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I’ve written my column through hell and high water. To be specific, I wrote my heart out after 9/11, grieving with so many readers who lost loved ones in the towers. I scribbled my way through blackouts, epic blizzards, hurricanes and, for three years, the pandemic.
I wrote about how to sleep better and eat better and find friends and keep friends. Sometimes an idea landed on the page full blown, and sometimes it’s been a struggle to compose a cogent piece. I spent my 750 words in wildly different ways, from a tribute to a courageous teacher friend going through chemotherapy to a send-up of the much-reviled New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, to one column many years ago in which I advertised for a prom date for my daughter. (She was in on the joke.).
My work has been personal. I have written about my children’s lives, their mitzvahs and their missteps. My breast cancer. My husband’s heart surgeries. I struggled for days trying to find just the right words to honor my parents when they died. In some ways the column has been a running history of our times in our Long Island communities. After all, don’t we share the same lives and dreams, worry about the same threats to our mother Earth and hope for a safer world for our kids?
Many of my columns have suggested or reviewed books, the other love in my life. In return, many of you have pitched books my way that turned out to be thrilling and illuminating.
As politics got nasty and toxic in recent years, I jumped in, wanting to use my 750 words a week to rally support for our democracy, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and laws that ensure equality for every community and every human being. I think these were words well spent, although at times the backlash has been fierce. That’s what opinion columns are for: to stir the pot, open up the debate and disagree without getting too creepy.
Over the decades, I had one official week off per year, the end-of-year edition of the Heralds, when we publish special editorial pages. I consider the obligation to turn in a column every week, on deadline (most times), a sacred privilege and a joy. Mine used to be considered a “humor” column, and I miss that, but the world is only intermittently funny these days.
Maybe you can tell: I love newspapering. So it is with some sadness that I write today to tell you that I am taking a two-month leave starting next week.
My husband, my Donnie, is facing a serious medical challenge, and I want to be there for him 100 percent. I hope to see him through it, help him get healthy and strong again, and come back to this page with fresh ideas, good news and renewed focus.
Over the next few weeks, we’ve decided to revisit some winning columns from the past 20 years, and hope they still offer a laugh or an insight or a reason to write an angry letter. I did briefly consider using ChatGPT to write my column while I’m away, but I’d hate to find out that I can be replaced by an app that’s writing fake college essays for a living.
I am keeping a journal of this time, and if you’d like to stay in touch, please write to my email below and I’ll share some of what I’m writing on our medical adventure. I wish we were off on a Hawaiian Islands fling. Or a return to Komodo Island, even with the monstrous, salivating dragons. I’d even settle for the North Seas cruise where the waves were 20 feet high and the sun didn’t shine for 14 days.
This turn of events is not what I would have expected or wished for in our lives, but it is what has been given us at this time.
Wish us luck.
Copyright 2023 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.
