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At a candidate breakfast the other week, I happened to sit next to congressional challenger Teresa Sue Bratton, who was pressing the flesh in an unsuccessful bid to unseat Howard Coble.

She had a question.

“With all the news and everything going out on the Internet,” she asked, “what’s going to happen to print? How can newspapers survive?”

Normally, I’d have a hard time answering this question, and not for lack of mulling it over.

But seeing as I had just taken a bite of a country ham biscuit, the main drawing card for this event, I had an easy comeback.

I pointed to my mouth, nodding apologetically, and held my palms up, as if to say, “Don’t ask me, I’m just here for the free ham biscuits.”

But upon further reflection, and after seeing the morning-after election issue of the News & Record and a bunch of other newspapers around the country get scooped up quicker than — well, free ham biscuits — I’ve got it. I’ve figured out the answer.

Newspapers will become a keepsake. Something to be laid out flat, like the dearly departed, pressed in an acid-free scrapbook or framed behind UV-resistant plastic, to shield us from those harmful rays.

You know, something to show the grandkids years from now. That’s because after the most drawn-out campaign in history, the crescendo seemed somehow fleeting, like that bottom-of-the-screen crawl telling how many thousand points the New York Stock Exchange lost today, and which random ’60s rocker, probably Keith Richards, turned 70.

“Shouldn’t we be taping this?” my husband asked as we watched the midnight speeches by McCain and Obama on Tuesday night, before remembering we no longer have a VCR. “I mean, uh, recording it?”

I’d been thinking the same thing earlier, as we watched a polling place at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on West Market Street close at 7:30 p.m. sharp.

After a last call into the empty darkness, in case any stragglers were waiting to vote, the precinct workers started breaking down the tables and machines, and one headed out into the rain to take down the jungle of yard signs. By morning, you would have never known people voted there.

History is a brief pirouette, and everything in between, a long slog through ordinary time, to be rained on and faded by the sun and disintegrated from the acid within.

Nothing lasts forever — except, of course, for those PDF files in the UBS flash drive on my key chain. I’m saving them all for posterity.

The greening of Greensboro

Speaking of our disposable culture, next week marks an important launch for the city’s new Community Sustainability Council.

The meeting Thursday will bring together interested citizen groups and individuals who are working on ways to be better stewards of our land, air and water by reducing carbon emissions and energy use, and promoting conservation.

“By learning about each other,” said Deep Roots manager Joel Landau of the many efforts under way, “it’s a way to be more coherent and get more momentum behind this.”

There’s been an increasing shift in public opinion in favor of sustainability, but that has yet to translate into a large-scale shift in behavior.

Interestingly, businesses are beginning to lead the way — not only in such showcase efforts as the Proximity Hotel, a “green” project, but in the practices of such existing chains as Food Lion and Walmart in energy-saving technology and packaging.

And, sure, it’s the right thing to do. But if Walmart’s doing it, it might just be the cheaper thing to do, too.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com