RIP, NYT

This? This is the last Sunday New York Times I will be able to buy in Thunder Bay for the foreseeable future. I picked it up on Thursday and I’m going to try to read it as slowly as I can, savour every last word. I’ll probably even read the sports section — I often do anyway, because it’s that good.

I’ve written recently about trying to bridge the distance, close the mental gap between where I live and where I wish I lived, about trying to be here now, be here happily, even. And, truly, there is much to love about this city, chief of which are the people who live here. But it’s also true that part of what makes this city livable for me is that I get to leave it a fairly regular intervals for doses of big urban spaces, the chance to lose myself in cities.

And when I’m here, part of what makes living here possible has been the Sunday New York Times.

When we first moved here from Toronto, 10 years ago, you could still get the Globe & Mail delivered daily. And that was a decent thing, but the best thing about it was that if you were a Globe subscriber, you could also get the Sunday New York Times. I admit, after a while, I started vacation-stopping the Globe during the week, emerging from my pseudo-vacations long enough to have the Times arrive on Sunday. I felt bad, but I started to get tired of seeing the same stories from the Sunday Times appear in the following week’s Globe. And with babies and toddlers, I didn’t have time to read a daily pretty good paper, so why not hold out for one, fabulous, newspaper that would carry me through the week? My sneaky workaround came back to bite me in the face when the Globe & Mail — you know, Canada’s self-declared national newspaper? — stopped delivery to Thunder Bay, leaving us with the digital edition at best, and a sudden dearth of Sunday Timeses.

And no, I don’t want the digital edition, so don’t ask me about that. I stare at a screen all day, anyway. I want paper.

So, when some guy in Thunder Bay — let’s call him Gary — began driving to the border each week to pick up all the good newspapers for us diehards, I was elated. First, Gary delivered them to the local comic shop, but after that got to be too inconvenient the owner, he switched over to Charley’s Ticket World in the mall, where I lined up dutifully each Sunday afternoon with all the other addicts, although they were mostly buying lottery tickets and cigarettes, and I was buying the paper. And every time I got my paper from Charley’s Ticket World, I was always kind of surprised it was there, because really, how long was it going to be before Gary decided that driving an hour and a half minimum each way on a Sunday to cross the border to bring back newspapers in generally inclement weather was going to get old?

Not long at all, my friends. Not long at all. Gary, bless him, has seen the light, and I am counting out my last Sunday New York Times pages and trying to see how long I can make them last.

And yes, let’s go on and on about our First World problems, and say what you will but I adore this paper and I really wish I lived somewhere real big enough so that I could read it regularly without relying on the crazy kindness of enterprisers like Gary.

So: a plea. If you happen to be lucky enough to find yourself on a Sunday in a place real, I mean, populated enough to carry the Sunday New York Times, and you happen to be travelling shortly thereafter to Thunder Bay: message me? See if I’ve managed to get my hands on a paper for that week, and if I haven’t, please do pick one up for me. I will pick it up from you. I will pay you back for it. I’ll even bake you cookies. I just want my big-city culture fix. I hate that it’s so much to ask.