No sign of the Times

Lately I haven’t been getting the Sunday New York Times. They
forget to deliver it. I walk out the front door in my robe and look
for the paper in its blue plastic wrapper on the driveway but it’s
not there.
I get down on my hands and knees to see if it rolled under the
car. Nope. I look up and down the street to see whether any other
driveways have Sunday papers resting on them. They do not.
This is not a very reliable way to see whether anyone else got a
Sunday paper. Many houses on my street are vacation rentals, and
the house across the street is vacant, having been ravaged by
tenants with a drug problem.
So I know with some intuitive certainty that most of the
neighbors on my street don’t get any newspapers delivered to them
at all, let alone the N.Y. Times.
After there was no Times in the driveway for several Sundays in
a row, not even after I called customer service and they promised
to bring one out, I started to worry that I was being nudged away
from an old habit of reading a Sunday paper that’s actually printed
on paper.
There’s a certain orderliness about having the Sunday Times
delivered to your door. It’s a symbolic, reassuring and, I’m
afraid, completely delusional indication that civilization still
exists.
So when the paper does not arrive, going on two, then three
weeks, you start to worry that the old order is not there.
Am I part of an experiment? I wondered. Are they trying to find
out whether Sunday New York Times subscribers, if deprived of their
newspapers, will switch to reading Frank Rich online?
Have you ever tried to read Frank Rich’s column online? It’s
sprinkled with hyperlinks, those words in blue that you click on to
go to another Web site that opens up a whole new universe of
information. It’s possible to start reading Frank Rich’s column
online and never finish because your brain has been sucked into the
Internet’s cyberspace Casbah.
I can read the Sunday Times online for free, so why subscribe?
Why make people chop down trees to print newspapers and pay someone
to drive all the way to Guerneville to drop one on my driveway? It
sounds absurdly wasteful, inefficient and obsolete.
It sounds like ancient history. It sounds like the story of my
generation. Many of my routines are wasteful and obsolete and will
have to change. I’ve always let tap water run down the drain while
waiting for hot water but now that seems ridiculously wasteful,
thoughtless and extravagant. I’m working on a new routine to
collect the cold tap water in a pitcher that I use to irrigate the
parsley growing in a planter on the porch.
Reading the New York Times used to be a hit-and-miss experience
until Sept. 11, 2001. After that I had to read the Sunday Times no
matter what. In those days I got two Sunday papers, the Times and
the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. I let the Pee Dee subscription slip
away because a lot of its news consisted of stories that were
already in the Sunday New York Times.
So when the Times stopped arriving on Sunday morning, I thought
about trying something completely different. Instead of reading a
newspaper or surfing the news on the Web, what about simply going
outside? It was Sunday morning and the sun was out. Why not
subscribe to that? It’s free, too, and they never miss a
delivery.
Maybe that’s what they’ve been trying to tell me.
Frank Robertson is a contributor to the Sonoma West Times &
News, the Tribune’s sister publication.