By Jim Hagarty
2006
I can think of a few differences between the editor of the New York Times and the editor of the Stratford City Gazette. For starters, he could probably fit my car in his trunk and my house on his back porch. (Why he’d want to do either is anybody’s guess, but you get the point.)
Secondly, I’m guessing his office stretches for miles and that a mighty oak tree gave up its life so that he could have a desk. I could be very wrong on this, but I am also taking a shot in the dark and suggesting that he doesn’t share his office with two reporters. But I think that possibly the biggest difference between the Times editor and I, can be wrapped up nicely by the following little story of something that happened to me, which I don’t think happens very often to him.
I was leaning back in my chair at the hair salon, anticipating having my hair washed in the sink in preparation for having it cut, when a woman moved into the chair next to me, pulled out her sharpshooters and let me have it point blank at close range. Very close range.
“Whatever possessed you to write that article?” my neighbour to my right asked me, about an opinion piece we recently ran. And as we were lowered down into our respective water basins, the fight was on. As an editor, it isn’t easy to defend yourself at the best of times, but it’s especially hard when you’re horizontal, water splashing over your head and running into your ears. But I fought back bravely. The offending piece was something I’d written a while back, calling into question the veracity of a news report in other papers. I had had the audacity to ask, in my article, whether or not the incident in question really ever took place. And shockingly, by inference, I guess, I had called into question the judgment of a leading Stratford citizen, something, apparently, that is not supposed to be done in this town.
Did I know how much investigation of this incident in question was done by the above-mentioned leading citizen, I was scolded, somewhere between the shampoo and the rinse.
“How much was done?” I asked. Well, it so happened, the leading citizen talked to someone who had witnessed the event, the only witness, in fact.
“That’s it?” I asked, impudently. “I talked to him too. What if he wasn’t telling the truth?”
Eventually, both hairdressers who were attending to this squabbling mob, sat both chairs upright again and launched arguer and arguee back onto our feet, From there, we continued our healthy discussion over the 15 feet from the sinks to the bank of hairdressers’ chairs and unfortunately, we were seated side by side again. The poor hairdressers waited patiently as each of us clambered for the higher ground, and eventually we were seated, mouths still firing away like pop guns at a carnival.
Finally, my opponent’s stylist came up with a brilliant plan. “Let’s get our hair dryers going,” she said to my hairdresser. “Maybe if they can’t hear each other, they’ll shut up.”
The break in the action was a welcome relief but it also signalled a too-soon-conclusion to my haircut, through which I usually am able to catch a few winks. Whether disturbed at having my opinion challenged or just mad at missing my sleep, I met my adversary at the counter where we paid a nervous-looking receptionist and writer and reader proceeded into the cold outside the shop and argued for another half an hour.
Can somebody point me in the direction of New York?
