At 3:15 a.m. Central time, I was reading page A5 of today’s ADN. Sipping my first cup of coffee and listening to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” on iHeart Media’s “Real Oldies Roku TV/Radio Channel/ Station,” this 70-year-old Air Force brat (also an Air Force retiree) remembers: helping stoke a coal-fired furnace in Wisconsin while attending first one, then another “one-room schoolhouse;” long-since closed Department of Defense schools in Germany and Labrador; pulling more than one newspaper out of the bushes in front of our Sewart Air Force Base house near Smyrna, Tennessee, another long-closed base and where, after being turned over to the county, one house on a block is neatly kept up while next door is a weedy pile of bricks; needing help from our then-second-grade son to operate our “generic” Apple II computer.
And as those “the way it used to be” memories bubble up, I’m both understanding of those who miss that physical touch of newsprint in and on their hands, yet thankful I can still, several years after leaving the Alaska I loved and lived in for 15 years, read page A5.
And with a “sideways shout-out” to another A5 letter — George Harbeson, Jr.’s “Give a Listen” — maybe this “benedictory blast from my past” can end today’s ramble down my memory lane: “What is, and what should never be.” Thus singeth Led Zeppelin. Amen?
— Keith Muschinske
Cumberland, Wisconsin
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