Senior Daze

by Katie Bourg

About Katie: Having arrived in time for the Great (?) Depression, WWII, and all other 20th century problems, I am endowed with long and varied memories. Writing classes have long been my home away from home. Other people's stories are fascinating, and sharing is growth at its best. Hope you seniors will join me with your stories. Try it. You'll like it.

This is not my favorite time of year. The warm summer days (we did have a few, didn't we?) are leaving. True, we have had an extended summer, lingering into fall, but the wet chilly mornings tell us not to expect much more.

That's not my only grudge against fall. Every other year we have an election. On the year we are not having one, we are beginning to build up ammunition against 'the other guy.'

I have always had a long memory. Some days I really wish I didn't. Politics is a good subject to stay away from. Just try and do it. In fact, I can never remember a time when it was possible to do so. And dirty tricks have always been a large part of the collective memory of all of us, I'm sure.

I was just starting first grade when a nasty little man, who was editor of our local paper, decided to undermine my father's reputation. Nearly eighty years later, I still grind my teeth when I remember the phone ringing repeatedly as my mother tried to get me dressed and across the vacant lot behind us to the school. I don't think I even had milk on my cornflakes that morning, as she kept answering the phone. Everyone in town had read the morning paper. It seems the little man did not like my father's influence on one large segment of the local population. It was also apparent he expected these old soldiers to ask my father's opinion on how to vote. It was not the choice the editor preferred. In the end, the hatchet job wrapped in newsprint was ineffective. However, the tale was not so easily dismissed, and even years later someone would mention the subject, sometimes in the classroom or other public place I couldn't avoid. I would go home fuming with the injustice of it.

My father always repeated the same statement. "Paper can't refuse ink." It is a statement I have carried with me all these years.

Once radio became common, the same problem occurred, though not to me or mine. My father would again voice the same statement. I would point out that radio was not paper, and covered more ground. "The same holds true." He would say. Humph! I would answer, and stomp off.

Almost since its inception, television surpassed radio for the dispensing of information-good or bad-true or false. It has been that way ever since. I'm not going to change it. Nobody can, I'm sure. But I still get very huffy at the name-calling and disinformation we are being force fed.

That's not my biggest gripe, however. Money is. Cost. Waste. Radio is almost never on in our house, TV less all the time. Newsprint can still be used to wrap up dirty fish for garbage collection, so it has some use.

Our roads are a mess. Bridges are threatening to fall down all around us. Schools are inadequate. There is not enough money to pay enough teachers, buy books, computers. Taxes are eating some people out of house and home. Foreclosures just hit a new high, worse than ever known.

So how come all these candidates can find so much money to sling so much mud at each other--and in my direction--when I just want to spend an evening watching something pleasant on TV?

And do they really think I'm interested in all that sludge they dig up? My dumb dog knows better.