Whether it is or isn’t, I now have a delightful winter project, cutting, pasting, tweaking and revising them. Time will tell how complicated it is to upload them, but for now, I’m carefully checking for copyrighted material and re-using a history article that I wrote for the South Wedge newspaper in 2011.

This eBooklet’s current title is Oldies and Goodies in and around the South Wedge. This fun  project should keep me whistling while I work, as I await the final stages of a long-term n-f history eBook, All Rights for All: Longing for Freedom, about the growth of social justice campaigns in the 19^th century. It makes me cringe when I see how all the conflicts, setbacks and divisiveness after the American Revolution leading to the Civil War, seem all too familiar now.

Another bright spot in my reading life is the monthly issue of City: News. Arts. Life. The January 2023 issue is about the best of Rochester. I haven’t paged through it all of it slowly, but it is something I look forward to. And, I’m back on track with my Newbery Award books, this week with The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli from 1949. So far, so good in this engaging coming-of age story set in fourteenth-century England.

My dear husband dutifully gives me the last-page obits from The Economist and we agreed the last-page article in The World Ahead 2023 issue was odd. Although it’s titled, “Obituary: Unexpected item in bagging area,” it’s a mournful essay on the last supermarket cashier in the world. Whoever Gary was, it’s not clear if he took a break and never returned. Whether he did or didn’t, the article mourns the end of in-person cashiers. Without workers like him, who soften “the loneliness of cities and the facelessness of suburbs. . . .[t]he gap between the tech-crazed young and the technophobe old would only widen.” Unless people learn to find their happy place and pass along a smile.

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