In Colorado, peaches go with everything: movies, newspapers, old friends and blueberry pie.
“Spotlight” is my favorite movie.
I watch it a lot. Nearly every time I’m staring at the TV and the endless lists of movies and documentaries and cutting-edge dramas and old-timey sitcoms make television programming seem uninspired, I end up watching “Spotlight.” Since I heard last week that it was leaving Netflix at the end of July, I’ve watched it twice, maybe three times.
I like it because journalists spend most of their lives sitting in a front of a computer or looking at documents or having mundane conversations about pedestrian topics, and yet “Spotlight” was able to create a compelling story about sitting in front of a computer, looking at documents, talking on the phone.
I like it because of the newsroom scenes and all the details they got right — like the grocery-store cake at the going-away party and the vending machine crackers the editor eats for lunch and the reporters looking over their shoulder to see if their jobs were safe as soon as a new editor walked in the door — and because of all the details they got wrong. (An executive editor would be unlikely to tell a city editor to work a sentence into a story “before the jump.” That conversation would be with someone from the copy desk — but that chain of command is, as they say, a little “inside baseball.”)
I like it because it shows how we fail each other — as individuals and as institutions, not just the Catholic church, although that obviously is a big one, but also the police and the courts, our neighbors and friends, and the media. I like it because it shows how we can try harder and do better and change the world.
I like it because it shows how we can try harder and do better and change the world.
Mostly I like it because, in that movie, reporters are the good guys — which in real life is true more often than not but it isn’t always true and which is a truth that is too often these days written off as “fake news.”
My first job out of college, I was a reporter at a weekly newspaper in southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley. It was a small paper — an editor, a sportswriter and two or three reporters, depending on who got mad the week before — in a small town that made its livelihood from potatoes and barley. We covered city council meetings and school board, took our cameras to rodeos and county fairs, spent Tuesday mornings at the police station and Wednesday mornings at municipal court combing through records, worked way into the night once a week, every week to get the paper off the floor and onto the doorsteps of a still-slumbering town. There were no big scandals, no coverups to uncover, but there were a couple murders that seemed earth-shattering and were covered as if they were unprecedented, even though they were sort of run-or-the-mill, as murders go.
We were mighty in our intentions and we tried.
I loved that paper, but left about 18 months in when the executive editor gave my job as managing editor to the male sportswriter who routinely whined about his position at the paper. He has a family, I was told, and the salary he’s getting as sportswriter is embarrassing for a man in his station in life.
Even though I wasn’t yet mature enough to understand that injustice, I left and took a job at the daily down the road.
I loved that paper too. The newsroom, still small but so much bigger than the weekly, was more true to the orderliness I had been taught to expect but hadn’t yet found. I was agricultural editor, but I also covered courts and council and I wrote a column that was mostly dumb but sometimes stretched into issues of importance. The publisher was kind of creepy (he lived in a room he had built out of plywood in the pressroom and sometimes spied on people who were working in the newsroom on the weekends), but I made great friends there, some who modeled the beauty of a domestic life, some who went on to a “Spotlight”-caliber career. I probably would have stayed there longer if my landlady hadn’t decided I needed to vacate my little house so her granddaughter and her boyfriend could live there instead.
I was hurt, so I decided to move on. And I did to other unsatisfying newspaper jobs, graduate school, teaching, portrait photography and finally back to a daily newspaper in my hometown that was not always a good fit but sometimes was wonderful.
When I first started there, it was a big paper, routinely 24 or 32 or more pages, with a bustling newsroom, maybe 20 reporters, seven editors and some assistant editors, a dedicated photo staff, a copydesk that was full to the point of sharing desks, and at times a full cohort working on a nascent website.
We didn’t uncover any scandals with international implications, but we did a pretty thorough job telling our community about binge drinking on campus after a young woman died of alcohol poisoning in a vacant bedroom in a fraternity house; the drought that had ravaged the West and was impacting the environment in our fragile mountains and the water supply to our growing, thirsty city; the prison release of a local man who was wrongfully convicted of murder ten years earlier when he was just a skinny teenager and the fallout of that injustice; a pattern of neglect and abuse at some senior care facilities in town, and the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on our community and the families who lost loved ones to the conflicts.
In between those “big” stories, we covered the essential, heartbeat pieces of a community: city council and school board, tax hikes and new construction and controversial changes to plastic bags and parades, the police and courts, the triumphs and tragic losses on the playing fields on countless Friday nights, the new businesses and new babies, the sad goodbyes to old landmarks and beloved town characters and everyday family members.
We won some awards and got a few pats on our collective backs while simultaneously enduring the wrath of people who didn’t agree with us, didn’t like what we were doing or saying or unearthing or who felt they were wronged or slighted or ignored. We ate too much pizza on so many election nights and way too many pieces of going-away cake.
I left there, not by my own choosing, more than six years ago. Even though there are some things about that job that I am glad to be done with — like irregular schedules, untenable workloads, newsroom politics and the constant worry about the proverbial pink slip — I miss it still. It was who I became, who I am still, who I likely will always be. A storyteller.
The other night I attended a post-pandemic reunion, so to speak, with a few close friends from the paper. We spoke briefly about the paper, as two of us continue to work there. But the paper really is only a shadow of what it was when I was a new employee so it is sometimes a painful subject. Mostly we told stories about our kids and our grandkids, our vacations, our aging parents, our pets and pet peeves and newly-discovered TV favorites. (“Dickinson” on AppleTV. Watch it. It’s fantastic.) We grilled steaks and ate pie and laughed about shared sensibilities and similar situations.
I thought then, if only briefly, that this is how people used to get their news — before the Internet, before TV and radio, before the printing press. We are in a perpetual circle.
The stories matter. The little ones told to a friend at a barbecue and the big ones that speak truth to power. They inform who we are and what our futures will be and the way our world will evolve.
I worry about people losing sight of that in their silos, but I am confident in the belief that there are still people who have stories to tell.
The Pie
Late summer is peach season in Colorado. People wait, like a kid on Christmas morning, to see the peach stands pop up at easy-access spots on the roadsides around town. To smell the sweet perfume. To feel the soft velvet beneath their finger tips. Impatient, they sample the California peaches that debut in the grocery stores a few weeks before the Colorado peaches show up and are almost invariably disappointed — whether because of the actual quality of the fruit or just an ingrained prejudice is immaterial. To be conversant in Palisade peaches is a point of pride in Colorado.
Although they’re not yet in the grocery stores, they are in the farmers markets now and at the farm stands. So we’re slicing fruit for cereal and ice cream; we’re making salads and pouring cream and baking pies.
This one, Peach-Blueberry, tastes just like summer.
TIP: My mother, a peach lover (but one whose love paled in comparison to my father’s), taught me this peach trick. If you need to peel your peaches, place them — one at a time — in a pot of boiling water. Let it sit in the boiling water for a minute or two — it’s not an exact science, just don’t leave it in there too long or the peach will start cooking. Then remove it from the pan and run some cold water on it. The hot water makes the peach let go of the skin (and the cold water allows you to hold it in your hands). At this point, you should just be able to pull the skin off, no need for a knife (although it’s still nice to use a knife to pierce the skin and begin the peel). Sometimes, you can just rub your fingers over the peach and the skin will rub off. It’s amazing. Worth noting, though, that this doesn’t work well on peaches that are still hard.
The Recipe
Peach Blueberry Pie
Some combination of peaches and blueberries, to make six cups of fruit
½ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup brown sugar, packed
1/8 teaspoon or a “pinch” of salt
¼ teaspoon of nutmeg
About 1½ tablespoons of lemon juice
1/3 cup flour
Dough for a double-crust pie
Cinnamon for sprinkling
Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Peel and slice peaches into slices about ¼-inch thick. Place in a large bowl and then gently combine with blueberries, sugar, brown sugar, salt, nutmeg and lemon juice. Taste and adjust the flavors as needed. Gently stir in the flour and set aside, allowing the fruit to juice.
Roll out the bottom crust and place it in a 9-inch pie plate. Tuck the crust into the plate and trim the edges, allowing about an inch beyond the pie plate. Place in the freezer while the fruit juices.
Roll out the top crust. Retrieve the pie plate from the refrigerator.
Give the filling a final stir so that the flour that may have settled at the bottom of the bowl coats the fruit. Pour the filling into the crust. (It’s OK to pour off some of the liquid in order to prevent your pie from being too juicy.) Drape the top crust over the fruit. Trim the top crust. Fold the top and bottom crusts together to seal the pie, and then flute the edges. Cut steam vents in the top crust. Sprinkle the pie with a cinnamon-sugar mix. (Some people like to finish the pie with an egg wash and sprinkling sugar, instead of cinnamon-sugar.)
Bake pie for 15-20 minutes until the crust is lightly golden. Reduce the heat to 375 and bake for another 35-40 minutes until the crust is golden brown and the filling is bubbling. Allow to cool for at least an hour before cutting and serving. It’s good slightly warm or at room temperature.
ALL-PURPOSE CRUST
2½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
¾ cup (1½ sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
¼ cup (4 tablespoons) cold vegetable shortening
¼ cup (4 tablespoons) cold vodka
6 tablespoons cold water, plus extra as needed
In a large bowl, mix together the flour, salt and sugar until thoroughly combined. Add the butter and shortening and cut together with a pastry cutter until the mixture forms small pea-sized crumbs.
Pour the vodka over the mixture, a tablespoon at a time, using a rubber spatula. Add the water and press the dough together to form two large balls. If the dough seems dry or does not hold together, add extra water a tablespoon at a time until all the ingredients come together. (Be careful not to work the dough too much to prevent the crust from being tough.)
Press each ball into a 1-inch disk, wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour — or up to two days — before rolling out.
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