25 years of sharing
It’s been 25 years since I first wrote a column for this space.
This I know, because I wrote my first column when my son was 2, and he turned 27 last month – that’s been my measure of time. But I was reminded of that quarter-century milestone Wednesday night, when a public event brought me face-to-face with some of my readers.
I was at Ringgold Middle School for a public screening of “A Season to Remember: The Baseball Boys of Mon City,” the documentary I produced about the youth baseball leagues of Monongahela in the early 1950s. It was heartening to see an enthusiastic hometown crowd fill the auditorium almost to capacity. Watching our work on the big screen was a moment of professional pride that will be with me always.
Afterward, many from the audience thanked me and WQED for producing the film. And among those who stopped to chat were people who read my column in this newspaper.
Each of them held on to my hand as he or she recounted the columns that resonated with them: my groundhog problems, the dead mouse, my wardrobe malfunction at the Emmy awards, my little dog Smoothie, my love of watermelon. They asked about my children and congratulated me on my daughter’s college graduation; they told me they were sorry that my son lives so far away. They asked how my health is, 12 years after sharing my challenges during cancer treatment.
“I feel like I know you,” more than one of them said.
Twenty-five years is a long time to talk about oneself. There have been times I’ve thought about quitting this – including the teenage years when my kids weren’t thrilled that I was mentioning them. I found other things to write about, filling this space with musings about cycling and playing piano and my iffy cooking skills. I stopped counting “bad hair” columns after about a dozen.
Writing is lonesome work. Whether it’s for this column or for my work as a producer, sitting before a blank screen always has been fraught with anxiety and self-doubt. The work will never be anything but hard and solitary.
It can feel like shouting into an abyss. The best part of every Friday is opening my email to find messages from my readers. I know people are reading me, but the silence can be disheartening.
And so Wednesday night, as I walked through the crowd after the event, I was heartened and encouraged by each reader who stopped to say hello. It’s high praise to hear that someone has been clipping my column to send to her daughter two states away. Apparently, a few of my clippings are stuck by magnets to refrigerators. That makes me as happy as any award.
Although I rarely write about current events – others do that much better than I could – the happy and the sad of our world can’t help but seep into my work. The sad comes at us more frequently and aggressively now. Those moments of sincere kindness Wednesday night made me feel a little less hopeless this week.
Why else are we here but to connect with each other, to compare stories and to remind each other we are not alone? Each week when I sit at this computer, that is my only goal: to think about what’s been happening in my life, and then look for that common ground that will resonate with you. It could be something as significant as chemotherapy or as silly as a dead mouse. But it’s life – mine and yours.
To hear that you feel like you know me – that’s why I do this.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.