Forum Steps Aside

The traditional weekly Forum section stepped aside today to let the Caregivers special report take its place on the presses. The Caregivers report sprung from an idea by Tony Lang for a Forum project and was carried forward by the News department. This morning I've already heard from a friend who intends to keep the section for future reference, so it seems like a worthy reason to have set aside our Forum plans for a week.

But it left me without a home for a Bengals playoff cartoon today, a party I would ordinarily have joined in. Instead we ran the cartoon I drew on Friday on Saturday's editorial page, not a standard day for my cartoons. (This was the cartoon I had to draw in the last hour of the day Friday -- my last posting on this blog -- and that day ended with the rush of pulling off a reasonably good cartoon with the clock ticking in my ears. When it works, there is no better feeling.)

By the way, the cartoon I pulled out of my archives to run on the Caregivers editorial page today is one that readers have asked me to copy for them over the last few years since it initially ran. It was inspired by watching my aunt and cousins take care of my uncle as Alzheimers dragged him down. The drawing was an example of departing from the headlines to draw about what might be the larger concerns in readers' lives.