What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

5.

Tuesday night when I got home I had a drink and asked my wife what’s new and she said everybody on the block had been talking about the newspaper all day and some of the girls had been placing bets and phoning their brokers. A lot of the women here play the market and even the horses though my wife is not like that, she leaves the male stuff strictly to me.

What stocks were they buying I asked?

Well she didn’t know the names. But a little while later Joni Bruce called up for a recipe and my wife asked her about the market and Joni said she had bought Winnebago Xerox and Transamerica. I was relieved at that because I figured it might look really suspicious if everybody on Redbud Crescent suddenly phoned in orders the same day for Levitz Bausch Disney Natomas and EG&G. On the other hand what was I worrying about nobody would draw any conclusions and if anybody did we could always say we had organized a neighborhood investment club. In any case I don’t think there’s any law against people making stock market decisions on the basis of a peek at next week’s newspaper. Still and all who needs publicity and I was glad we were all buying different stocks.

I got the paper out after dinner to check out Joni’s stocks. Sure enough Winnebago moved up from 33¼ to 38¹⁄₈, Xerox from 105¾ to 111⁷⁄₈, and Transamerica from 14⁷⁄₈ to 17. I thought it was dumb of Joni to bother with Xerox getting only a six percent rise since it’s the percentages where you pay off but Winnebago was up better than ten percent and Transamerica close to twenty percent. I wished I had noticed Transamerica at least although no sense being greedy, my own choices would make out all right.

Something about the paper puzzled me. The print looked a little blurry in places and on some pages I could hardly read the words. I didn’t remember any blurry pages. Also the paper it’s printed on seemed a different color, darker grey, older-looking. I compared it with the newspaper that came this morning and the December I issue was definitely darker. A paper shouldn’t get old-looking that fast, not in two days.

I wonder if something’s happening to the paper I said to my wife.

What do you mean?

Like it’s deteriorating or anyway starting to change.

Anything can happen said my wife. It’s like a dream you know and in dreams things change all the time without warning.