Dear Editor

The newspaper in this small town is truly a must-read each week. I've read a lot of small town papers but this one seriously takes the "are you serious?" prize. It's thoroughly Yankee, in that insider-y, kinda distant kind of way. The police blotter is laugh out loud funny (most of the time) as if the person who writes it is in on the joke. The columnist with the pseudonym (though pretty much everybody knows who she is) spends paragraphs describing the cars of drivers she feels have violated some ethical or legal code, lists all the errant yard sale signs that people have forgotten to take down, and is consistently irritated by misbehaved children in public places like restaurants or sidewalks. She hates cell phones and SUVs, not for environmental concerns, but just because she hates them. And the people who have them.

But the Letters to the Editor are serious important reading and sometimes all that anyone reads. Which makes sense really, because pretty much all you need to gauge the heartbeat of the town is what's in those letters. And right now, it's sheer venom.

The nastiness has reached brave new heights. The personal attacks and the name calling are so vicious that I'm sure I'm not the only one who has shook the paper out and thought, "oh no they did NOT." But they did, and they do. Like weekly. Like for paragraphs and paragraphs. About an ousted Head of School, about the construction plans of a local business, about the trash someone left in someone else's barrel.

We take our history seriously here which might explain why this underbelly of American democracy and culture thrives so well in the newspaper (and at Town Meetings and Zoning Meetings and Historic Commission meetings). Everybody's gotta an opinion and everybody's right. And I like that to some extent and I get it too, but the meanness and the dog-with-a-bone mentality and the public-ness of it all seems more like embarrassing shenanigans right now. And it's depressing really.

Last year when things got similarly cranked up, I wrote an op-ed in which I reminded letter-writers and smear-campaigners that while passion and commitment are commendable, they lose their good intentions when ugliness erupts. And I reminded them that despite their so-called concern for the community, children were watching and in a lot of cases reading and how, ewww, bullying, dudes! We don't do that.

And it's completely shocking to me that NO ONE LISTENED TO MY SHEER BRILLIANCE but instead IGNORED MY RIGHTEOUS REASONING and CHOSE NOT TO FOLLOW ME INTO THE SUNSET OF PEACE AND HARMONY.

But I digress.

Tonight after coaching soccer, and pulling a muscle trying to out-cool myself, and in which not one but both daughters cried, and then later the Giant Four Year old (good times), I sat down on the porch in a lump of aching aches and crabbiness and cracked a beer (sweet relief). The garden looked pretty awesome, which it better after three hours of weeding its sorry ass, and I got a wee thoughtful.

A flicker flickered to my right. A hovering, fidgeting tiny little fast thing. And because of all the doom and gloom around these parts, I thought "great! now we've got hellish cicadas! end times cometh."

But it was not a noisy flying bug. It was a humming bird. A humming bird! In my garden!

I am not a bird watcher. I know blue jays and cardinals and pigeons and doves and sea gulls and that's about it. But I am pretty damn sure, that sweet, hovering, wing-flapping, nectar-drinking bird was of the humming variety, and either way, I don't really care. It was a good omen, at least I'm taking it that way, so I recycled the newspaper and I moved on.