David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Aug. 30, 2005

Did I miss much? Where's the loop?

"So, what did I miss?"

Whenever I return from vacation, not only am I out of the loop, I don't even know what the loop looks like or where it is. After spending a week in the rustic and tranquil Black Hills of South Dakota, I'm not sure if we even have a loop anymore. I guess the loop is around here somewhere, but it'll take a while to find it. Maybe it's under the big stack of newspapers on my kitchen table.

(Parenthetically, hence the parentheses, last week I wrote about my trepidation about flying with my two young kids. I'm happy to report both earned their wings with varying degrees of success. Anna, the 4-year-old, was rock solid. She's thinking of joining the paratroopers when she's old enough to enlist. Phil, 2, did as well as a 2-year-old could do, apart from some seatbelt issues during takeoff and landing. In fact, the kids fared better than the professional flyers who saddled us with 6 hours' worth of unexpected delays on our destination trip. I have newfound appreciation for french fries, Sprite, Pixar and laptop computers with DVD drives.)

Back to the loop.

As a stay-at-home dad, I've grown somewhat accustomed to being out of the loop. Back when I was working in the Chronicle newsroom 40+ hours a week, it was easy to stay on top of current events. We had police scanners, AP feeds, 24-hour TV news, Internet news, not to mention our very own in-house newsy noses. When something happened, I knew about it.

It's different now that I'm at home with the kids all day. Between diapers, play dates, meals, skinned knees, alphabet songs, fingernail painting, home upkeep, plus my sideline schoolwork and part-time work work (the kind that actually pays!), staying current with the news has taken a backseat -- the one located behind the kids' Cheerio-encrusted booster seats. At least once a day I scan the headlines from the big news Web sites so I don't feel totally uninformed, but finding time to delve into details can be difficult. I also flip through USA Today during the week, but often I don't make it past the front pages of those wonderfully colored blue, green, red and purple sections.

The result is that I'm not very up-to-date on what I call "watercooler news." In the '90s there were "watercooler shows" like "Seinfeld" that most everyone watched and then discussed the following day, presumably while standing around the watercooler holding those little paper cups. Today, with the demise of well-written television in favor of bug-crunching reality shows, we're left with "watercooler news" -- news that doesn't really impact very many people but the details are juicy and scandalous enough that folks just can't help themselves but to rehash them with their well-hydrated coworkers.

The Runaway Bride is a prime example of "watercooler news." Most murder cases involving attractive white women, while tragic, are also "watercooler news." There are thousands of murders in the United States every year, and just because the national news media latches on to three or four a year doesn't make them any more or less important than all the others.

The truth is that I'm afraid of missing something big, really big. Some days it's 11 at night before I can look at the first headline or change the channel off Nickelodeon. What if there's another major terrorist attack during one of those days? I didn't know about the London bombings until half a day later. For someone like me who's spent so much time in the news game, that's embarrassing.

"So, what did I miss?"

Even though I spent a week in the Black Hills blissfully unaware of the world's goings-on, reality reintroduced itself before we could even get off the plane in Knoxville. According to the pilot, our plane was transporting the remains of Staff Sgt. Victoir Lieurance, a 34-year-old soldier from Seymour who was with the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment. He was killed Aug. 22 when a roadside bomb exploded near his Humvee. Staff Sgt. Lieurance was only a year younger than I.

The war marches on. We could all use a vacation from that.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.