We try our best to fill The Daily Item’s front page and itemlive.com with interesting and important local news. But I think a nondescript page in the back of the newspaper has the most heartwarming or heart-rending tales about the human condition.
Page B6 is the last vestige of that mighty engine that once helped propel American newspapers. During their long-gone heyday, Classified sections were stuffed with help-wanted advertisements, real-estate ads, and cars for sale.
Classifieds were a feast for the eyes and a temptation to the wallet. I remember scanning my hometown newspaper’s Classified section as a teenager looking for a used Cadillac that cost under $2,000. The Classified section is often where people found their first job and their first apartment as well as their first car.
The internet and one abysmal business decision after another made by newspaper executives doomed newspapers to extinction, and today they survive mostly on legal notices submitted for publication by courts, government boards, and banks foreclosing on mortgages.
Buried beneath the surface of the bureaucratic language common to legal notices are tales of human tragedy, trevail, and, once in a while, triumph. I often find myself feeling sad, and at the same time inspired by legal notices, especially “appointment of guardian” notices.
It’s easy to read between the lines of these notices and glimpse a family dismantled by addiction or mental illness, with a judge required to intervene to provide a child with a responsible loving adult to care for them. The saddest guardian notices are filed by hospitals: It’s hard to read them and not imagine a kid lying in a hospital bed wondering who is going to care for them and make them smile.
But I try to also read guardianship appointments as the legal first step for someone on a new path in life that — I always fantasize — includes a stable place to live with nice, responsible people.
Call me a Pollyanna but I work in a business where you learn for the sake of your mental well-being to balance out the horror stories you read and write with ones that have hope at their center.
The Essex Probate and Family Court handles guardianship appointments and I have received calls over the years from disgruntled unfit parents complaining about how the court screwed them. I listened to their rants and imagined a judge giving kids a shot at a stable, safe life even if it included eventually reckoning with why their parents were monsters.
“Formal adjudication of estates” listings are less sad to read but they conjure up images of intractable Ebenezer and Ethel Scrooges sitting alone with their money bags, refusing to write a will, and leaving it to the courts to sort out their estates.
My favorite legal notices are Zoning Board of Appeals agendas. Call me mentally-warped or in desperate need of a new hobby, but every request to build a new house or add a porch on the back of a home represents someone’s dream and investment in bettering their life.
My favorite zoning board notice was published on B6 just before Christmas. It stated that the applicant was “…seeking a special permit to outfit an accessory dwelling in her home for her parents.”
I imagined the woman and her mom and dad talking — sometimes arguing — for months about the older couple moving out of the house where the woman grew up and into her home. They finally come to an agreement, and on Christmas Day, after all the other gifts are opened, the woman hands them an envelope with the zoning board notice inside it.
If that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye then I have an onion I can send you.
