People who need People

Magazines! I am drowning in magazines. Mark subscribes to Time, Consumer Reports, Entertainment Weekly, Budget Travel, Real Simple, and Food and Wine. I get Classic Cars, The Studebaker Club Magazine, National Geographic, and Metropolitan Home. Not to mention the rags I didn’t ask for like AARP Magazine, AARP News Letter, and Chrysler Magazine (just because I bought a few Chryslers). Plus there are the ones Mark buys over the counter one at a time.

My living room is littered with these things, most of which I never get around to reading. There are magazines in the bathroom, in the bedroom, on the floor, on multiple magazine racks around the house. They are spread out on the coffee table and every night I have to move them off of the bed along with the dog.

I really only read three of them, two cover to cover and one only partially. I don’t know how many Mark reads but I think it might be physically impossible to actually read every magazine that comes into this house, especially since Mark gets the newspaper every day also.

I love my nephews and nieces, they are really all very good kids. Not a one of them has ever caused me a problem and always, they have been respectful and decent. So what am I supposed to do when my dear nephew Paul is involved with a school fundraising program. The school gets money for every magazine a student gets somebody to subscribe to. It reminds me of when I was a kid and the Catholic Church had us go out and sell subscriptions to ‘The New World’, the official Catholic Newspaper of the Chicago Archdiocese. Every year hundreds of little Catholics would spread out across Tinley Park, knocking on doors asking "Would you like to buy the New World?" and getting the answer "No kid, I’m satisfied with the old one.".

What makes this so hard is that last week Mark decided to spend his Delta Air Miles. Not on an airplane ticket, no, Mark spent fifteen thousand air miles on magazine subscriptions. Our mail carrier is a short old Asian man who probably hates us already and now he will get to deliver to us about fifty magazines a month. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found him laying in the middle of the street some day with a broken back.

So the question remains, what do I do about Paul’s fundraising request that I subscribe to a magazine to benefit his school? I subscribe to a magazine of course. I think I’ll order ‘The Nation’ and have it sent to my Republican brother David’s address.