The wind had picked up the newspaper and scattered it’s pages up the driveway, into the lawn and through the old farm fence on the side of the hill. It was all there but now the carefully edited and ordered stories lay haphazard in an unrecognizable disarray. International, national, local, sports, human interest, obituaries, comics, editorials, letters to the editor, advertisements, inserts, public notices, classifieds, weather forecasts, and, cruelly, the table of contents, all there but no longer in hand and easily found, discollated, the ink fading. Like in his mind, the pages, memories, were still there but no longer connected and bound together.
At some point, exhausted by the search for the right page, the next page, he just gave up looking and lived without the day’s paper. And I could not blame him, hope lost, hopeless. Occasionally stumbling across a page not torn by the wind or soaked by rain he would read repeatedly with delight, smiling until the story continued on to a page now blown away. Then the smile would fade and silence set in, and he would sit, staring at nothing, for there was nothing to see. And I sat with him , looking through yesterday’s papers, hoping to find another page we could read together, to see another smile.