeling when you leave a store knowing you would have had a better customer service experience in Wal-Mart.

misty morning, Suffolk

This doesn't feel like Christmas

I have a sneaking suspicion Christmas used to be more exciting than this when I was a kid.
For a start it's almost 4 am and my daughter is soundly asleep while my wife is downstairs wrapping up her presents.
If it had been left to me I would just now be trying to ascertain what stores are open at almost 4 am on Christmas Day.
When I was five-years-old I don't think I'd have been asleep at 4 am. On one occasion I stayed up most of the night in fervent expectation that some old guy with a white beard would leave a few eclectic offerings at the bottom of my bed.
Of course I didn't believe that rubbish some adults told us that Santa arrived down the chimney, because we didn't have one. Nor did I believe there was one Santa for the whole planet who visits x billion kids in one night. I'm not sure how anyone can fall for that.
But I did believe in Santa, although I rationalized it. I figured every local authority employed a few Santas that went round the houses ringing door bells. Hell maybe they had a Santa budget and a Christmas Committee that would make great fodder for the local newspaper when they implemented Santa cuts.
My thought process didn't make for an easy night. For a start, I'd listen out for the bell to ring for hours on end, probaby pissing off my parents no end.
Then after I finally fell into a fragile sleep for 10 minutes, I would feel the wonder of the magic stocking at the foot of my bed and eagerly trace the outline of the presents through the fabric.
I didn't actually get stockings. My mother put our presents in a couple of pairs of her hose (tights as they are known in the UK) which is just plain wrong now I come to think about it.
Then when we were finally allowed to open our presents at around 5 am we would rip them open enthusiastially and cherish each one, even the apples and walnuts that my parents used to pad out my mother's hose.
Often there would be a book about ghost stories and my sister and I would tell each other tales under the tree.
In the case of my daughter it's different. She'll wake up at about 9 am, yawn a lot and ignore most invitations to get excited about Christmas. Then she'll matter of factly open her presents and bug me to get out my chainsaw to remove them from their Fort Knox approved packaging.
I'm tempted to use her reaction as an allegory on how Christmas has lost its excitement and meaning.
But maybe she's just like that.

Yakety yak

The Chinese don't have a Year of the Yak but, if they did they would surely devote it to hairdressers.
I braved the salon early this morning in the vain hope that the hairdressers woudn't have oiled their jaws with coffee at such an hour.
My good intentions were in tatters within 10 seconds. That's how long it took for my least favorite sylist to catch my eye and to lure me across the room to her tatty torture chair.
No sooner had I recovered after a close to strangulation encounter with the black gown she had clingwrapped round my neck, than she was subjecting me to a barrage of questions about Thanksgiving, her matronly hams fiddling with various razors and bottles by the mirror.
I desperately played for time, talking slowly and mumbling something about recalling a turkey. The subtle hint that I was at Supercuts for a haircut as opposed to a cross examination was left to dy up on the cutting room floor.
My hairdresser continued into a spiel about how she didn't want to get up at the "arse crack of dawn" to visit her father on Christmas day but perhaps he wouldn't force her to do breakfast because her sister had moved to Georgia and they were close before, but nobody had liked his first wife but now they were divorced the situation was better and perhaps they would do breakfast and perhaps they wouldn't and did I want the back of my hair flattened off or rounded?
She had to repeat the last bit because I was flatlining.
In such situations I tend to be polite but monosyllabic. Maybe I have been beaten into submission by hairdressers. Back in the UK they'd always go on about their holidays but here in the US nobody has holidays so they talk about turkey and how oyster dressing makes them flatulent.
The only hairdresser I have ever had who hasn't submitted me to a verbal ordeal was a taciturn Russian woman I went to in Ilford who was more likely to cut my ear off than talk it off.
But unless I stand up to hairdressers soon I am going to snap because the alternative will be ending up resembling a montage of all of the early Jackson 5 because I'll be too rattled to ever get my hair cut.
Maybe I should have blurted out: "I'm sorry. I thought I came here for a haircut rather than a monologue on your dire and dysfunctional Christmas arrangements."
But knowing me I'll just continue to nod my head and run for the door as soon as she puts down her yakkety scissors.

The Death of TV

I'm old enough to remember the birth of television on our street.
That's not to say I was around in 1925 when John Logie Baird succeeded in making monochromatic silhouette images move on a screen.
But I recall the odd brown box that arrived in my parents' home one morning in the 1970s and the air of pioneer excitement and they fiddled with clunky dials and a picture fought its way out of a snow storm.
Back in those days there were just two channels, BBC 1 and BBC 2 and two colors, black and white, as well as the unedifying spectrum of greys in between. We could get ITV on a sunny day but my parents didn't approve because they were forced to watch adverts for commercial appliances, the latest transistor radios, twin tub washing machines or Cliff Richard spinning at 45 revolutions per minute.
Early TV provided a script for our childhood. We hid behind the sofa when we heard the alien theme tune of Doctor Who thumping through a vortex of time because we knew the Daleks were about to appear. We shared our early years with the avuncular presence of Ronnie Barker in Porridge and John Cleese strutting through the corridors of The Ministry of Silly Walks or beating up his Austin 1100 with a tree branch in Fawlty Towers.
And it sounds like a chiche, but some TV-less neighbors did come to our house to watch the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, although our mother was at pains to point out she didn't look like a fairytale princess; more like a horse.
Then there was adult TV, which meant something different in our childhood than it does now; the serious grown-up drama that my parents were addicted to such as When the Boat Comes In and Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven.
Color arrived in our home at some point in the 1970s. I can't remember when but I recall the characters from Dougal and the Magic Roundabout suddenly gaining the hallucinagenic hues of their LSD addled creators.
As we grew older TV ceased to lose its novelty and charm. It was just there in the corner of the room like a goldfish or picture, although I still have fond memories of the monotone voice that read out the football results on Grandstand and the game we played predicting what score came next based on its cadences.
At some time in the next decade I drifted away from TV. When I returned in the mid 1990s it was a curiously different creature from the one I had grown up with. The feeling was mildly disconcerting. It was as if I had been going into the garden to feed a reliable but unaminated pet rabbit every day for a decade, only to notice one day it had grown green tusks.
For me the green tusks of reality TV first arrived in the form of Changing Rooms. The plot was simple. Take two sets of neighbors who are good friends, add garish paint, some MDF, a ridiculous fop with a name like Llewelyn-Bowen and get them to decorate each other's homes, resulting in neighbors who weren't such good friends.
The other reality TV show that I first noticed was Airport, a fly-on-the wall about Heathrow airport. I was suspicious from the outset. I'd spent long enough hanging around Heathrow Airport waiting for delayed flights to not want to watch this kind of thing as a leisure activity.
My cynicism did little to arrest the forward march of reality TV.
About 10 years ago I attended a lecture by Peter Bazalgette a TV executive who outlined the vast popularity in Holland of a show in which random people were put in a house and eliminated by public vote. Bazalgette explained audience numbers peaked when two housemates had sex, which equated on the small screen to two grainy figures wriggling around in a sleeping bag.
The scene was set for Big Brother and the rest is history. I have lost track of how many tedious series of Big Brother have been filmed or the cast list of desperate wannabes the show has enabled. But by hanging on every action of these characters the media has transformed them into vacuous celebs who are famous for being famous.
Characters like Jade Goody made being talentless a talent. And they lived and died in the glare of tabloid TV.
Today I have more than 30 channels on a basic cable package in the US. I can surf them for hours without finding anything I have a remote interest in watching.
Reality TV is TV whether it's Wife Swap, the real housewives of whatever place you can think of, the Kardashians, The Osbournes, Hulk Hogan's daughter, men who catch crabs in cold places or men who force themselves to eat enough food to feed an African village for a week for a certificate.
And Bazalgette's monster has spawned in a way Frankenstein's never did. You can vote on America's best model, singer, dancer, cook. Surely America's top snail racer or sewage technician will soon be a mere lazy flick of a channel away.
Meanwhile I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of here is in its umpteeth series on British TV and the soiled underwear of dozens of minor celebrities we had forgotten about is being paraded across the tabloids. TV has surely reached a parlous state when the departure from the show of Jordan, a woman famous for her gravity defying breasts, and I can't think what else, causes the viewing figures to plummet by two million.
If this isn't bad enough plans are now afoot to make the bushtucker trials, the stomach churning tasks the D-listers endure in I'm A Celebrity, such as eating kangaroo testicles and witchetty grubs, the centrepiece of new prime-time series.
Stateside our obsession with celebrity shows few signs of abating. In Colorado a father apparently pretended his son had floated off in a hot air balloon to raise publicity for a reality TV show he had pitched named The Science Detectives.
Perhaps he should be rewarded with a few bushtucker trials.
In DC a couple up for consideration for The Real Housewives of DC crashed a state dinner at the White House.
The monster unleashed by TV executives more than a decade ago who realized they could save money by avoiding high quality productions and using members of the public instead of actors, is out of control and nobody's going to round it up any time soon.
And as TV increasingly becomes fragmented and rendered obsolete by the Internet, it's hard to escape the conclusion that TV's going to be voted off this challenge.
Years ago when I first saw those flickering shades of gray it seemed like the beginning of something. Little did I realize I was peering into a golden age and contemplating the beginning of the end.

The Last Days of School

I have a lot of regrets about my pathetically short career as a teacher.
But not parting with $29.95 to buy The First Days of School isn't one of them.
The book by Harry and Rosemary Wong is the bible for new teachers. You see them showing up during the new teachers induction, its perky green font sticking out of their shiny, new tote bags. If they ever forgot it you saw them turn pale and give the kind of look reserved for the first passenger on the Titanic who does a lifeboat count.
For the uninitiated the Wongs write about how being a teacher is the best career in the world. Turn to page 106 and there's Harry dressed for success resplendent in a waistcoat in the door of his classroom, his hand outstretched to connect with those of his students, radiating Oriental efficiency from every pore.
"I love to stand at the door on the first day with a giant smile on my face, hand stuck out in an invitational pose, waiting for those 'little darlings' to come down the hall," the caption reads.
I don't want to shatter any illusions here, but I tried a similar thing and gave up after the second spurned handshake. The sight of a tsumani of 12th graders rolling my way convinced me I would be crushed into a pulp on the first day of school unless I retreated.
It didn't end as suddenly as that but I was crushed over the next few weeks.
I can't pinpoint exactly how and why I failed but I found it hard to act like a teacher at times.
It takes a few semesters to click into the mindset of a teacher which is similar to that of a prison guard. Always be suspicious and assume the little darlings are lying or on the make unless you have evidence to the contrary in the form of a pass, an email or something else official.
I had some effective teaching moments but I failed to be a classroom cop.
And at the final reckoning I realized two months in I was already beginning to hate the humorless automotan I knew I had to become to keep order. It was hard to switch off at times. I was barking orders at my daughter across the supermarket aisle and middle aged ladies were giving me funny looks.
As Wong correctly points out, the most important factor governing learning is classroom management. On many afternoons the words of the great classroom Confuscius would come back to haunt me at the end of another 90 minutes of hell under artificial lighting when I sat in the middle of a maelstrom of paper balls and mangled desks.
My head of department took a dim view and rightly so. Desks out of line and books thrown around were tantamount to an invitation to riot. From then on I was fastidious about lined up desks and paper on the floor, although they didn't always listen.
And my thoughts were out of line with my departent head on one key area. I felt the uneven desks and papers thrown around were a symptom of a general lack of respect, rather than the cause of the chaos.
Wong says humans have a success instict. I'm not sure this was the case with all of my 10th graders. Indeed some seemed to have a failure instict and told me they saw their future in shoplifting. This leads me to conclude either Wong is wrong or some of them weren't human.
With this in mind I spent 10 minutes of one of my lessons looking to see if any of my students had small antenna pointing out of their heads.
It broke up the lesson and wasn't any more useless than some of the activities suggsted in the local authority's curriculum guide; jigsaw activities; fishbone maps; sequential episode maps; thematic maps etc.
I considered doing a sequential episode map with my kids and changed my mind. This was, afterall, a class that took 15 minutes to sort themselves into four groups.
But they were good at some group activities. Fighting for one. With no effective prior direction and little preparatory work two of my 10th graders successfully managed to beat each other to a pulp, while I hopefully pressed the red panic button.
"Why didn't you break it up? You played rugby back in Britain," one student asked me afterward.
Those exaggerations always come back to bite you.
So now my teaching career is practically over and although I'll miss the prospect of working without pay next year, it's not all bad. For one thing I have more time to read Wong's tome.
Wong said schools should organize a first day of school celebration where the teachers should stand at the bus stop and welcome them. "Wave and smile like it's aunt Mabel whom you have not seen in 14 years and the airplane has just pulled up to the jetway."
Hmmm. I feel I need to contact Wong or find him on Twitter. I actually had an aunt called Mabel. She was objectionable and flatulent and last cracked a smile the day Prince Albert died.
My family never failed to crack open the champagne at the sight of her oversized backside waddling away to the bus stop.
On the subject of flatulence, Wong doesn't tell you what to do when someone breaks wind and the whole class runs screaming to the door.
I suppose if I'd had the classroom management thing down to pat they would have remained glued to their undersized chairs, their nostrils twitching, fearing my withering gaze more than the odor.
My kids weren't really like that but my fellow teachers told me it took time to get it right. Nobody listened to Lenin and Trotsky much at first. It took a civil war and a lot of upheavals before Stalin came in to impose some heavy duty classroom management.
Nor does Wong devote any lines to insects which, to my mind, is a grave omission in The First Days of Schools.
It only took an oversized fly to reduce my best class to chaos. Just when they were calming down the infernal creature would reappear to torment me. When one student tried to swat it on a girl's head, the victim wanted to see me outside to press charges.
They don't tell you how to deal with that kind of thing on the training course.
My fellow teachers told me there's a lot that you learn on the job. I have nothing but admiration for these heroes of the education system, who go into a war zone every day without complaint.
That's not strictly true. There was a guy I met sometimes at the photocopier who reminded me of Travis Bicker, the De Niro character in Taxi Driver.
He told me the conditions were getting worse, the kids were getting worse; nobody wanted to learn.
"I gotta get out of teaching," he told me in a New York drawl.
He was drawn and on edge. I wondered what he would do next.
The day I realized he was six years younger than me my mind went on a loop and those words kept circulating in my head. "I gotta get out of teaching."

Fall colors, Lake Maury, Newport News

A gray Saturday in Virginia

Today is Saturday and it could be the first day of the rest of my life.
But then so could any day.
The leaves lie limp on the tree outside the office window and there's a grayness hanging over the squat buildings of the toy soldiers' compound across the street and the gantries of the great shipyard beyond.
Soon the leaves will turn into a beautiful portfolio of red and russets although it's hard to imagine anything beautiful growing from the limp yellow offerings hanging outside the office.
It's funny how a densely populated city on a Saturday afternoon can feel like the surface of the moon. There's not a soul on the streets, trash is being kicked along and abandoned in cold corners by an aimless wind and even the linear highways are bereft of all but the occasional car. I hear a low whirr from my office window and it's gone.
There's a scanner voice out there in the areas of the office that still lie in quasi darkness like the half abandoned strip malls round these parts.
And information lies all around me, but nobody's making any sense of it. My redundant notepads are still here, a testament to two years of collecting information for people who will quickly forget.
Who now remembers Mary S. Thomas, two counts of child neglect or Christopher A. Judkins, abduction and kidnapping?
These nefarious acts that scour and scar and ruin existences, are commonplace on the yellowing pages of my notepad. The shorthand outlines take on a life of their own on the page. I can't even recall if they made it into print.
So many lives and deaths are forgotten about. Today I am driving through the city to see a woman whose uncle was blown away outside a convenience store two years ago.
It was the first day on my job as a crime correspondent. I heard the call but my predecessor went out and covered it. She wrote of the everyday nature of death. The school bus that had just disgorged its cargo when the youth worker was peppered with bullets outside the store.
The store closed for a while. Then it reopened. Life went on.
A few days later I went on the peace march. A small crowd lighted candles and placed flowers on every street corner of carnage, before they went home to finish off another day. So many victims: all forgotten now.
My predecessor ignored the quotes I had collected and put her name alone on the story. I only cared in passing. She went on to the education beat but left soon afterwards. Everbody's forgotten about her now.
Like the wind that batters old papers and sends them skidding from gutter to sidewalk, we are buffeted along uncertain paths and we play many roles before we return to a second childhood.
And we forget. Many of us completely, but some of us not so well.
I have a problem forgetting. Like I said I am a collector. I hoard memories, I miss faces; I reguarly make futile searches on Facebook for my best friend at university.
I miss people. I miss whole continents. I often see the late afternoon sun caught in the windows form a dazzling sculpture of mirrors on cliffs of Positano when I close my eyes.
Then I open them again. And it's still a gray Saturday in Virginia.