I love magazines

I fell in love at an early age with magazines. My grandmother bought the Weekly World News and other sorts of fantastical and gossip rags. She sat all of these along with her daily newspapers on plastic tables next to her chair so she could read and watch soaps at the same time. Being at my grandmother's house during the summer was sometimes akin to being in a doctor's waiting room, long and boring and nothing Bo or Jack did on the screen could keep me entertained. To entertain myself I would wade through stories about bat kids and JR Ewing. And if I dug deep enough through her self made slush pile, I would find her Reader's Digest and take as many as I could find and horde them in my room. Sometimes they had puzzles or quizzes and sometimes the articles would be interesting, but my absolute favorite part was the jokes at the very end of each article. I would start at the back of the magazine since I only wanted the ends of the articles. I remember thinking some of the jokes were hilarious and some barely made sense to me. For instance: "classified ad: nice apartment. within walking distance of car wash and gas stations."

After awhile I didn't go to grandma's in the summer anymore and I started reading teen magazines such as Seventeen and old editions of MAD. I even did a stint as a Rolling Stone reader. Later on I became a Wired afficianado and I personally own an entire bookshelf of Martha Stewart's Living as well as a couple of well used Real Simple issues.

As a devout user of our library, I can now pick up that odd Entertainment Weekly with Jeffrey Dean Morgan on the cover and I can read Money's front page article on the Seven New Rules of Financial Security. And I owe my love of all of these to the woman who paid so much for magazines like this, and I love my library because I don't have to shell out the dough at the checkout stand at the grocery store.