I miss the sight of people reading newspapers

From An old man talking to himself again by Garrison Keillor.

I'm conservative. I feel that what is inherited - family, community, culture and language - is more crucial than what is acquired - tattoos, an Armani suit, a taste for artisan beers, a cat who loves you - and there are as many conservatives on the left as on the right, maybe even more. I want my daughter's school bus driver to be conservative, obsessively checking his rearview mirrors, and not resenting the rules of the road as an infringement of his liberties. I'd like her English teacher to correct grammar and usage rather than urging the kids to write about their upbringings and never mind if they misspell "abysmal" or "horrendous." I could go on.

My daughter dragged me to a school dance last week, a '50s dance, and it was illuminating as most things with teenagers are. She didn't care to dance with me because I am a postmodern dancer uninhibited by rhythm, so I got to sit and watch teenagers in 2017 going wild to Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Fats Domino, and it dawned on me that when rock'n'roll got all progressive and artistic and inward, something you listened to and tried to figure out what the lyrics meant, it lost the power to make people jump around and have a good time. My daughter was having a wild good time. The dead musicians were alive as could be, and youth danced to their tunes with no sense of nostalgia.

I don't miss that music so much as I miss the card games I played long ago with my Republican in-laws. We disagreed about Nixon and trade unions, but we ignored that over games of gin rummy and four hundred and hearts. The gentle small talk, the kidding - where did that go to? I think that's why people love cruise ships. They take you off the grid and recreate the slow stately life of a small town, like a floating lodge. You gather at the buffet or the bingo game and a little small talk leads to conversation, politics assiduously avoided.

I miss the sight of people reading newspapers, holding the big broadsheet up and poring over the contents. Radio and TV are amusements: The big page of gray type is where you connect to the world through real journalism. That's where you find out we are heading toward an economy in which, thanks to Googlization, Facebooking, Amazoning, a great many people now gainfully employed will find themselves doing whatever they can scratch up for $7/hour. I come from a family of six children raised by parents who absorbed the lessons of the Depression, make do, hold on, tend the garden, and we became an engineer, teacher, writer, lawyer, historian, and development director. We all made homes, raised children, enjoyed our lives and our work, and have arrived at old age just in time to benefit from remarkable medical advances. We're lucky.