Spiked

The Rocky is gone. It was never "My Rocky," which is the way they recently marketed the newspaper, I hear. But I once spent some time with a woman who had lived in the Denver area and she made reference more than once to "the Rocky" in a way that suggested a depth to the connection between the people and the paper. This was back in my mountain-bike racing days (there; this is related to athletics, you see). She was a newspaper person then—maybe still is—and I was too. But so many of us have moved on.

My dad spent, I don't know, 40 years I guess it was, printing newspapers. It was always morning papers, so he worked an overnight shift that would end around four in the morning. I remember being awaken by his arrival home from time to time, and getting up eagerly to check the baseball scores. I'm no old fogey, right? I do Ironman triathlons, give me a break. And yet in the relatively short time since then, since the newspaper was the only way to know, the idea of needing to grab the newspaper to find out the scores from last night's games has become so absurd as to be comical.

It's all changed so fast. There are things replacing newspapers as sources of information. Sort of. We hope. But are there things replacing newspapers as stitching in the binding that holds communities together? I wonder.

This, more or less, was the soundtrack today to my hour heading up to Tabor, running its trails, and coming home, on a sunny chilly day in Portland, where I subscribe to the Oregonian.