It's a Given, Or Is It?

On my few trips into Manhattan this year, I’ve been sad to see the Hudson News store in Grand Central Terminal closed. Sitting at the top of the escalator, the store sits dark, windows papered over, normally wide-open doors on three sides closed and locked. Downstairs, near the tracks, their smaller newsstand is gone.

I hope this isn’t the end for my favorite place to browse when I have time to kill waiting for a train. Hudson News is one of the last places with a great selection of magazines. I’m still partial to paper magazines with promises and pleasures splashed across their covers. I enjoy exploring the racks and have often had to stop myself from buying an armload of magazines.

Magazines were a given when I was growing up. Time, Look, and Life for news and current events; Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Better Homes & Gardens for my mother; Sports Illustrated for my father and brother. Our mail man rolled them up and slid them to fit in the magazine holder on our mailbox. To me, pulling them out was almost as good as opening a present.

When I learned to read, my parents bought me subscriptions to Jack and Jill and Highlights for Children.

I still read magazines, but these days I swipe through their images on my Kindle. It’s not the same as leafing through paper pages, lingering over photographs, or dreaming over luxurious ads.

“Given” took on a new and unsettling meaning as the pandemic quashed so much of what we assumed would always be true and with us. As we make our first steps back into the world, I wonder what “givens” we will have to give up, what we’ll shift to, and how well we’ll do it.