Kathy said she was beginning to get depressed by the news. I asked her what she was reading, and she said, “The New York Times, The Guardian U.S.A., The Guardian U.K., The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, Politico, Axios, Raw Story, The Los Angeles Times, the Atlanta Constitution, the Miami Herald, the Austin Statesman, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Alaska Daily News, The Boston Globe, The Portland (Me.) Press Herald, Corriere della Sera, Salon, Slate, and Vanity Fair.”
And this all before 6 a.m.
She’d done it for all those years at The Star — 27, if I recall correctly — too.
“Nothing’s changed,” she said, referring to our abiding seediness as a species, “it’s just that everyone’s out in the open about it.”
And yet, despite her daily high-calorie intake of outrages and horrors, she’s enjoying life, which she shares with a golden retriever, two cats, and 14 fish, all of whom adore her. The cats — one of whom went AWOL for three years — kiss her in the morning, the dog too, and the fish, each with a different personality, she says, press up against the glass, ready for her to sprinkle goldfish flakes down upon them.
Soon — I say soon, though soon’s been a long time in coming — she will arrange the columns I’ve picked for a book, and some photos, and send them off to be printed. It was a project she suggested a year ago, after learning I’d been furloughed, for the first time in more than half-a-century, and a project that got me through that rather isolated period.
Now that I’m back rubbing elbows on fields and courts and diamonds, “Essays From Eden” doesn’t seem as important as it once did.
Though it pleases me to know that my descendants, because of Kathy Kovach, may know something of me and Mary and our town, which, despite the traffic, the toniness, backbiting, and ticks, is at times, I would say, in the same ballpark as Eden.