I grew up around newsprint. My family’s business in Northern Ireland was what was called a newsagent – a small storefront selling mostly newspapers and magazines. I remember my Uncle Adrian, and before him my mother’s Aunt Daida and Uncle Harry, sorting newspapers in the cramped back room. Adrian was always ink stained, with blackened fingers and dress shirts.
The shop had regular customers. People who stepped into the tiny store daily or weekly or monthly to get their papers and magazines and to read stories. For that was mostly what the publications offered. Pictures and illustrations, sure, but mostly words, words which told stories, words which attempted to make sense of the world, words around which men and women and children built community.
My first job in this profession was in a newspaper composition room, pasting waxed columns of words onto pages, cutting apart lines to fit the space available, literally editing the stories to fit. I’d smell of wax and ink and chemicals when I got home.
Wax, of course, is long gone from composition rooms. Modern inks don’t rub off as easily. And newsprint is a dinosaur, we’re told. Information is electric now - a micropulse of energy that can carry all of the day’s news through the air. The news cycle isn’t monthly or weekly or even daily. It is constant and ongoing.
This is the information age and newspapers, with their stories and their ink and their newsprint, are a clumsy transport vehicle for digital information. I can record videos on my cell phone and upload them to the web in seconds. I can post a question on Facebook tonight and wake to dozens of answers in the morning.
I chat online with my uncle, back in Northern Ireland. He is retired. The newsagents shop closed years ago. For awhile, the space was occupied by a photography processing business, but that, too was a dinosaur, on its last legs. No one uses film anymore.
And no one has time for stories. We’re too busy telling our own. We Google. We Facebook. We text and tweet. I am thinking about dinner. I am happy it is warming up. LOL.
Instead of a daily paper - a digest of events that guided us through our days - we swim in an ocean of data, treading water in this roiling, crazy sea of big and small stories. But how do we navigate?
When my family came to America we journeyed by ocean liner. I remember little of the trip. I was seasick for most of it. But the scent of fresh baked bread immediately carries me back to that ship, to the immense dining hall and the dinner rolls I finally felt well enough to eat after several days of nausea. One sniff, and I am on the open sea, the night sky inseparable from the water, the horizon imperceptible, yet safe and protected.
It is a nostalgic aroma.
Like newsprint.
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