Nows and Forevers

Bitter wind chills and areas of blowing snow will continue this morning. High temperatures will remain below zero across much of the area today. Temperatures will briefly drop once more tonight into the teens below zero north and single digits below zero Downeast. #MEwx pic.twitter.com/3oRdXtkfc2

— NWS Caribou (@NWSCaribou) February 4, 2023

I’m still trying to wrap my head around what’s going on in and around my former town of Caribou, Maine last night and this morning.

There are blizzard and extreme cold warnings from Friday into Saturday, with blowing snow and wind gusts up to 45 mph piled atop temperatures that won’t get above 0 and wind chills that for the top half of Maine are between -43 and -81 below zero.

Aroostook County, that far northern top of Maine bordered by New Brunswick and Quebec, are used to brutally cold winters. It’s not unusual for it to snow from September through May, and temperatures to fall well below zero for days on end. Nor are double-digit wind chills unheard of. Aroostook County winters have driven their share of people away, never to return.

It wasn’t the only reason, but I’ll say that by the time I was thinking about leaving, I had grown tired of the winters.

Northern Maine is not for the faint of heart. It’s part of New England, but just barely. It doesn’t get as cold as that in my part of New England, Connecticut and Maine, and rarely gets that snowy. If you love winter, then you will love Aroostook County. It breeds a pretty hearty person, and I’ve always admired the Aroostook County people. I still do. And today, even more so.

And on the flip side, the summers are wonderful. Even in the depth of winter, the sun shines bright across the rolling hills and the sky is wider than anything I’ve seen outside of some parts of the West. And as I’ve written about before, the Northern Lights and other wonders of the sky make Aroostook County a great place to look up.

But wow, today. I hope everyone gets through this OK.

Since I didn’t listen to the radio or TV this morning, what would I do without Twitter to tell me what I already know living here in Pennsylvania: Six more weeks of winter.

I honestly don’t understand the whole Punxsutawney Phil phenomena, nor any of the other groundhogs who are out there, forecasting the weather. I’ve spent most of my life in cold climates, whether that’s Connecticut, New York, Maine or Pennsylvania. There’s no way that winter ends on Feb. 2. I mean, who would think that? It sometimes doesn’t end on March 21.

And where I used to live in Caribou and Aroostook County, Maine, winter is definitely not over: There’s a blizzard and wind chill warning for Friday and Saturday. The wind chill will be somewhere between -55 and -60 in Presque Isle and Caribou, places I know quite well.

“The coldest wind chills in decades will thrash New England,” CNN reported today.

On the bright side, though: It spawned a great movie, “Groundhog Day.”

Schoolhouse Rock!”

LIke anyone my age, “Schoolhouse Rock” was part of my childhood. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that they are 50 years old this year. I was in kindergarten in 1973.

And yeah, “Schoolhouse Rock” was pretty influential. In the ’70s, that was a way to learn more about your country, its history, grammar, nutrition, and other topics. I still have several of those tunes rattling around in my head.

I learned the Preamble of the Constitution because of this song, long before I decided to make my living based on the First Amendment. Schoolhouse Rock’s “The Preamble” always gets me a little emotional. I even teared up a bit hearing the song at performed live at a show I took my kids to years ago.

Why? Because the song lays out the promise of this country, these United States, and for that lesson so long ago, I am thankful. It really is amazing, this country of ours, even though it’s been under stress lately. It’s not perfect, nothing ever is. And I’m beyond disappointed how it treats, and has treated, some of its people. Inequity and racism runs deep. We are never going to get to where we should be as a country til we fulfill those promises. I am thankful to both my parents for teaching me from a young age that the country has a long way to go until it lives up to the words of the Preamble to all people.

True in 1787, true in 1973, true in 2023.

A coworker of mine told me about a column in Town & Country about how to beat the crowds at Disneyworld.

“It’s in this month’s issue,” she said.

My coworker subscribes to a lot of magazines, and I say bless her for that. There aren’t enough people who subscribe to magazines or newspapers these days, at least not on the paper side. Seems like every week I hear about a magazine or newspaper either going out of business or reducing its frequency. It’s a big change from when I was covering the magazine industry in the early 2000s, when print media were starting to feel the heat from online but that magazines seemed to be immune.

“It’s an active medium,” one big media planner/buyer told me back in the fall of 2003 for a story I wrote for MediaPost. “For our clients, the appeal of magazines is tapping into, trying to borrow from the reader, that passion for a particular magazine, and transfer it over to the brand.”

Fast forward 20 years and it’s different. There are probably more things to be passionate about than ever before and it’s easier than ever, thanks to social media, to get passionate about them. And you can connect to enthusiasts quicker and deeper than ever before.

I look at my own reading habits. I read most periodicals online. I used to subscribe to Men’s Health, Esquire, Real Simple, The New Yorker, The Economist, and QST (an amateur radio magazine). None come to my house anymore.

The magazine industry is changing and the lines are blurring, just as they have for the newspaper industry where I’ve spent most of my career. In my career, I’ve founded one magazine (a local one) and worked on two others, both in New York and Pennsylvania. All three never made it past 2015, even though one had been going since the 1940s and the other two had at least 15 years’ each. Another magazine I worked at for six years, The Hollywood Reporter, went from a daily magazine (yes, really) to a weekly after I left in 2010.

Magazines, like newspapers, are changing with the times.

I’ve enjoyed the transition to digital that my career has taken over the past more than two decades. I’ve written primarily for an online audience, or at least predominantly online, since 2002. The Hollywood Reporter was in transition when I was there and there was more prestige in writing for the print editions over online, even though even then the online stories tended to have more reach and impact, at least for someone like me on the ground. Where I work now, we have both a print edition and online. We put time into both, although as a journalist I have daily deadlines as well as weekly and monthly ones.

But I think we are missing a lot when it comes to the gradual (and maybe not-so-gradual) decline of the print media. While I’ll admit The New Yorker’s always piled up at my house, I remember a certain thrill in the ’80s and ’90s when a new magazine would come to my mailbox. You don’t get that same thrill in the digital age, when something hits your email box. Magazines were an event. They were also bigger than they are now.

I think my colleague has the right idea.

Every Jan. 28, I pause to remember the seven men and women who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion. They were extraordinary, by any measure. They were heroes – not just by being aboard the shuttle. Judy Resnick and Ellison Onizuka switched on the emergency air for the pilots in the flight deck after the explosion. That could not be done by the pilots. Most of the crew if not all were alive for three minutes afterward til the flight deck hit the water, something NASA took years to admit. The crews’ oxygen tanks were not only open but mostly depleted, something that can only be done by breathing.

I bring that up as a prologue to this remembrance of Onizuka by the late CDB Bryan, was published in The New York Times a few weeks later. Bryan knew Oniziuka, and he and his stepson attended the launch 37 years ago as the astronaut’s guest. I have kept this piece, from the Times magazine, all these years because it inspires me in something that I have been called to do, writing remembrances of people who have passed.

Everything I have read about Onizuka and Resnick and Christa McAuliffe and Ron McNair, and the entire crew, compounds the profound sense of loss. They were bound for even greater things after their flight.

I was on a Zoom conference call this afternoon where one of the speakers wished everyone a happy new year.

“If we’re still OK to say that on the 26th,” she said.

It made me wonder. Because I don’t know.

I wished people a happy new year much earlier at the end of 2022 than I normally would. I started saying it just before Thanksgiving to people I wouldn’t see or talk to for more than a month. It kind of just popped out of my mouth. But then it stuck.

I didn’t wish anyone a happy new year at all in 2021 or 2022. It didn’t feel right, with all the people dying from Covid-19 and the general tone of the world. I would say it back if someone asked me. But I have to say that at the end of 2020 especially and even the end of 2021, I just felt grateful to be alive. It could have gone a different way.

Frankly, 2022 wasn’t that great a year either, at least personally. I felt the weight of a passing, which then gave way to a flood of emotions. But that’s neither here nor there. I still felt it was important to say “happy new year” for 2023.

And, like the woman on the conference call, I’m still happy to do it, 26 days in. It’s still a new year to me.

Elegy for an angel, Melissa Morris

I’ve got a love-hate relationship with podcasts.

I’ve been listening to them on and off for more than 15 years, during the first wave in the middle 2000s and then again over the last decade. I’ve enjoyed any number of them, whether it’s “RadioLab” or “Ask Me Another” from public radio or content from the BBC. I’ve also listened on and off to podcasts from Merlin Mann and David Sparks, a couple of ham radio ones, and over the last several years, podcasts in the Welsh language.

Yet I’ve never been able to consistently listen, week in and week out. Whether that’s because I am easily distracted or because my tastes change from time to time, I don’t know. Probably both. Yet it seemed like podcasts had reached a point, over the last several years, of mass media saturation.

Maybe that’s changing. I saw a report on NiemanLab.org (from Hot Pod originally) that said that there aren’t as many new podcasts being introduced now than there were in 2020. That Covid year saw 1.1 million new podcasts started, the highest by far since the data was tracked (2010). Podcasts had been on a steady increase since 2010 with 2019 seeing just under 400,000 new podcasts, according to Listen Notes. In 2021 there were 729,000 new podcasts and 219,000 in 2022.

That’s the lowest, last year, since 2018.

Is that a pandemic blip or are people changing their listening tastes? I certainly spent less time in my car and at the gym between 2020 and today than I have in any three-year period since I began driving. But my listening to podcasts, or not listening to podcasts, has little to do with that.

I just haven’t found the time. I’ve continually added and dropped Overcast, the stellar podcast app, from my iPhone. It went back on about two months ago and now it’s about to go off again, because I don’t really listen to any podcasts anymore with any regularity.

I wonder if that’s a trend that will continue. NiemanLab has a lot more to say about it.

I’m old enough to remember when TV was free, at least after the set and the electricity. Today, it’s anything but.

I am paying more than $200 a month for the privilege to watch TV. This isn’t a cranky old guy complaint. Even when I got my first apartment in 1990, cable TV was only $19.95 a month. I can’t remember when it started climbing in price, although I was also immune to it for several years because I didn’t have a TV or cable. But now cable TV is about $100 a month bundled with the Internet, which is way more critical to how I live than TV ever was.

And besides, who has just cable TV? For my household, here’s HBO Bax, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Peacock. I could get others, but I would have run out of money and time to watch. I just saw today that Apple TV is going up in price from $4.99 a month to $6.99 a month, just in time for the third and likely final season of “Ted Lasso.” Hulu and Netflix have also recently raised subscription fees.

I get it. Content, as they like to call it, is expensive. So are licensing fees. As a former TV business journalist, I know that better than your average viewer.

But as a consumer, I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to keep what I have. How long will it be sustainable for many others, too? Especially those of us who remember simpler, cheaper times.

Elegy for an angel, Melissa Morris

This is the first time, I think, that a member of my father’s family ever made the front page of a newspaper. And above the fold!

I got this a few weeks ago from my father, who had gotten it from my aunt who was cleaning out stuff that hadn’t been touched since the 1930s. This is the Boston Daily Record, the front page of June 6, 1929. My grandfather, Edward A. Gough, was the “Newton Boy First Prize ESSAY WINNER!” and, just below the big Rum Trial headline, that’s his picture looking all studious.

The caption: “First Prize Winner in Daily Record’s schoolboy essay contest. Edward Gough, 17, junior in the High School of Our Lady, Newton, shown reading over his prize contribution. Young Gough wins a $500 first year scholarship in any college he may select.”

This was a huge deal. It allowed him to be the first member of his family to go to college. He would later be able to pull his own parents out of poverty, pay for his four kids to go to college (and some graduate school), have a summer house along the Massachusetts coast and travel around Europe with my grandmother. Each of his four grandkids went to college, and his great-grandkids are starting to now, too. All from this.

Not bad for the only son of immigrants from near Belfast, Northern Ireland, and he grew up in abject poverty at a time when Newton was anything but a tony suburb. He lived with his parents and grandparents on Silver Lake Avenue in a house that is, the last time I checked, still there. This helped him pay for his first year of Boston College, which allowed him a foot in the door to his future. The essay, “What My School Means to My Community,” got him a job as a part-time reporter for the Daily Record. He paid for the rest of college by joining the National Guard, taking odd jobs, and, this is impossible but true, boxing.

But this is where I think it began, where a poor Irish Catholic kid could achieve the American Dream. I know he was incredibly smart and industrious. He was fluent in French and German, which would end up being perfect for his Army service after D-Day. He was a magna cum laude graduate of BC, got a master’s degree in social work from BC and then also got a master’s from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Except that it wasn’t the Kennedy School of Government when he was there: JFK was one of his classmates. And he designed and built the summer house three generations of his family grew up in in Marshfield, Massachusetts.

It’s also interesting, the date of this paper. June 6 would end up a crucial day in my grandfather’s life. This, of course. And then, 15 years later, he’d wake up on the morning of June 6, 1944, as a U.S. Army officer about to go ashore on D-Day.

Elegy for an angel, Melissa Morris

Imagine looking up every night and being mesmerized by nature’s wonder. I don’t have to imagine. That was my every clear night when I lived in far northern Maine, a sparsely populated stretch of land near the Canadian border. It was one of the best things about living there.

How many times have you seen the Northern Lights? I didn’t have to fly to Alaska or Iceland. All I had to do was walk out my door or drive around Aroostook County. I probably missed just as many due to clouds or just being inside. (I saw the best one ever April 6, 2000, thanks to a call from a dear friend, who saw the Northern Lights out her window and knew I would want to. You could see that one down to Connecticut.) How about comets or meteor showers? What about stars as far as the eye could see? Or seeing the Milky Way?

That’s what you get every darkfall if you live far enough away from city lights. Or at least it used to be that way. Now light pollution is getting worse every year, according to a citizens science study Globe at Night and researchers in Germany and the United States. That study found an annual brightening of the sky 10% every year since 2011.

It’s “equivalent to doubling the sky brightness every 8 years,” according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.

LED lights, human migration patterns and the march of civilization has done a lot of things. One is to drastically change the sky at night.

“The visibility of stars is deteriorating rapidly, despite (or perhaps because of) the introduction of LEDs in outdoor lighting applications,” the study said. “Existing lighting policies are not preventing increases in skyglow, at least on continental and global scales.”

That means that even in my lifetime, a little over a half century, the sky has gotten markedly brighter. Light pollution means that children growing up will end up seeing far fewer stars as an adult than they did when they were younger.

And that doesn’t even include the impact of Starlink satellites, which are bringing the internet to remote places but at a cost of light pollution for those of us who enjoy looking up at the sky.

It’s at a huge cost. The stars have, for as long as human beings have looked up, been essential to our existence. And they’ve beguiled us for that long.

“Every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature and Selected Essays.”

Or this: “The sky was clear — remarkably clear — and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse,” Thomas Hardy wrote in “Far from the Madding Crowd.” Or this from Joseph Conrad: “In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.”

The stars matter. What would we do without them?

Before I moved to Maine in the mid-1990s, I saw only a fraction of the sky above. I lived in cities and suburbs around Boston, New York and San Diego, where the everyday light even then masked all but the brightest stars. Rare would I glimpse a star that the light didn’t cover. But there were times: One week, when I was a teenager in October 1983, my stepfather and I went fishing and mostly slept under the stars on Lake Havasu, Arizona, before that part of the desert became populated, too.

I was shocked to discover how many stars you could see when you got far enough away from the city lights.

Then I went back to San Diego and its lights, and even without that, the fog rolling into Coronado almost every evening, blocking even the moon. It wasn’t until a dozen years later, when I was in my late 20s, living in Maine, did I get a chance to live under the stars again.

I didn’t just enjoy the night sky a little. I loved it a lot. I never was much for the outdoors life. My mother hated all forms of camping and believed the indoors was invented so you didn’t have to be out there with the insects and animals and rain. But I lost track of how many times I was blown away by the sheer beauty of the sky in northern Maine, day or night. Aroostook County’s rolling hills and farmland, with no mountains where I lived, led to more sky than I had other than in the West.

I grew up in the crowded East and West coasts, the houses close together and a big city never too far away, whether it was Boston or New York or San Diego. I’ve spent more than half my life near or in one of those three cities. And no matter how dark it got in the suburb, it was nowhere near as pitch black as a night driving up Interstate 95 between Bangor and Houlton, or walking to my garden in Abbot, Maine, or coming home from church on Maine Route 89 between Limestone and Caribou.

Or as lustrous. I was down in Bangor for work once a week for years, and I always drove back to Aroostook County, three hours or so in the car, late at night. I often was the only car on the road for an hour and a half or more. And sometimes I wouldn’t even have the radio or cassette player on in the car to keep me company. Just watching the sky, the intense moon rendering headlights almost unnecessary, the white or colored flashes of aurora borealis across the sky, or being able to navigate by stars alone.

I didn’t have a telescope in those days. I didn’t need one. What I could see with my eyes alone was plenty.

I have only been back to northern Maine once in two decades, and it was raining. So I don’t know what it was like in the intervening time, but I suspect that if any place in the country still has its fill of dark sky, it’s Aroostook County. I wish I could bottle it up for the rest of the country, the 80% or so of the United States that can’t see the Milky Way when it looks up.

I’m sad that succeeding generations won’t be able to see the same night sky that I did when I was younger. I know where I am right now, even though it’s 25 miles from a big city, is still too light to do much of any skywatching. It was so difficult, even on a clear night, to see the last big comet. It took five times to see it, when it should have only taken once.

Take it from a sky watcher: There’s nothing like the heavens. It makes you feel more alive.

It was nearly a quarter of a century ago, I still remember the light shows I saw almost every week.

They felt like they were blazing for me alone.

Elegy for an angel, Melissa Morris