A brilliant early-March day. Tuesday afternoon. Hot sun. Thermometer near 70 in the shade. Grandsons Jordan, 20, and Arie, 16, in town for a quick visit from their Williamstown, Vermont home.

Oh my! How time flies. Seems like yesterday when my wife and I were meeting their mother or her parents at a midpoint rendezvous site in a McDonald’s parking lot within earshot of the Interstate 91/Interstate 89 interchange in White River Junction. Now Jordan is driving his own compact SUV to us, his brother, soon to be a licensed driver himself, riding shotgun.

The boys were in town for a little visit after a long, cold winter. Figuring a Big Y takeout meal would work, we ordered a family-size fish and chips, an order of sea scallops, and a party pizza. A perfect pregame buffet for the nationally televised Celtics road loss to the San Antonio Spurs and budding superstar Victor Wembanyama – an agile 7-foot-5 freak of nature with otherworldly hardcourt skills. A close contest throughout, the Celtics may have prevailed had not Jaylen Brown been ejected for arguing a second-quarter non-call of what he thought was a pushing foul driving him out of bounds.

My salient memory from the boys’ visit is the way they tracked up-to-the-minute sports news on their iPhones while glued to the NBA game. Observing them thumbing their way from one online site to another and reporting what they were learning reminded me once again of how fast the world is passing me by as I age out in retirement.

Hey, get this: I don’t even carry a cell phone, if you can imagine that. I’ve owned a total of one, which plugged into a cradle on my car’s console for a brief period of my working life. That lasted maybe a year before I gave it, along with my wife’s car, to my younger son. Stubborn, I guess. Locked in my old ways. Still, to this day, I have never sent or received a text. I’m just not OK with carrying a 24/7 tracking device. What can I say? Just me. Some would call it ridiculous.

But let us not forget that I’m an old news junkie who once bought two Boston newspapers a day, and often a NYC tabloid to boot when the time was right. That was during the first two-thirds of a 40-year newspaper career with direct access to national and international newswires, not to mention the best Franklin County news feed in the valley.

From my desk at the front end of the newsroom I took calls, supervised staff, edited and formatted copy, and laid out the daily sports package. During idle moments awaiting late games and box scores, I’d wade through the Associated Press and Washington Post/Los Angeles Times newswires and preview the local news and obits for the next day’s newspaper.

These days, people don’t need to wait for the morning paper to get their news. It comes to them even quicker than I used to get it on the wire, arriving on devices resting in the palm of their hand while waiting in the supermarket checkout line or, heaven forbid, bobbing their thumbs, heads down, crossing city streets.

No wonder the modern world is phasing out print media. I could see it coming when my kids were blossoming into young men and had no desire, or need, to gather news from hardcopy. They preferred to chase it down on phones and tablets, desk and laptops, while absorbing books on Kindle. To them, even cable TV news was a secondary source.

My grandsons are even more advanced. I watched them track Miami Heat power forward Bam Adebayo’s fraudulent 83-point game on their phones, beginning with the news he’d finished the first quarter with 31 points. As they followed courtside tweets from Miami, they simultaneously followed news from the World Baseball Classic, the Vermont schoolboy basketball tournament – and who knows what else that they didn’t want to share. They were totally immersed in the modern-day news cycle.

Watching them navigate from site to site told me I’m passé, maybe even Neanderthal, for preferring print media, be it books, magazines, or documents. That pigeonholes me into the endangered-species category – a late-Pleistocene dinosaur watching the ice melt and my relevance vanish like a blacktop puddle after a summer rainstorm.

There’s no denying or preventing it: print media is following the path of the horse and buggy. I’d guess that for every five longtime newspaper subscribers listed in the daily obituaries, there may be one new subscription to replace them. And that unsustainable ratio is doomed only to get worse. At least that’s the way I see it, and I’ve been observing it for many years – first as a career newspaperman at a 200-year-old local paper hemorrhaging readers and advertising revenues at an alarming rate during the new millennium, and now as a retired freelancer on the outside looking in.

This reality really hit home for me two years ago, when, in May of 2024, I received a snail-mail notification from Rolling Stone magazine informing me that the June issue would be my last as a lifetime subscriber. I had purchased the lifetime deal nearly a half century earlier, decades before the New Journalism magazine’s narcissistic publisher/founder Jann Wenner survived grave health concerns and sold out.

If memory serves me, the new sheriff in town offered “lifetime” subscribers like me a few options: we could either accept a free, trimmed-down online edition, or pay an annual fee for the full publication online or in print. Resistant to the annoying options and in a protest mood, I immediately became a former Rolling Stone reader – a status that still holds but may soon change. Truth told, I do miss the magazine.

The magazines now delivered to my doorstep are the weekly New Yorker, which I previously viewed as a snooty Big Apple publication, and the cultish Sun, published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’ve read the Sun for many years and was, after discontinuing my Rolling Stone subscription, gifted the New Yorker by a neighbor with access to a promotional reduced rate for friends.

Meanwhile, I’ve already decided not to renew my Orion magazine subscription when it expires. It’s been taken over by a new editorial staff that doesn’t fit my tastes since editor-in-chief Chip Blake left in 2020. Under Blake, Orion’s subtitle read Nature, Culture, Place. Now, new editors have removed the Place and gone to a more international focus that doesn’t float my birchbark canoe. I’m a place-based reader and writer, focused on this place and on our Western Hemisphere.

As hard as it may be to swallow, my Baby-Boomer generation of print-media consumers is being rudely phased out. That realization was delivered loud and clear by my Generation Z grandsons, who unknowingly slapped me upside the head with it.