Tuesday, January 28, 2020

All the News That's Fit to Print

For better or worse, Fiorella has been spending most of her days (when she hasn't been chawing down on the frozen Hershey Nuggets she's got in the refrigerator ) wading through still more papers from her upstairs office, and some of them go way back--like when she was writing a weekly column for the Austin American-Statesman. 
     Being the daughter of a journalism teacher and having edited two high school publications, Fio got a real kick out of having her own column, especially since the newspaper asked her to take photos too. Her favorite was a shot of a neighborhood man putting up Christmas decorations with a begonia in full bloom beside him. (That's Texas for you.)
     The negative part of the job was that whenever Fio ran into a really good story and wrote it up, the Statesman published it under a full-timer's name. Also, she was once accused of using the newspaper camera to take pics of her kids, which Fiorella had never even thought of doing. When she looked at the shots, she was even more confused--those kids weren't hers.
    One of the joys of the job was talking to the full-timers when she waltzed into the newsroom with her copy, but technology was beginning to rear its evil head and personal relationships were being replaced by metal things called modems, which were not your girl's cup of tea. Needless to say, she soon parted ways with the Statesman, although she's kept up her subscription through the years. It's not just the news--it's the comics.
     Your Fio can't go a day without the funny papers.

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