A Deer Ate My Column
It is Tuesday morning and I am not in Mendota pursuing a column about yet another vanload of farm workers tragically killed in a highway crash. I also am not in the High Desert, where a provocative fight over a prison looms. Nor am I in East Los Angeles, counting the destitute County-USC patients who soon will be forced to take their wounds and maladies into the streets.
No, I am at home. I am at home because a deer bolted on to a road in the path of a car. The car was driven by our baby-sitter. She swerved to avoid the deer and wound up in a ditch with a mild concussion. It was too late to put a call into the baby-sitter bullpen. So here I sit, caught in the headlights of another deadline. Stuck.
Perhaps this dilemma is fodder for 800 words about the old homestead, about nannies or those darndest things kids always are supposed to be saying. Perhaps not. A while back I read an otherwise urbane Florida columnist ranting about the vagaries of dirty diapers. On the spot I promised myself to keep Mr. Mom columns to a minimum.
Plan B would be the weather. California weather often makes for great copy. Mark Twain knew this. So does every city editor from Eureka to Escondido. The weather often is wonderfully weird; it also is elemental to California life. The fundamental mechanisms of the state require a tricky balance in climate. Too much of any one item--rain, fog, wind, even prolonged sunshine--can mean chaos. Unfortunately, the market for weather writing has been more than saturated lately with the build-up of El You-Know-What-O.
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And so finally, an obvious solution: What is needed here is an opinion. The columnist, deprived of the opportunity for reportage, pines to opine, to make a point, stir the golden pot. Opinions, after all, are quite the rage. They ring out from nearly every AM radio station across the dial. Newspapers drip with them. They dominate dinner parties and pop up routinely in grocery store checkout lines.
This is the Opinion Age, and almost everybody has one. About everything. Ask anybody. They will assert, with full confidence, that the nanny did it or, conversely, that the nanny did not do it. They will know, absolutely, whether it is proper to breast-feed in public, or build more B-2 Bombers. Or not.
But enough. Time to paw through the morning papers, a dog in search of a chewable bone. Once more, it appears, California presents a Mother Lode of possibilities. Willie Brown cracks down on hobos in Golden Gate Park. Bilingual education ballot petitions are submitted. Good twin is pitted against evil twin in an Orange County courtroom showdown. A 92-year-old Glendale man elopes with an 84-year-old girlfriend and faces jail time. What’s the call? Yes or no? Up or down?
From Sacramento, there is the open primary ruling and the Ted Kaczynski trial. Is the mad bomber too mad to kill? If leaders of both parties so loathe an open primary, how can it be all bad? Most promising, however, is the announcement from El Segundo’s Mattel Inc. that Barbie is to undergo a breast reduction. In the pundit desert, this is pure manna. Big-chested Barbie, si o no?
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The difficulty, however, is in trying to form, not just an opinion, but one that can be argued with enough vigor to awake echoes of Clarence Darrow. Some days it is possible to feel hot outrage at the prospect of a Barbie breast reduction. Other days it is not. This appears to be a day of the latter variety.
Sadly, I could argue open primaries either way. I haven’t a wit of insight into the cupid grandpa or the evil twin. I do not believe anyone sane would send mail bombs to strangers, but decorum would dictate withholding this opinion until after the psychiatric evidence is submitted. As for the bilingual education debate, I have only a question to add: Rather than enforce a single language, why not instead work to make all children fluent in two? Don’t shoot. Just a question.
In truth most issues are never as simple as the debates would suggest. They are, to the contrary, as gray as the skies over Northern California today (and now we are back on the weather). Yet, in the opinion field, gray does not cut it. Paint it black. Or paint it white. Never gray. At this point, however, none of this matters. Across the street, the school bell has rung. Children must be picked up. To misquote Jeremiah, this journalistic harvest is done, and we are not saved. I hope the deer appreciates that a column died so that it might live.
