Commentary

The times change, the world moves on

September 24, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS,

The world moves on, man.

The days are becoming shorter, and the light has thinned. It’s as if the daylight is somehow changed by the colder air and the cotton-batting clouds that are more common now than the blue summer sky.

The sidewalks downtown where I live and walk are quieter. The usual route I take to put distance between me and the noise has fewer people now that schools are open again. The air has a different nose, especially in the evening and night. The pubs and restaurants that served patrons at sidewalk patio tables will soon be accommodating inside only. Their smells have been replaced by those from nearby chimneys that stretch over 12-hour wood stoves. More people each evening try to push away the season’s change.

Even Harold is seldom seen as September inches closer to October and the more frequent nightly frost. He told me recently, on a Saturday I saw him at the sidewalk bench; he said he prefers the spring and the summer for his walks about town. The heat and the Ontario humidity have never bothered him, he said. It’s what he thinks about during the short February days as he tosses shovels of driveway snow over his shoulder in a constant stark cold.

I’m the other way. I prefer the crisp evening for a stroll when you need a sweater. Maybe a toque.

A Saturday, this was, and Harold was at the bench, the day’s Globe and Mail folded to a page in his hand. The broadsheet was folded in half and then again from the fold to the paper edge, how people do when they’re away from a table and a comfortable chair.

“I loved the sports section as a kid,” Harold said. “I would spend so much time looking at the stats, the standings. And the articles. So many times I’d find the score a day later because the game wasn’t over before printing time. The glorious overtime games.”

He said he still enjoys his Saturdays that way, tucked into the Globe and Mail weekend paper while Daphne, his missus, prefers The Toronto Star.

“Everything else about the world has changed,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if he referred to the things read in the paper.

“It moves on,” he said.

It does, I said. And I told Harold that he recreated the perfect Saturday just then when he spoke about poring over sports scores on a Saturday morning. Taking his time because there was nowhere else he needed to be.

I remembered when the Globe and Mail was six columns. Specifically, I thought about back in the mid-1990s and the Saturday paper was so heavy. The Atlantic edition was flown across the gulf from Halifax, and I would get it at a gas station down the hill from where I lived in Corner Brook. If you’ve ever been there, Harold, I said, everywhere in Corner Brook is down a hill or up a hill.

I’d spend the day with the paper. Neil Young, The Beatles in the background. Heavier music of the day, too. But always Mr. Young, The Fab Four, The Stampeders, some others at some point in the eight-CD random mix. Relics from a better time before, those songs. Just like how newspapers that can be smelled and hefted are relics today.

“Me and roommates nursing hangovers and, oddly, Bob Villa on the TV with the volume low, showing us how to spackle and tile a floor,” I said. “I still can’t spackle or tile a floor, a kitchen counter backsplash. Any job beyond the need for plumber’s tape and I have to get a real man to do it. Or the wife.”

Depending on my disposition, those years were the best times or the worst times. But the music was great. It’s always so great when I remember it. Pretty sure they were the last years when music mattered.

And print journalism is like that too.

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