My New Yorker

I've been reading The New Yorker since a kind woman at the university's financial aid office, where I held my first student job, gave me her copies. Each issue's front page had perfect little rectangles missing from the corners where she had carefully removed her home mailing address. Since then, I've never had an actual subscription because somewhere, somehow, I'd always find copies lying all around me. My want never went unanswered.

For example, a friend of mine at work received a subscription for his birthday. What a surprise it was given (1) he hated to read and (2) he had never heard of the publication in his thirty-some odd years on this earth. Every week he'd carefully fold the magazine vertically, slip it upright into the side of his briefcase facing out so that strangers would deliberately see his reading material on the train ride in, and deposit it on my desk. He was shocked that the magazine didn't have any pictures except for a few black and white drawings. "Do ya' mean cartoons?" I asked. "Yes," he sheepishly acknowledged. "But they don't make sense." Quickly, before I could respond, he made me promise to keep it a secret that he only opened the magazine to skim the cartoons. Insecurity drives people to do the craziest of things. But it was an excellent arrangement - I'd get a virtually untouched copy every week and he felt good putting on airs that he enjoyed a literary magazine.

But then (surprise), our friendship was no more and I found myself without my weekly fix. It's been months.

Then I stumbled upon this free calendar offer yesterday. It's for a 2010 calendar printed on high glossy paper. It's not a subscription, certainly not even an original print of one of their spectacular cartoons (several of which I hope to hang on a lucky wall of my very own house some day), but it's something to keep the joy alive.