What a difference a year makes

I have been a newspaper columnist for almost a year now. What has transpired for me over these past months, simply put, has been the culmination of a dream. When I started to take this whole writing thing seriously I set two goals, one short term, one long. Short term was to get published, that happened pretty quickly, long term was to write a weekly column; that one only took twenty-four years. If I subtract from the almost two and a half decade gap, the time I stepped away from writing because I wanted to spend time with my family, not alone in my office writing about them, the column would have happened in about a year.

In the beginning once I figured out what it was the editors wanted almost everything I sent out made it to page. My earlier op-eds and essays are quite different from what I write now. Back then I took whatever opinionated angle and off-kilter slant it took to get a byline. Now, I’m still opinionated but after raising a family, working and running a household, after scattering the ashes of my parents, after losing the best mother-in-law who ever lived, after seeing two daughters finish college, get their master’s degrees, after seeing both get married last year, and after watching my daughter suffer the loss of her dear friend,
a first grade teacher/hero in Newtown, I’ve learned a few things.  The word is 'wisdom' although I like to think I’m not quite old enough to claim such insight. Taking a hard edge may get a by-line, and a few extra dollars in my Vera Bradley, but it alienates people, pisses them off actually. When I say the same thing with humor, I own their temperament, if only for an instant.

I love to write about what is general in all our lives. I like making people smile by letting them know, I know what they know, because I’ve been there too. The universality of what makes us human beings is what connects us.

So…what do you know, I know, because I’d love to know?