Farewell

When I was a small child, toddler, perhaps, one of the growing members in my vocabulary was the “word” mags-mags.”  I have been an aficionado of magazines from early on.

Today I heard that NEWSWEEK would be biting the dust and I felt the compunction to send off the publication with a little tribute.

I remember coming home from school and seeing freshly received magazines on the round table in front of the fireplace.  I loved going through LIFE and National Geographic.  For a time, I found TIME and NEWSWEEK out of my realm.  But I grew into them.  TIME and NEWSWEEK, especially, became my friends when I lived for five years in a variety of foreign countries.

I still have a fondness for the 1970’s issue that had Joni Mitchell on the cover.  It kept me company for many hours at Victoria Station in London as I waited for my train to a German Christmas.  Or the time I used my sparse kroner in Stockholm to buy an issue to read on the journey to the Soviet Union (as it was at the time).  Unfortunately,  the cover picture on that issue was of recently exiled author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  Wanting to get my money’s worth I hid the magazine under my seat on the train as I crossed over the border.  A guard came and inexplicably lifted my cushion and took the magazine.  Big Brother WAS watching.

BUT, having done a quick Google search of these issues I now realize that they weren’t NEWSWEEK at all.  They were TIME.

In any case, farewell to NEWSWEEK.

FEAR: In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings

When I was a child growing up in Silver Lake I remember three distinct times that I was really afraid.  Comparing those three times to the horror and fears that the students and parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School have experienced cannot equate.

I like to think that my five-year-old grandson’s fears consist only of me singing “Merry Christmas, Darling.”

I had never seen a dead body, nor had I even attended a funeral.  My three fears were of a grasshopper in the back yard, the fact that my father—being much older than my mother—would die, and, thirdly, feeling terror at watching the scene in Ben Hur with the lepers.  Each of these situations was dealt with by different means.  With the grasshopper, my dad carried me outside to try to show me that the insect was of no harm.  With my father’s age, I came up with a ploy that calculated his age and mine and that by the time he was in his 70’s I would be in my twenties and able to deal with things like death.  I was 8 at the time and 20 seemed a long way off.  And with the leper scene, I crawled into bed with my little sister.

I cannot image how the children and witnesses of the Sandy Hook killings will deal with what they’ve experienced.