“Hi!” The woman’s voice was bright and open, and her greeting, aimed at me, was surprising. I was at a celebration of First Friday and was passing the 5th grade boy who was playing the old piano in the Harrison Center when she beamed her smile at me. I responded with what I hoped was an equally enthusiastic greeting, and as she walked away, I loitered in the hallway, waiting for Paula Nicewanger and her daughter to emerge from the basement studios. The woman swirled back toward me and asked me if I was still writing about my grandchildren. I knew then that she was a reader of this publication.
I am notoriously lacking in memory for names, and lately — for faces. I apologized to the woman and asked her name. Cindy told me that she had read my columns about my grandchildren, and most recently, my youngest of the three. She remembered what I wrote about caring for my eldest when her mother went back to school and the troubled man who spent 22 days on my futon. I told her that I appreciated her readership of The Weekly View, the publication that permits me a forum for my thoughts.
Last November 17th, at 10 Johnson Coffee House, I attended the taping of a “Firehouse Irvington” podcast. I met Jay Baker and Kevin Friedly there, and watched as they interviewed and recorded Dawn Cox Briggs, Kathleen Angelone; the “walking man,” Matt Langenbacher; Lloyd Knight, the principal of Thomas Carr Howe high school, and our own Al Hunter. On Saturday, February 2nd, Baker and Friedly recorded another episode of “Firehouse” at Coal Yard Coffee, speaking to Dawn Cox Briggs about her charity work with the Black Hat Society. I stood away from the interview area, close to the exit door, and a woman passed me, asking my name. When told, Barb said that we were neighbors and that she appreciated the work being done by the ladies of The Weekly View. And she reads my column. After the recording of the show, Baker and Friendly spoke to Paula and Ethel, two of “the ladies” of The View. They graciously included me, and Jay Baker laughed: “You’re that CJ; you mentioned visiting Ken Collier-Magar and ‘pramming’ with your granddaughter.”
As an artist, the great and grinding concern for me has always been whether I had done my best in my craft, my sullen art. An English professor told me a long time ago that the writer, at some point, has got to learn to free her writing to fly or fail. Some nights, when I put “-30-” to my submission to my editor, I stand and stretch and say to myself, “Yes.” And other days, other nights, I wonder if the thoughts that I had wrangled into the corral of coherence, if the inner views that been expressed through the touch of the keys of my laptop were an effort worthy of being read by our paper’s readers, the unseen audience for whom, as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote, “I labor by singing light.” And when I hear from Dr. Fulton and Jeremy and Stephanie and Steve and David and Doug and Michael and Phil; Jack and Mary and Jeremy, Ken and Tina and Tom and in this last week, Jay and Kevin and Cindy and Barb, it matters not that they agree with me: They picked up the paper, found me in it, and made an effort to tell me about it.
In whatever way it comes, and no matter what the message may be, I love that word from our readers.