Taking the very simple and making it very complicated

When I was a kid, buying the Sunday paper may well have been the simplest of the many rituals in my young life. After my parents, my brother and I left church and piled into the car, we stopped at Vic's Spa on the way home. (For the uninitiated, "spa" was what we called convenience stores in the Massachusetts of my youth.) Dad parked the car. Mom gave me some money. I popped into the store and bought the paper. End of story.

Fast forward to this past Sunday. The print edition of the newspaper is rumored to be a dinosaur, but it hasn't taken its last breath just yet. Still, these endangered creatures have become more elusive in recent years. So every Sunday I set out in search of the Boston Sunday Globe and the Maine Sunday Telegram, much like a 19th-century explorer hoping to find the source of the Nile.

My first stop was a convenience store in Augusta, Maine. (No "spas" here.) I quickly spotted both papers. But finding the beast is one thing; determining its health is another. I've learned to check newspapers before I buy them, because sometimes they are delivered to the store with entire sections missing. At other times, the store clerks, who are too young to know anything about "dead tree" newspapers, set out individual inserts on the shelf, as if the automotive section is a complete newspaper unto itself.

The clerk eyed me suspiciously as I flipped through the newspapers, section by section. He probably assumed I was newly released from the state mental hospital a mile up the street. As it happens, the Telegram was intact but the comics - the most important part of any newspaper - were missing from the Globe.

So I bought the Telegram and headed to a nearby supermarket, where the shelves were bereft of newspapers. They remained bundled up in nearby shopping carts, waiting for some pimple-faced clerk to be told that customers might not want to wait until Monday to buy a Sunday paper.

I then drove to a third store, where I finally found a copy of the Globe that included the comics and the rest of the paper's internal organs. Plunking down my four bucks, I headed home, weary but content, my weekly journey into the heart of darkness complete.