The Newsletter That Never Was

When I was ten, I got the bright idea to create a newsletter. I never followed through with that idea for several reasons. Reason one: I was ten. Reason two: I didn’t know how to type, which was a requisite for creating a professional looking newsletter.

However, reason three was the one that really shot down the idea. A newsletter has to report news, but I had no idea as to where to find some. Nothing exciting ever happened in our small town. And, at ten, the people I knew didn’t seem at all that interesting.

By the time I was twelve, I suspected that at least a few of those individuals were, or had been, involved in some really interesting stuff. Unfortunately, the adults who knew all the details usually tried their best to stay mum about them in front of the kids. By the time we were teens, though, my friends and I had figured it out for ourselves, thanks to keen observation and a little surreptitious eavesdropping.

At sixteen, I was more interested in dating than I was in writing a newsletter, which was probably just as well. I don’t think a newsletter would have gone over big then. By that time, several of my peers were adding grist to the gossip mill, and a couple of those peers had issues that seemed to appear in the newspapers on a semi-regular basis. Anything I dared to write about them would probably have made some people very unhappy with me, people like their parents, their probation officers, and whoever else was involved in whatever they did.

And even if I had wanted to resurrect the newspaper idea, it wouldn’t have worked. As a high school junior, I had to take a requisite typing class. Two weeks into the class, I discovered that I hated typing.