Many a mystery has been unscrambled on the back pages of this publication. I hope that the great Malaga missing newspaper saga will be the next one.
“Ah, Málaga!” you are thinking: Spain, Pablo Picasso, Guernica, Costa del Sol. I regret to inform you that the town involved in what my editor calls “the Malaga Drama” is the one located just a few miles downriver of Wenatchee, former home to Alcoa — not the one that is the birthplace of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
My parents, who get their mail in Malaga, have been faithful Methow Valley News (MVN) subscribers since 2008, which by no coincidence is when I started writing this column. Most weeks when they make their Thursday trek down to the Malaga post office, they find their MVN sitting in their mailbox.
But sometimes it’s not there, and when they investigate further, they learn that their newspaper has indeed arrived, but it has been put in someone else’s mailbox, stuck to another MVN subscriber’s edition. (Pause for a moment to let that sink in. “Another MVN subscriber’s edition.” There is apparently more than one Malaga household with a subscription to the MVN — I find this remarkable.)
When that subscriber sees they have two copies of the newspaper, sometimes they return it to the post office window and my parents get their MVN a couple of days later. Sometimes they don’t. This, clearly, is either a delay two days too long, or a week without a newspaper. Neither is acceptable.
Thus my dad is attempting to learn who the other Malaga-based MVN subscribers are — particularly those whose last names are alphabetically near “Lodato” — so that when he arrives to an MVN-less mailbox, he can just ask the post office staff to check so-and-so’s box to see if there are two MVNs in it.
For reasons of confidentiality the post office will not give my dad these names, but you know who might? That’s right — the subscribers themselves, some of whom may read this column from time to time. Malaga post office friends — please reveal yourselves to my parents, so that they may continue receiving their Methow Valley news in a timely manner.
Meanwhile, I will share some follow-up information about Anne Young and her gun-in-the-piano mystery. Anne, you may recall, with the help of a piano cleaner, located a .357 revolver in her piano, where her father had apparently stowed it 13 years prior, and then forgot about it. While waiting for her parents to come claim the firearm, Anne and her husband Nate put the gun in a safe place in their home. So safe and secure was the hiding place, in fact, that by the time the gun owners arrived to fetch the long lost item —a mere matter of weeks later — the Youngs had forgotten where they stashed it. It runs in the family I guess.
