Well, there is more to the story than that.
So when I run errands in town, I reach out to my mother-in-law, 84-years-old and living independently not far from church, to ask if she needs anything from the market or to see if she wants me to do anything for her while I’m in town. In this regard, “in town” can mean in any town because she does not want to be a burden on us, so any time I’m going anywhere that does not involve a gi or a shower afterwards, I ask if she needs anything.
I was actually headed to the “eastern” part of Springfield (which is now the middle part of Springfield in some parts of Springfield these days). Barnes and Noble and Staples on Glenstone Avenue. So I asked her if I could pick her up a copy of the latest issue of Metal Hammer while I was out. She demurred.
I was disappointed with my visit to ABC Books. I was looking for a book on the CompTIA Network+ certification, and I circled the store a couple of times before finding that the computer books section has shrunk to about 24 inches on a single shelf–almost as small as a public library’s philosophy section–and the selection had books on the Security+ and A+ certifications, but not the one I was looking for. The store did not have a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning which I had noticed on my mother-in-law’s table on Sunday, and I have seen/heard it mentioned several times “recently,” so I hoped to score my own copy. Too soon, too soon, my mother-in-law’s copy will be available to us, but I’ll let the oldest have it if he’s still reading (and if he’s over the fashionable anti-zionism of the current day). I also considered buying a copy of Writers Digest to price its advertising in case I want to spend a couple bucks promoting Wunyo Submission Tracker the old fashioned way. So: No Network+, no Frankl, but it did have the most recent Writers Digest. For $10. Instead of buying just the magazine, I flipped through its last pages and found little in the way of classified ads.
And no Metal Hammer magazine, either. The music section was given over to special edition collectible collector’s issues for individual artists, which I guess can have a longer shelf life than a regular magazine.
So, later in the evening, I texted my mother-in-law that I could not have gotten Metal Hammer for her after all. And she responded that she thought I was referring to an actual magazine, and….
Ah, gentle reader, I have been holding out on you.
I have mentioned that books tend to accumulate on the little table beside my chair; however, at some point, I got a little magazine holder, probably to “refinish” it, and placed it back there. And that, gentle reader, is where magazines go for decades. I am pretty sure that I have worked through most of the magazines that I picked up (at that same Barnes and Noble) when I was first publishing John Donnelly’s Gold so I could send review copies (one, Suspense magazine, reviewed it). I have a couple of crossword puzzle books which had been my sainted mother’s. And I had a copy of Metal Hammer magazine from some years ago:
That’s the December 2019 issue.
You see, the magazines languish down there because I do not read magazines there; I read books in that chair. I read magazines in the chair in the parlor or the rocking chair on the front porch. I haven’t actually put magazines down there in years, either, so they’re just…. languishing.
I sent the photo to my mother-in-law, and I then looked at what else I have in the magazine holder.
Two issues of Ideals magazine.
Which is good; I’ve been reading old copies of this magazine that I’ve gathered at book sales as my liminal bedtime reading in the bedroom. However, I found that I had seven different Mother’s Day issues, and months of paeans to idealized mothers was kinda wearing on me. My sainted mother kept a roof over our heads and food in the kitchen, but she was never to my recollection anything like the mothers in these poems. So it will be good to interleave some other holidays. As it stands, I actually have an Ideals Christmas collection beside the reading chair–I started it, what, in 2024 as a possible “Christmas” book for Christmas time, but it’s two hundred pages of prose telling, basically, the exact same idealized paean Christmas in my youth story. So clearly I bogged down on it.
So for fun, I texted my mother-in-law that the Metal Hammer magazine was in with two old (and they’re older, not 1980s) issues of Ideals.
“Wow! Mom loved them.” she replied.
Her mother, born in, what, 1910? loved Ideals. And she, my mother-in-law, more into literary fiction and Viktor Frankl, does not.
Ah, gentle reader. I have to recalibrate my terms. Now that I am getting to grandfather age (my grandmothers and mother would have been grandmothers by this numeral), what I’ve previously called “grandmother poetry” should now be called “great-grandmother poetry.”
Ay, me.
