A Banker With a Heart

If you missed this on World News last night, here's the kind banker from Seattle who catches and escorts ducklings to safety. It's a nice story at a time when there aren't very many nice stories. From what I read, the mother duck has laid another nest in the same place so I guess he's got a steady job even if the banking one doesn't work out.

The Smallest Drops Remind Me of This Poem

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e. e. cummings

I Guess It Was Just a Matter of Time

Everyone knows newspapers are in trouble. Many have folded in the last few months and more will go this year. Advertising started going downhill in 2008 and, now, with the worsening economy, it is expected to go even lower. Even my beloved Inquirer is facing serious problems, declaring bankruptcy earlier this year and intending to close down The Daily News, the smaller of its two papers.

We used to have two major newspapers in Philadelphia. The morning Inquirer and The Evening Bulletin and most families read both, but The Bulletin went by the wayside years ago. I remember walking to the corner drugstore to get my Dad's Evening Bulletin ("be sure to get the 'late' edition" -- there were even different editions, but he always needed the latest sports scores) and an ice cream cone -- 5 cents for the paper, 10 cents for the cone). To older people, the thought of not having a morning paper is truly depressing. It has been part of our lives forever. We read our favorite parts and do our puzzles and it is important somehow to be able to hold a paper in our hands and flip through the pages and carry it around to read later.

So today's mail brings an offer to "get the best of both worlds!" I can add a digital edition to my current subscription for 2 cents a week--they're calling it the e-Inquirer. Up to this point, the digital edition has been free, but I guess that's about to end. And then how long will they continue the print edition, I wonder. It's only a matter of time.