Paper Weight

This morning I picked up the local Sunday paper from a corner hawker. I have stopped purchasing my paper from the metal paper machine bandit. The walk kills two birds with one stone. Yuck - I hate killing animals or other critters - except for mosquito's and palmetto bugs. Palmetto bugs is a nice name for cockroaches. When I was a young innocent we called them palmetto bugs but now I know the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. No one wants to say they have cockroaches in their home. So, we twist the truth and make it a little prettier. Back to the weight of paper.

I carried the paper home and realized how small it was. It is shrinking - right along with the economy. When I was that young and innocent child still thinking palmetto bugs were not cockroaches - I knew alot about the Sunday paper. I was up bright and early - way before the sun even thought about painting the morning sky orange and red. It was a family thing that we all had to participate in - no choices in this matter. I helped my dad and brothers put together the Sunday paper and bag them or rubber band them - depending on the weather. We had these brown - very narrow wax like paper bags that the Sunday paper was stuffed into in case of wet weather.

The papers were humongous. It took an art form to roll those papers and get them to fit inside those bags. I liked the mornings with no threat of rain - rubber bands. Mostly I remember trying to get that bundle of paper into the narrow sack.

Today the Sunday paper would have no problem fitting into that brown, waxy, narrow paper sack, although today we use plastic.

The paper that I walked home with seemed very lightweight and not at all like the papers from my youth or for that matter just a few years ago. What is happening to our papers? Why are they getting weightless? No news? No ads? No money to produce the paper? How much has this pathetic economy contributed to the shrinking newspaper? Soon, I will only be able to read the news online.