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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Saluting a Survivor

This is the Michigan News Agency in downtown Kalamazoo. Sixty years in business, changing blessedly little from year to year, Michigan News never disappoints. Besides magazines, they have maps and lots of books, including a large POETRY section. (Yes, that's right--poetry.) Along the back wall are magazines and newspapers in foreign languages, where I found a current copy of LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE (not readily available in Northport).

When my son was just a little kid with a paper route and had to deliver Sunday papers in the dark, I would walk the route with him (I helped carry, but he did all the delivering, not throwing from the street but leaving each paper where the customer wanted it left), and afterward we would go to Michigan News, where I got the latest NEW YORKER and he got the new comic book of his choice, before we went down the street for our downtown Sunday breakfast. This past Sunday was a small, nuclear-family reunion of sorts. I drove south from Northport, my mother and sisters came north and east from Illinois, and on Sunday morning Ian and Kim met us downtown for a very large, very late breakfast. Michigan News was our dessert. May it live a hundred years!

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