This is not your grandparent’s newspaper.
But much like many of the newspapers that have paved the way for this little printing, hopefully those grandparents are still reading it, cutting out a piece and putting it on some space-age refrigerator.
And the column you are reading?
Well, like so many of mine before, it could not have been done without the little tidbits of information on your sons and daughters and, OMG, your grandchildren??!!
What you read today is not just me.
I could not have spent my hours outside of work yet away from my personal life and finished this project without the help of many of the names you will read in the articles you see to the right (or the left depending on where my mugshot is placed).
Ahhhhhh, the circle of life.
Many of the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé seniors will be participating in their last home sporting events Saturday, and they will be celebrated.
Many more have already done so and they and all their classmates will graduate soon.
I think this class of upperclass youth still know what a printed newspaper is…maybe they have even touched the paper and ink and looked at the smudges on their fingers…certainly their parents have cropped a bit out and placed it somewhere.
I still collect them all.
The plastic bins they rest in have slowly become the furniture of my tiny living space. Luckily, my significant other understands what they mean, the physical part of the five senses my generation was raised on.
We slowly turned a page and experienced the feel of thin texture, the sound of the parchment rustling, the sight of black and white or colored blocks of life jinga-janga’d (did I just make that word up?) around line after line of letters suggesting how I might feel, and, of course, the aroma of fresh ink or dust or however long it existed in some readers hierarchy of literary amusement.
A semi-recent editor/friend of mine, whom I helped very briefly, would laugh when I said I was a “dinosaur of print.”
I had meant I was old-school, in my thoughts and desires of writing and publishing.
He even gave me a self-made going away cartoon card. His art shows a large dinosaur head and tiny little reptilian appendages.
The cartoon roar coming from the vicious tyrana-something-or-other says, “My arms are too short to file copy!”
It makes me laugh. So much so that it greets me each day from behind a magnetized caricature of a marmot as I reach inside our Frigidaire.
I have tried to age well with the times.
From a single high school typing class on an old IBM taught from an instructor with an even older Underwood, I clicketly-clacked out “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” over and over until my weakened little piano fingers started leaving out some of the 26 letters of the alphabet. My mother always said I had the hands of a pianist but my digits were weaker than the strength of her parental love.
I detested typing class.
I loved my little Pee-Chee folder. Inside its peach-yellow exterior that showed old-timey athletes doing what old-time athletes do I carried my pencil writing ramblings of attempted humor and longings, scribbled out in poems and short paragraphs.
I never saw a computer until roughly 1997. Its eerie dial-up modem announcing that a washed-up commercial fisherman was writing his first news piece in a weekly paper.
And life just kept advancing.
My first cellphone in 2003. What wizardry was this?
And then, what? I can carry my computer on trips much like a portable sandwich cutting board — yes, I have used one as such.
I still struggle with time.
I have learned to “back my work up on hard drives or discs” but the “cloud” scares me for some reason as it takes up no space in the box under my desk yet still contains my daily ramblings? And what wizardry is this as well?
I have learned that I do not have a South African cousin that, despite, his long-lost uncle passing, whom knew his recently deceased father who had known my grandparents, and have left him two million (insert some foreign currency here) he can claim if only I could wire assorted information. Despite his many emails I just can’t make him understand I am not that guy.
I love that this former fisherman can send that inheritance message along to a “phishing” folder. That I have come around full circle into this modern age.
Who knows, maybe in another eight years some little snot-stain will pull on one of these current seniors’ pant legs and ask about a wrinkled piece of memory parchment barely surviving a self-sticking refrigerator.
I will have that same paper. In a plastic bin. My memory of some time I was impressed by the youth of today.
Congratulations class of 2025!
You have helped me write and I truly appreciate that.
• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@juneauempire.com.
