The Tapes That Came Back To Me

Tuesdays and Fridays, cover to cover

People ask me what I read on those tapes, like there must have been some art to choosing.

There was no art to it. I read the whole paper. Cover to cover, front to back, the way a seeing person gets to.

I read the front page and the county commission minutes. I read the obituaries slow and careful, because for some of my listeners that was how they learned a friend was gone.

I read the school lunch menu. Monday, chicken patty and corn. Tuesday, the beef and noodles. It sounds like nothing, but a grandmother wants to know what her grandbabies are eating that week.

I read the 4-H results from the county fair, every name, because a child’s name in the paper is a treasure and a blind grandparent should get to hear it read out.

I read the ballgame. The Bethany Bulldogs, the scores and who scored them, the overtime against Princeton that went to the wire.

I read the want ads and the farm sales. A hay rake for sale, a litter of blue heeler pups, a estate auction out on Route W.

I read the weather, though half of them could feel it coming in their knees before I ever got to it.

I learned to read at a certain pace. Not slow enough to insult a person, not fast enough to lose them. About the pace you would read to a child you loved, if you wanted the child to remember it.

I learned to say the hard names twice. I learned to spell a word out loud when it was one a person might want to write down in Braille.

A tape held thirty minutes a side. A full paper took me three tapes, sometimes four on a fair week.

I labeled each one with the felt pen. HARRISON CO NEWS, the date, and side one or side two. My hand got good at it. I could label a tape without hardly looking.

Then I put them in the padded mailers the state sent, free postage, and dropped them at the counter, and off they went.

Tuesday the news, Friday the news. For nineteen years I did not miss but a handful of days, and those were the days I was in the hospital with Harold.

Edna retired. A young fellow named Tom ran the library a while, then a woman named Paula. They all kept my desk, all kept my space heater running.

I was a fixture back there. Folks forgot I was a volunteer. Some of them thought I worked for the state. I never corrected them. The work was the thing, not the title.