I had a good thought back about 12 years ago. I’ve had one or two since, but I’m particularly proud of this one.

I thought that newspapers were filled with too much bad news and needed something fresh. People needed something that would make them feel good when they walked out on the porch Saturday morning, picked up the paper, and read the news as they drank their coffee and waved at the neighbors.

As I think about it, I guess I wasn’t the first to come up with that notion. After all, somebody did invent the funny pages a long time ago.

You might think that our notion might outlive its use since it’s a dozen years old. But we all know that every generation looks back and says, “I’d sure love to go back to the good ol’ days.” For me, I think I could live in a log cabin and write my column each week on a scroll. Now that Co-cola Mike is retired, I could hire him to ride it into town on a horse.

It never was my vision to visit with you about life’s woes, although there are plenty of those to write about: scandals in sports, financial crises, bail-out plans with fancy names, and ridiculous stories leaving you with a didn’t-this-used-to-be-wrong feeling.

Why, I picked up the paper recently and read about a prom queen who was crowned at a basketball game recently up North. Everybody seemed OK with her, even though she wasn’t even a she.

Whoa! I’ve got to stop there. (Sorry for the digression, but that “whoa” just gave me an image of Coca-cola Mike galloping on that horse with our column tucked under his arm.) I’ve got to say “whoa” here. You see how easy it is to get sucked into writing about the bad stuff. It’s easy to write about baseball players and steroids and egotistical NFL owners or politics-gone-wrong, or scandals, racism, and crime. You can flip through the paper and get all of that you want.

But we’re not going to do that. Here’s what we’re going to talk about:

We’re going to talk about Grandma, pretty near the best cook LaGrange, Georgia ever had. Recently the neighbor who lived in a pretty yellow house across the street from Grandma wrote me a nice note, telling me how he would see her from his front porch standing in her kitchen all day long. I smiled, because I knew that was Grandma. That’s what she did. By the way, Grandma crossed the street many times with a cake or a pie in her hands for her neighbor. Besides crossing the street, the two of them crossed racial barriers, too. That’s what I want to write about.

And at every opportunity I want us to sit on the front porch and visit about Doosey – the fella with the missing teeth and webbed fingers and attitude problem — and about that lucky lady, the amazing blond, and about sweet Audrey Lyn, our little angel we call “Pretty Eyes.”

I want to write about Little Dewey who has gotten adept at telling fibs lately. Stay tuned for that visit soon.

I want to write about Coca-cola Mike and Glory and Bathtub Stevie and the boys down at the Y.

And about the pilot who skidded into the Hudson, saving 155 lives. Again, stay tuned.

Good Lord willing, we’ll talk about these topics many more times. When you get the paper, go straight out to the porch, sit down in that old rocker, grab the paper, and skip through all the bad news and come right to this space.

And read.

With a smile on your face … or maybe a tear.

Ah, what better way to start off a Saturday morning!

Readers may contact Steven Bowen at steven.bowen@redoakisd.org