It’s been hard to find subjects for this week’s notebook entries. Most weeks when it comes time to write the piece to fill this space, I review what I have done in the past week and conversations I’ve had. Before his death eight years ago, a conversation with my father often sparked an idea.

In his retirement years, Dad had a daily coffee circuit and often shared tidbits of information he gained from the other coffee drinkers. Sometimes those tidbits led to newspaper stories, other times the tidbits directed our thoughts back to prior events Dad and I were involved in.

I like to visit with people and tell stories but the pandemic has made for a lonely time. I’m not getting to see or visit with people like I once did. We’ve had the front door of the newspaper office locked since March. When customers come calling, we try to pass their orders out through the front window. That works but it doesn’t allow much time for chit-chat. It has also cut sales for it doesn’t encourage impulse shopping.

From my days helping in the family gasoline station to the present, my favorite work activity has been associated with waiting on customers.

At the gasoline station, I particularly enjoyed waiting on the customers headed to Lovewell Lake for they were expecting a good time and were in a good mood. It wasn’t so much fun serving a customer with a flat tire or broken down vehicle for the problem that brought them to the station had spoiled their day.

Since the pandemic began, I have been people deprived. Some days I can count on one hand the number of people I have talked to. Because of the virus, I’ve been staying home and not going to places where people congregate.

It’s being extra hard trying to produce a weekly newspaper without face-to-face interaction with our readers. We have tried to limit our personal contacts. We want to avoid being exposed to the virus and we don’t want to be the one distributing the virus.

I shouldn’t be crying about the virus. I have been healthy and able to go to work each day. Heard from a college friends this week who told of being unable to attend a brother’s funeral because of the virus. While they were sorry to not have gone, they were also thankful they didn’t go because someone attending the funeral was spreading the virus. Several people, who attended the funeral in a Western Kansas town, contracted the virus.

Rita’s parents have been confined since March in a nursing home. Rita’s mother hasn’t be allowed to go for a ride with us to see the flowers blooming in the yard of her former home. Rita’s father hasn’t been able to see the crops growing on his land.

And the saddest of all, they haven’t been able to have their family together since last year. If this had been a normal summer, their grandson and his family would have come from Maryland to Kansas for a few days. They would have enjoyed watching and listening as the generations played and visited together. Instead I’ve been sending them pictures of previous family gatherings. One I sent this week was of their then eight-year-old grandson looking at the packages under a Christmas tree. Today that grandson is a veterinarian in Maryland with three children of his own.

Another time I sent a first-day of school picture my father took of me before I headed out to begin life as a Superior High School junior. I have a collection of first-day of school pictures for my parents took one each year. Many are of me and my ride so the pictures include bicycles, horses, automobiles and one school bus.

Some I have shared with social media friends.

Sunday I shared on social media a picture I had taken late at night as three woman stood watching flood waters swirl around houses on Superior’s West Eighth Street. When posting, I wasn’t sure of the year but a then unborn daughter of one of the women pictured responded with a picture of The Express front page from September of 1977 on which the picture was first published along with a story about the flood. I particularly liked her comment which included a love symbol and “It is a little more yellow in color but I will hold on to it as long as I can.”

I didn’t like so much the comments made on someone else’s page which said we printed fake COVID-19 news in last week’s paper.

The writers were not pleased that we published a South Heartland Health District report indicating several cases of the virus could be traced to a party held at Lovewell Lake in early July. They labeled our report as “fake” news and said we should publish a retraction. Their post also included a reprint of last week’s front page.

I didn’t like the story any more than they did but facts are facts. The health district believes COVID was spread at a Lovewell Lake gathering and we attributed the finding to the health district.

After more than 50 years in this business, I’ve learned it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time.