The Mickey Rooney Memorial Newspaper Rack

This is one of those things that fascinates me but I can’t really tell you why. There are a lot of newspaper vending boxes left empty in my neighborhood, as there are in most neighborhoods, installed years ago when people still actually bought their news printed on paper, abandoned over the past few years. Some distributor or other sold USA Today in one of those boxes up until exactly one year ago. I know the date, because the last edition left in the rack never sold out, and the front page still sits there, fading and yellowing but faithfully announcing the NCAA Title Game, the continuing search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, and the death of Mickey Rooney.

To tell the truth, “fading and yellowing” is a bit melodramatic, because, except for a loss of vividness in the red ink and a slight jaundice, it’s in remarkably good shape. I suppose that’s because it has a northern exposure and faces a building across the sidewalk, which means it never gets any direct sunlight. Glancing at it in my peripheral vision, I might think it was today’s paper, if I hadn’t been so conscious of it for months as an accidental artifact. I’ve been watching it, you see, recently beginning to hope it would make it for a full year. I don’t know why that mattered, but it did. And I was strangely pleased this morning to discover that it had.

I suppose it’s Mickey Rooney, really. I’ve always been kind of fascinated by him, by the bizarre American icon of Andy Hardy, by the frantic desperation in his performances during the decades of his long decline, by his sheer durability, by the fact that an actor whose first movie was a silent comedy starring Coleen Moore was still making movies in 2014. There was something significant about his death, not only the cutting of a string to a long-ago time but the final victory of time over a stubborn soul who fought harder than anybody who ever lived to stay in the spotlight. I like the fact that his death didn’t just flicker away with the next edition of USA Today but that, in at least one vending machine, where I see it when I’m walking the dog or going for coffee at Martha & Bros, it’s still a headline.