What's the News?

All my life I’ve thought with my mouth open. So last week when a passing idea came to me about writing a weekly newspaper column, I said, out loud, in public, in print, that I would do it.

All week I’ve been kicking myself.

I’ve already got enough to do. I run a publishing company. I’m getting old. Get to the gym or feel guilty. Still working on the Great American Novel I started over fifty years ago. Newlywed. Grandkids’ birthdays and plays. Keeping the house and yard up. Cooking. Meeting people. And now I go ahead and take on the writing of a weekly newspaper column?

I don’t have the time to think up new ways of saying things others are saying on at least one of the ten-thousand-channel media screens.

What do I know, anyway?

But still I have to write a weekly column because I said I would do it and if I don’t do it I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror and call myself a newspaper reporter for the Westphalia News

But what can I say that others are not and not waste peoples’ time?

I thought about writing about how I became a secret agent, or what that really means. But there’s nothing new there. Lots of people become a secret agent and write a book about it and get on television.

Or what about Ukraine? Trump’s indictment? Biden’s brain?

What’s new?

What’s news?

We took the two older granddaughters to the Denver Art Museum last Sunday. That was new and nobody else is talking about it -- about how they must have been affected by just being there in quiet cavernous rooms in the midst of 19th century French art.

When they went back to school the next day – 6th grade and a high school sophomore – they were not the same without probably really being aware of it themselves. But they were changed because they’d glimpsed the world through the eyes of others who’d wrestled with big ideas and unusual perspectives and tried to express it in their own way. So when it comes time for them to make their next big decision -- whether to go this way or that -- they will have been influenced, if even a little, by a glimpse of others who tried something new.

And that, in my experience, is what makes something news.