Our Alexandria Times Tribune comes only once a week. It sort of takes that long for the news to pile up enough to warrant an edition. The Tribune reports the obituaries of people who have lived here maybe all of their lives, or at least enough of their lives to earn the title of being “from here”.
Photo by Valarie Jerrils
In our paper there are all the latest wins and losses of the Tiger’s basketball, baseball, tennis, volleyball, wrestling teams. Many of the last names of jr. high and high school athletes are the same family names Bill and I knew when we taught high school English when we first met. Bill’s family on both sides are “from here”.
The Tribune also runs four or five columns by local writers who cover town history, life lessons from sports, and observations of human and natural behaviors. Sometimes there are comments of economic and political developments in our local and state governments.
But I want to talk to you about the front page. A recent lead story is about a man who lives on the street on the way to the high school. Every three weeks or so he puts a new sign in his yard, giving a short message and a Bible verse. He says he does this because he knows how many challenges come to kids these days, and he feels called to point them to the Word of God. When he was in his formattable years there were two convocation speakers whose stories lodged in his heat and eventually let him to trust the God who they said changed their directions.
Another front-page story was celebrating a woman who is retiring after fifty years of service to a Senior Health and Living facility. The story said that after 30 years as an aide, she moved to laundry and was outstanding because of the care she gave to her job, including “matching outfits to hang together in order to save closet space and make life a bit easier” for the residents. She told how the staff at the facility had become like family that because of that she hated to leave.
Our town gives what we call a “Samaritan’s Heart” award to honor “heroes who perform extraordinary deeds and are bright lights in the community.” This issue celebrated Pete Sayre who, among many other services to our town, was the favorite bus driver when our kids were in public school.
The other two front page features were the ribbon cutting for the summer opening of the B & K Root Beer Stand under new management, and the approval by the school corporation to give our Superintendent the go-ahead on a bond sale to do much needed renovations of the school gymnasium and other projects on our school campuses.
When I hear talk show politicians refer to the wide belly of our country as the “fly-over zone” and belittle the intelligence of the heartland for its faith and naivety, I think to myself than one could do far worse than to live in and espouse the values of a community where the front page story is of woman who was revered for fifty years of service because she cared enough to sort pieces of laundry so someone with limited mobility could access them, because, after all, life is more than a job and community is a word bigger than living in the same subdivision—gated or not.
