By Harry Cummins
Waiting for this morning's News of the World to arrive, those tangled articles of impeachment and Gerrit Cole's complex new tax bracket, I pause to remember simpler days when daily dispatches first brought wonder to an uncluttered heart.
When I was 6 years old, I lived with my mother on the shimmering edge of the world. It was a luminous place known affectionately to us as Bird Rock By-the-Sea.
My life then, the part I now choose to remember, consisted of collecting ladybugs every morning in canning jars filled with blades of grass. In the afternoons, my mother and I would walk the short, steep hill down to the sea where she would sun herself on a smooth rock, her eyes fixed on me near the shoreline.
In the many years that have since passed, my mother has died. Our clapboard beach cottage was sacrificed long ago to Southern California sprawl, replaced by a conga-line of million dollar properties. I, in the name of becoming "settled," have since wandered from one address to another.
Reflecting on all this from shores many times washed over, I can still trace where home-delivery of the news first began for me. Glancing back up the beach at my mother, my anchor, day-dreaming on her favorite rock, I could safely sense the rush of a wider world lapping at my little feet.
In those moments from where I stood in the late afternoon light, home was everything I saw and imagined. Although I was never really sure, I assumed the same was true for my mother.
All 'breaking' news, especially the kind that once left sand stuck between your toes, is unmitigated and inherently local. It's News of the World..before it gets reshaped by social media and the pile up of pain and doubt littering our adult landscape.
Where we currently call 'home' and what's truly important there... are matters, above all others, that we simply cannot afford to ignore. In terms of our own transformation, there is no such thing as a slow news day.
News is in every breath we take.....may you be washed in the world's good tidings.
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| ...First Anchor Desk |
