Back to the table

I'm on the road today, bound for Boston, to one of those scaled-down modern Thanksgivings. Instead of using up all the leaves in the old dining room table just to seat the grownups--and a card table or two for the younger kids--we'll be just four. It's the way of the world. In the 1950s, you couldn't throw a rock in Bradford County PA without hitting one of my mom's relations, generations of them clustered around the gentle hills and good soil of the Susquehanna Valley. Same with my father's clan in Indiana.

Since then, decades of jets and cars and jobs have swizzled my family evenly into the long drink of America. Working in countertrend, I have stayed pretty much in one spot for fifty years, but to no avail. You move, they move--it amounts to the same distance.

My sister dropped by the other day with a big box of old family photos. And there they all are again, those missing from the table, the dead and the living, distant in time, distant in place--brought near again in memory--in sepia, in black and white, and color faded as a dream. I sorted out a selection to take on the road, to bring them back again to the family table, where even though the bird may be smaller, the thanks will be as great.

Harry escape

The longer I am exposed to the brutal bleeding edge of popular culture, the greater comfort I take in more antiquated and sedate pursuits. Like many parents with children of a certain age, I rediscovered the pleasures of reading aloud through the adventures of Harry Potter, wizard-in-training at Hogwart's School. The series has outlasted our daughter's residence at home, but the habit of picking up each new book and reading it aloud has stuck. In fact, we re-read the fifth book in preparation for seeing the movie released last week, and the sixth, to bring us back up to speed for the final book, due out with screaming hoopla on Saturday. We read aloud in the car, spelling each other at the wheel, and read aloud in the kitchen, trading the cutting board back and forth. We read aloud in the living room, when taking a break from the hundred channels of mind-numbing cable, and read aloud in bed--which can lead to odd dreams and the need to go back over some pages.

One of the beauties of the process is that it seems tailor-made for the long-married. After thirty-odd years, one tends to use up all possible conversational gambits. You can always talk about the day's news, but after a while, yelling at the radio and muttering obscenities to the inbox--though gratifying when shared with a loved one--is incompatible with sound cardiac health. A mutual reading session, on the other hand, shares all the features of companionable conversation, with none of the stress of figuring out what to talk about--a real blessing after a long day in the frazzle of cyberspace. When we have worked our way through to the stunning conclusion--some time next week, probably--it will be soon enough to engage one another on the pressing issues of a serious relationship. Such as what to read next.

New Blood

Wil Hansen dropped by the station yesterday just in time to hear the latest birth announcement--Baby Boy Ahlfeld had arrived, son of Shelly, our operations manager, and our occasional sports maven, Bob. Wil reminded us of an NCPR newsletter cover photo from more than twenty years ago that bore the caption "We'll do anything to increase our audience!" It showed staffers Ellen, Martha, and Jackie, all with their new crop of kids. We're audience building again, with a new generation. As we speak, NCPR baseball commissioner, bilingual music host and reporter David Sommerstein is sweating out extra innings with his wife Lisa. And while much of the rest of the staff are reaching the age where we are unlikely to be doing cannonballs into the gene pool, Kelly, our development assistant, has become the first to don the grandmother hat (like Queen Elizabeth's, only not made of diamonds). It's all pretty exciting. Even Joel, whose home sports a pillow labeled "We had to get rid of the kids; the dog was allergic," has been heard to say repeatedly: "Children—they ARE our future." I’m not quite sure what to make of the WC Fields accent he puts on when he says it. So the future looks bright at North Country Public Radio, even if it is a little bald and smelly.

Made redundant

While visiting my daughter Elena a few weeks ago in Boston, I had her place to myself for a few hours while she and my wife left to engage in the retail form of mother-daughter bonding. I thought I would take the opportunity to check out some major-market public radio and tune in WBUR or WGBH and see what they were up to. At first I thought there were just too many buttons and doohickeys on her stereo for me to find the fm tuner—but it turns out there wasn't one. And no clock/radio in the bedroom—and no kitchen radio/CD combo, no boom box, no shower radio. No radio! If she hadn't stolen my favorite Django Reinhart CD when she left town, I'd worry that I had raised some kind of changeling cultural mutant.

As it turns out, she does listen to a little radio--even NCPR—on her laptop. Back when Al Gore and I invented the internet, we had theorized that one consequence might be that people would want to listen to what they wanted to listen to, when they wanted to. But no radio?—ouch! She gets the news from websites and headlines email—she gets music from sharing and download sites; she gets recommendations via web and IM and the murmur network of an active urban scene. In other words, she gets what I get from radio, elsewhere. Just as living a block from the Davis Square T has replaced her need for a car, broadband in the home coupled with an iPod Nano has replaced most of the need for a radio. And she is one of a growing legion. Hang it up with the buggy whip?—I don't think so. But it does underscore the necessity for anyone who is serious about having a future in broadcasting to provide services that are not duplicated or available in the growing elsewhere of new media. The next generation does not listen to network pass-through stations. The network content is—well—on the network, anytime they want it. In the new world, you have to be making your own. And you have to put it where they want it, when they want it. But just for luck, I've put an iPod fm tuner add-on on Elena's stocking-stuffer list.