Fremont News

The only news stand in Fremont is going out of business - my favorite one, on Fremont Avenue. It's a hole-in-the-wall kind of place. Usually, a cashier with multiple piercings sits at the front counter, bent over some magazine or another. Further in, the rabbit hole seems to burrow into its space among the shops. Magazines crowd the stands, turning their colorful faces outward. I usually haunt the poetry journal section, but nearer the front, newspapers also breath their papery gray scent into the air. At the back, a cheerful scatter of postcards, greeting cards, journals and other miscellaneous paraphenalia decorates the walls.

It is typically anachronistic of me to be entering print journalism now, when all of print media seems at the edge of total collapse, like a tired, wan old giant out of some fairy story. I told the cashier how sorry I was to learn they're going out of business. He, a sharp-faced, tall gnome with a bristly blond beard and spikey blond hair, looked at me with brilliant blue eyes and said, "Me too!"

We talked awhile. The internet, he said. Competition, he said. 100 foreign-language newspapers we used to carry, he said, down to eight, now. They're one of the last news stands in Seattle, with one surviving shop on Broadway; Bulldog, the University news stand, once had a Broadway branch, but they closed that, and now only have their little shop on University Ave - the Ave, as students say.

I don't know how people can give up the scent, the feel, of a solid book or newspaper or magazine in their hands. There's such spectacular romance to print. The internet sucks the life out of literature, consumes the reality of it, and turns its texture to a sort of evanescent pillar of air, substanceless.

"For me, it's heartbreaking," said my thin-faced elf, leaning down to me where I stood a step lower than him.

Me too.

Birthday guests

The tiny bushtits gather every morning among the oblong yellow leaves and thin branches outside our kitchen window. They make a miniature, merry band of thieves, small as grey gnats. They're the same color as the rain. Ignoring me completely as they explore, their nubby beaks poking from round faces, they hang upside-down on their twig legs. A flock of elves.

Meanwhile, I sit at the kitchen table, writing articles. A big bouquet of roses, interspersed with clustered white pinks and crowned by irises, leans over my laptop as I type. I bought it for Paul's birthday. I also made us a steaming white bean soup for a birthday dinner, speckled with shredded parmesan, served with wine and bread and a leafy salad.

Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A book of verse, a flask of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
And wilderness is paradise enow.

-Omar Kayyam

Three weeks ago, an Anna's hummingbird visited me here, just in time for my own birthday. She sat on a twig in her green coat, complete with shimmering lapels, her jaunty beak thrusting upward like a sword. Hummingbirds live here in Washington State year round, according to my Sibley's guide to birds.

So we have our little army of visiting winged creatures, even here in the center of town. Perched above the city like this among the tree branches, level with neighboring rooftops in the rain, I feel separate and magical. Cold grey autumn has settled in, and its tiny pilgrims keep coming by.