At every newspaper I ever worked at, there was always some old timer, some old retired reporter (always a guy who walked with a cane) who liked to come around to just hang out at the periphery of the scene, osmotically absorbing the frenetic energy of a newsroom approaching deadline, drinking coffee in his own personal mug, sitting at an empty desk in a corner of the room.

Not just anybody off the street can walk into and hang out in a newsroom — an inner sanctum where confidential information is openly exchanged. But old reporters who’d paid their dues can. Like families, once you’re in, nobody can make you leave.

Sometimes they’d join us after work over a few beers. The editors would typically let them write a personal column now and then. I usually didn’t like them, their columns, I mean, not the old timers.

I liked the old timers. I liked listening to their stories about their adventures chasing Capone and their stories of the homefront when everybody was supporting the country’s war.

But their columns sucked… all about the weather, their gardens, grandchildren, their bum knees. Vietnam was still going on and they’re writing about tulips in their garden on a sunny day.

I told myself that if I ever got to be old and had a column that I wouldn’t write that way.

But dammit, it’s been a horrible winter out here on the western plains of Colorado. Hot and dry. We can’t stay here without water. We’d have to move. The reservoirs are getting dangerously low. Record highs day after day. The weatherlady says she’s never seen anything like it.

I talk to my brothers and sister and folks back in the U.P. — Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, way up north. It’s been a miserable winter up there, too — snow drifted halfway up the telephone poles. Nobody can even get to their ice shacks out on Lake Antoine. Dad’s 98 and mom’s not far behind and they say they’ve never seen anything like it.

In our own backyard, winter’s barely out the door and already rhubarb and dandelions are breaking through the soil.

Never seen anything like it.

And now once again we’re a country at war and this is the homefront where millions are marching in the streets, chanting “No Kings.” Unlike Vietnam, the longhairs in the streets now are grandmothers.

No, in all my years I’ve never seen anything like it.

I wasn’t around for the beheading of Charles I in 1649, or Louis XVI in 1793. Even during Vietnam, everybody had been “Born in the USA” where there hadn’t been a king since 1776.

Like it’s the middle ages again before there were cars and electric motors to mill the harvest of grain into flour and people were ruled by bloodlines and creeds.

So, obviously, I’ve never seen anything like it before, which makes the story breaking news, more interesting, I think, than tulips on a sunny day, or my back after chopping wood.

--30--