Historical April 1995 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Here are some stories The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere didn’t report. Before the Sinclair station was shut down, its gaseous bowels unearthed, when there was a deserted house next to it, later leveled and swept away to make a parking lot, my two oldest boys, an adventurous pair, went exploring in that deserted house in the days of our first settling into the neighborhood, around 1967. And as I heard it later, there were these guys, older, tougher, from the next block over (where we eventually moved) and they put my boys in the furnace, cold as a refrigerator though it was, and they wouldn’t let them out, but eventually relented, because those were the days when even the bad guys went to church and there was accounting and my sons came home to dinner and a breathless tale and got to grow up. And another one. About the supposedly bad-luck black cat, who preferred the alley she was born in but accepted our back porch because it had a saucer of milk on it. Black as ink she was and her name Inky to cinch the case.
She couldn’t come into the house because we would have sneezed ourselves to death and left her an orphan after all.
But we could fit out a cat house with a comforter for the cold winter and then, to free her from the burdens of family in so small a space, send her off to the Vet to get her fixed, as if reproduction were a kind of brokenness. Which being a he, she took badly, the fixing more formidable to my male mind when the news came from the onsite inspector at the Vet’s.
But Inky would have left his family fatherless anyway, because he had the bad sense to walk across the street in the middle of the night and not see the car and not realize that his dark cloak was a danger to him. So there he was early on the morning of the Fourth of July, stiff and already stinking in the heat, wandered too far from his natal alley but not so far that his death wasn’t part of the neighborhood story.
The Times probably misses thousands of stories like these, every issue.
But not through oversight.
A paper that reports Scout activities and service station metamorphoses and that prints recipes from neighborhood broads and blades and keeps politics at the people level is after all the ultimate alternative newspaper, unturned-on by scandal, exposing nothing more than our ordinariness, sure of its circulation and its place in the big scheme. Its writers and editors have failed to report all the surviving children and all the dead pets.
But only because they had their own children and their own pets to worry about.
They were our neighbors and we were theirs for twenty-five years of a paper, still delivered to our door, that holds a mirror up to our hopes for the twenty-first century: that our children be delivered out of all their furnaces and that the darkness be no danger because we have learned to see, really to see, each other. Watch for the news in this space.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, April 1995.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1995_04.pdf, printed page(s) 5; PDF page(s) 5.
