Hard to believe — here in West Virginia, we’ve been hunkered down for over a month. It’s easy to remember, as we heard the news about the shutdown while celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with corned beef and cabbage at one of our favorite eateries. 
 
Sometimes it feels like weeks, sometimes it feels like days.
 
I feel like I had an advantage going into this, having worked from home for the last 18 months. With the exceptions of missing out on my weekly trivia night, having fewer golf courses to choose from and the inability to eat at a restaurant, not much has changed.
 
That doesn’t necessarily go for the others in the house, but, so far, we all seem to be putting up with each other.
 
We have, unfortunately, begun to see the negative effects of the prolonged closures as two restaurants we like — one a great public space and the other one of my significant’s favorites — have closed for good.
 
That surly won’t be the last of them, and I worry about the future of many places we enjoy.
 
We are doing our best to do our part. At least once a week we get takeout from one of our local businesses that are doing curbside service. It isn’t the same as having someone bring it straight from the oven to your table, of course. We’re rural, so we often have to travel a bit to get home and that has the expected effect on the best of food, but it is so very important help to our communities and our neighbors and support local business. I’d encourage you to do the same if you have the means.
 
One community I worry about a lot are our artists. Many of my friends are musicians, and many of them have seen their gigs dry up through mid-summer at the least. I’ve been trying my best to help there, too, whether it be buying an album, a book or a piece of art.
 
One thing I have immensely enjoyed watching some of my favorite musicians create with their peers via video conferencing and the like, and other friends have brought their creativity to the social media table in other ways. While having more time on our hands can be financially stressful, the wave of artistry is heartening, and proves the value of art — to help us forget for a little while and enjoy something beautiful.
 
I’m not immune. In the early days, my work kept me busy, but as the financial noose tightened around all of us, some of my smaller contracts evaporated. I, too, have been filling my time with creative pursuits. Writing, of course, as well as my music. Because, if you choose to work in one precarious industry (newspapers), it makes sense to diversify into another uncertain field for stability, right?
 
I finally took it upon myself to learn GarageBand, a powerful little recording studio app that came with my iPad. I’ve worked out about four tunes so far and learned enough of the programs’ nuances that I need to go back to the first recording and rework it to add some of the effect I was going for. And, also, to be annoyed at the things it can't do easily, but I'm thinking the practice will help me make the leap into similar programs.  
 
Most important, however, I am making music. I think it is paramount for all of us to branch out and engage our creative side now. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for binge-watching TV or video games, but I think it is important for our mental health to feel the reward and accomplishment of creating something. 
 
What you create does not need to impress someone else to have value. That comes from within. The creations I have put together so far are not something I’d brag about to professionals, But, then, I’m not doing it for them, I'm doing it for me. Besides, like anything, we learn by doing. With practice, we get better.
 
As I write this, plans are advancing to try to resume some form of normalcy. We will emerge from this a fundamentally changed society. These have been trying times for all of us, but I’m hopeful one of the positives we can take away is an appreciation of our creativity, and that of others.

Saturday marked the 75th anniversary of the death of Ernie Pyle.
 
If you don’t know who that is, Ernie Pyle was a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent during the Second World War. He was known for his ability to tell the stories of the ordinary American soldier.
 
After having covered the war across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific, in the air and on the ground, he was felled by a Japanese machine gunner on a small island northwest of Okinawa just months before the end of the war.
 
He is also the patron saint of columnists, and each year the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, of which I am a member, celebrates the day as National Columnists’ Day.
 
In previous years, we posted pictures of ourselves practicing our craft as part of our #IamAColumnist campaign, but as the organization’s president put so well, given our extraordinary circumstances, this didn’t seem appropriate.
 
Instead, we were challenged to either highlight a columnist who may have influenced Pyle, or a 25-word-or-less tribute to Pyle.
 
I chose the latter:
 
“Ernie Pyle’s example emphasizes the timeless necessity of journalism: Telling stories — good, bad, humorous, tragic and incomprehensible — to encourage understanding, compassion and hope in society.”
 
I chose those words because newspapers are suffering enormously in these unprecedented times.
 
It was not a healthy industry before this crisis, the business model was changing. Advertising, so long the backbone of a newspaper’s budget, was migrating to web platforms. Platforms the industry has had a lot of difficulty monetizing. Weeklies were closing up shop, dailies were cutting back on the number of days they were printing, and investors with dubious goals were swooping in to pick the bones.
 
One hedge fund, a notorious cost cutter in the industry, has its claws in its own MediaNews Group, Gannett, Tribune, and now Lee Enterprises (which took over Berkshire Hathaway’s properties when Warren Buffett gave up on the industry). With McClatchy on the ropes, having filed for bankruptcy protection in February, can an investment there be far behind? 
 
The result has been what we call news deserts — places where no one delivers local news. And in many of the places where newspapers are still printing, they are underfunded shells of their once great mastheads, hardly worth the price of a subscription.
 
For many local newspapers, the writing was on the wall, it was only a matter of time. COVID-19 has only hastened that process, even as internet traffic has flooded to newspaper websites in search of information, as most newspapers have dropped their paywalls as a public service in these trying times.  
 
The Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school and research organization, keeps a running tally— an obit column for newspapers, if you will — of the toll this pandemic is taking on the newspaper industry. Alt weeklies in cities, reliant on nightlife advertising, were some of the first to go. Many small weeklies soon followed, and some dailies are cutting back to a couple of days a week on their print products. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a once-great metro daily, has effectively disappeared. Furloughs, pay cuts and layoffs are rampant at newspapers nationwide.
 
Chances are, when the “new normal” resumes, it will be without many of those organizations. Some in Congress are pushing for funding to help newspapers, but as we so often see in these situations, it may be too little, too late.
 
I know there are more than a few who rejoice at that thought. Motivated by politics and perceptions, they see journalism as an enemy, and are blind to the positives a good newspaper provides to a community.
 
Of course, there is the role of being a local government watchdog for the community, attending and parsing local meetings the general public may not have time to attend, shining a light on budgets and decisions.
 
But there is also the living section, highlighting the good deeds people in the community perform. The local events to attend. There are the stories about local businesses. And, always, the sports section, where kids get in the paper and their feats are celebrated.
 
Certainly, there is the editorial page, and the columnists with their opinions. The polarizing national and state politics. But there is also vital information on how we are all battling this virus and surviving these trying times. Together.
 
Two quick examples stories I read from beginning to end this week to illustrate my point, both from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and both from sportswriters:
 

• Bob Brookover’s remembrance of the late Kevin Roberts, a sportswriter squeezed out of the business by economics but went on to an inspiring second life running a newspaper giving voice to the homeless.

 

• Mike Sielski’s moving piece on how Kobe Bryant’s death brought a high school friend back to life, for both himself, his network of friends and the family.

 
Two stories in a newspaper that weren’t about Trump, Biden, Sanders, Republicans, Democrats or polarizing politics. Just two stories that needed to be told and had a profound effect on me, and from the response, many others. 
  
And that, in a nutshell, is the timeless necessity of journalism . To tell the stories — good, bad, humorous, tragic and incomprehensible — that encourage understanding, compassion and hope in society.
 
There will always be a need for information. There will always be a need for speaking truth to power. But most important, through journalism, we gain better understanding of our friends, our neighbors and our communities.

Support local journalism.

 What is this, week three?
 
We’ve definitely reached the point where the days start to blend together, with nothing to differentiate between a Wednesday or a Sunday.
 
SNL returned this week, and it wasn’t awful. That at least made it clear it was Saturday, which was good, as we didn’t start cooking Easter dinner on the wrong day.
 
In the meantime, we’re starting to get a good sense of whether we’ve chosen our mates wisely. A meme I saw on Facebook this morning summed it up pretty well:
 
“I told my wife this weekend ‘at least I’m quarantined with someone I enjoy.’ She replied, ‘It must be nice.’”
 
In fairness, here we’ve managed pretty well. Both of us have spent extensive periods working from home prior to this, so we’ve adjusted pretty well. We work, we walk the pups, we make dinner, and we watch something in the evenings. 
 
I can’t say I’ve gotten much reading in, at least book-wise, but I have enjoyed diving back into my music collection with gusto.
 
And when I’m not doing all that, I’m filling my free time with a baseball management game.
 
I was never a big fan of the games where you were the batter or the pitcher, I always much preferred the ones where you acted as manager and GM. It started back in the 80s with Micro League Baseball on the computer, and when not on the computer, the old card-and-dice Strat-O-Matic.
 
Through the decades there have been a progression of such games, and all-time fantasy baseball leagues, yet in recent years I had strayed. But in the absence of real baseball, my mind wandered back to those games of yore.
 
A couple of simulations being run by baseball-reference.com and the aforementioned Strat-O-Matic also piqued my interest. An ad on my Facebook feed for Out of the Park baseball was the decider, and I pulled the trigger.
 
My league of choice is a 20-team circuit of all Phillies players, with a player pool drawn from 1890-2019 and a fantasy draft that makes it possible for a team to have a murderer’s row of Jim Thome, Johnny Callison and Del Ennis.
 
Not my team, of course.
 
You see, the problem with being a Philadelphia sports fan is you develop a tendency to fill your roster with players similar to those you grew up watching.
 
In the case of the Phillies, that often means once-greats well past their prime, guys who had “one great season,” can’t-miss prospects who missed by a mile and toolsy, .240-hitting middle infielders best suited to a AAA roster.
 
And, the inside joke with me, no matter what the game, I build a team based on that blueprint.
 
Heck, you might as well do it right.
 
As the days become ever more spring-like, the chill in the air fades and is replaced by the warm sun and soft winds we’ve waited for all winter, it becomes harder and harder to accept those grand cathedrals to the ‘boys of summer’ stand empty. 
 
For a little while, as I listen to the ambient sounds of the game emanating from my computer speakers, I’m simultaneously transported to both the ballpark and those innocent days of youth before something like our current situation was even imaginable.
 
Sure, it may be a little goofy, but we all have our vices. As far as vices go, this one is fairly harmless. I won’t judge yours if you don’t judge mine. Whatever you need to get through. We’re all in this together.