pamelagmusings

Musings

Pam's Musings

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

A long time ago or once upon a time, stifled by the desire to get everything right on paper, rendered immobile by my inner and nasty critic, I was encouraged to read Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott.  I have read it numerous times and often wish I could commit it to memory.  Ah, the perfection that comes from the memorized verse.  Lamott strikes out at the need and desire for perfection.  Instead, she pushes me to embrace the messiness of writing, to muse.  She tells me to let go and not worry about destination or the big picture.  She set before me the creed by which my musings are written, by which my inner wild woman craves to live:  “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right.  Just dance.”  When I muse, and this is a necessary part of my writing process, I don’t look.  I just write.  I hope you enjoy these musings.  I hope you muse as well.  

Newsprint, March and April 2025

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It was a simple but good life. Every weekday morning, I awoke in my small apartment in Fairlington, a complex of similarly designed units of brick apartments capped in black roofs. To those with window seats on the flights coming into nearby National Airport, the units resembled toy train cars moving in intricate paths. 

After a bowl of cereal for myself and a dish of cat food for each of my two feline housemates, I dressed for work and downed a strong cup of coffee—cheaper at home than in the vicinity of the National Science Foundation, where I worked for the government as a typist. Before my short walk to the Metrobus stop, I scooped up the jewel in the crown of life on the outskirts of the Nation’s capital: the Washington Post newspaper delivered to my door. 

Every weekday morning, the bus ride offered its own routine. Out of routine comes beauty—in the bold, competent repetition of details hardly realized at the time as its own art.

As a newcomer, I first took no notice of the intriguing ritual of the seasoned passengers during the Metrobus ride from the outskirts to the city center. I did note that it was a rare commuter who did not clutch a Washington Post. Soon, I began to realize that this savvy population of government workers knew how to cleverly manipulate the day’s edition, with all its pages, in order to read its full contents in spite of the bus’s turns, stops and starts, bumps, and josslings. Today, one might say it was the 1970s equivalent of using only two thumbs to text a friend and simultaneously determine the day’s weather. 

What else was there for me to do during the ride? Stare dumbly at the gray clouds and concrete construction? I grew fascinated and didn’t care that I watched intently. This was how the Washington Post content was devoured. This was art—in, of all places, a big, bulbous bus.

Let me try to explain. Whether seated or standing balanced against a silver pole for a bit of balance, the regulars managed the ritual, in spite of briefcases or umbrellas. Their hands were somehow free for the newspaper alone. They scoffed at turning each full page, one after the other; that was quotidian and a potential danger to a nearby passenger. Instead, they freed specific pages or sections from the day’s edition and in an instant returned the paper to what appeared to be its original state. Deftly, as if the passenger’s hands were part of a ballet, the selected pages were subjected to a series of shakes and folds, sometimes with one hand only, until what the reader had swiftly created was a compact item, about the size of a small book. It rested in the original folio, ready for reading. Throughout the commute, one small book moved aside for another. Sometimes it was elongated, in width or height. The region’s heavy humidity helped the ballet along, the air’s moisture softening the once-crisp pages to comply to be creased. I never saw a fumble. These daily commuters were experts.    

Newsprint acrobatics aside, the Washington Post was good to me. Reading it in its entirety was my own ritual, an homage to the expert reportage. It helped me, as a naïve college graduate, to see the world beyond and at various angles. It was more than just a paper.  It was one of the arteries of a vibrant community in a nation’s capital. I respected it by leaving behind the sections I finished reading before my stop. We all did that; the bus drivers didn’t mind.

That was a long time ago. Where I live now, Laramie, Wyoming, the only buses are those used to transport public school and university students. The Greyhound stops at one of the on-the-edge-of-town twenty-four-hour gas stations. The Washington Post is available, but only online. 

We have a newspaper, the Laramie Boomerang. In 1881, Laramie’s postmaster, Bill Nye, named the fledgling newspaper after his mule, for its tendency to follow its own path. The paper is available on line, but many of us with long Laramie histories, tend to favor the printed version.   In the dry climate, I shake and flail the paper’s stiff pages to little avail. There is no one to leave the paper for, so after it is read, it goes to the compost or woodstove piles. It is our paper, though, and we residents speak of the Boomerang with pride, even though we roll our eyes and grumble when today’s edition can’t make it over to Laramie from the Cheyenne publishing offices due to snowstorm-induced road closures.    

It would be so much easier to buy the Boomerang online. Call me ridiculously old-fashioned and much too loyal to the Metrobus experts, but it’s a newspaper, and as far as I am concerned, a newspaper’s pages must be flung out of order, shaken, and folded to needful dimensions. You need to be able to sit anywhere with your large and small folios, even places where it’s near impossible to take your computer. That paper must be ready for the challenge of reading it outside, even in the summer’s 30- to 40-mile per hour breezes.    

Yet, we need that paper, stiff as it is in the Wyoming dryness, small as it is, snow-storm unreliable as it may be. It is a tie that binds. We Laramie-ites are one of numerous small to medium towns of “rurally isolated” status in this state of Wyoming. “Quick trips” are not in our vocabulary. But we are not isolated in our concern for each other. If some tragedy occurs in one town, we all mourn. If one of our youngsters wins an award, we all cheer. The town newspaper is our connection, to the next town over and to the entire state. Regardless of preference—paper or online—we want to keep our newspaper just as we want, in July, for summer to finally arrive. 

I want, as well, to be able to re-live a memory that only comes when I head outside on a summer afternoon with the newspaper and settle into a chair that is in the sun. I spread the paper out on my lap.

And then it happens. The warmed newspaper releases that particular and rare scent. Newsprint. The scent that goes back before the Washington Post to the Baltimore Sun, when I am a mere child. It’s a late summer afternoon in Maryland. My beloved grandfather sits in the back yard in his lawn chair. I am at his side, plunking dandelions and clover. The sun’s rays have touched the newspaper, and there it is, that smell. “Hey,” he says, “let me read something to you.” And the world opens up and introduces itself.