I have to admit to having a weird sort of fascination with those around me who live their daily lives without a thought to the newspaper or the evening news.

You know the type. They sit among others who are discussing the day’s headlines and announce, rather self-righteously, that they don’t read the paper or watch the news.

I’ve never really known just how to respond to those people.

Should you feel sorry for them that they aren’t interested enough in the community and world around them to care? Or do you a feel a bit jealous that perhaps their own lives are so full and rich that they have neither the time nor inclination to worry about anything else?

The closest my husband and I come to that attitude is when we are on vacation.

“Do you want me to pick up a newspaper?” he may say to me as he heads to the store for coffee.

“If you want to,” I answer, truly not caring one way or the other because I’m on vacation and I’d really just as soon read my book.

I have to confess that the news from this past week has me wishing that I were on vacation.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who got choked up reading Tuesday morning’s paper in which 55-year-old Janice Gray recounted watching her husband get shot to death in front of her eyes in the couple’s Milo home on Easter Sunday.

Joseph Gray and William Elliot were the two men who were struck down in their homes in Milo and Corinth by a young man with a list of convicted sex offenders in his pocket.

He later shot himself to death on a bus full of passengers in Boston as police closed in. His blood, the papers noted, sprayed across all of those sitting near him, including a mother and her young children.

It’s an awful image.

This story alone would have been enough for the week, and it certainly has kept reporters here busy.

But Tuesday’s paper brought an equally horrifying headline about four young sisters who were killed in Ashland when the car they were in collided with a log truck as they headed to a high school softball game.

In Wednesday’s paper, their father and other family members shared stories about “their girls,” and many of us again started our day with a heavy heart.

To round out the midweek, there was the 16-year-old boy who died in an ATV accident in Greenwood on Wednesday and a 48-year-old man who died in a car accident in Brownfield. His 17-year-old son – who had had his permit less than a week – was driving.

Then we were reminded of that painful episode three years ago in New Sweden, when 16 people were poisoned, one fatally, at the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church, when a vengeful parishioner put arsenic in the church social coffee. Case finally closed.

It was a tragic week, for sure.

So someone said to me this week: “Geeze, it makes you not want to pick up the paper in the morning.”

That’s understandable, but not reading about it doesn’t make a tragedy any less a tragedy.

This week’s events spawned dozens of conversations. We’ve debated the merits of the sex offender registry and who should be listed on it. We’ve chatted among ourselves about the condition of Maine roads and shared with one another our own close calls with the behemoth log trucks that crisscross our state each day.

We’ve talked again about the challenges of teen drivers and what can happen in a close-knit community.

Put all that on top of the daily dose of tragedy from Iraq, Pakistan, the Sudan and a dozen other places around the globe.

Sure, a lot of the talk is just chatter, but it’s how we cope as a society, and it’s how change eventually occurs.

And that’s why, painful or not, it’s important to pay attention to the news.

Renee Ordway can be reached at ROrdway@bangordailynews.net