SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a group of Deseret News staffers holed themselves up in a Park City complex to rethink the newspaper.
One session dealt with a survey that revealed the typical readers for each item in the paper. Howard Moore, a photographer, brought a full box of theater outfits for the occasion. When time came to depict my most typical reader, he put on a gray wig, a pair of bifocals and grabbed a snazzy little purse.I had readers from all ages, but my most "typical" reader was a woman over 65.
For some reason a few people thought I'd find that troubling. I didn't. I wrote honestly about things I cared about, so I figured I had found my "natural constituency." I also knew I could change things. A few columns about beer and bowling, a kind word for Madonna, some Dave Barry comments about burping and they'd all be gone.
Then I might not have anybody.
Besides, I knew this about 65-year-old women: They have much more interesting things to say than 25-year-old women. They have more interesting things to say than 65-year-old men.
And over the years, my mail has pretty much proven the survey right.
"Dear Mr. Johnston," runs a recent letter. "I read your column regularly. The times you write of poetry or poets are the most interesting to me, I simply cannot resist any longer sending you my `stuff.' I reach the age of 82 this very Sunday, so you need not treat me too kindly."
Along with her letter she included a chapbook of poems.
Kind readers, you tell me how I should respond to such a letter? Soft-soap wasn't the answer. Faint praise? Hard-edged honesty?
Luckily, I caught a break.
The poems of Ione Fuller had a nice, gentle lilt to them. And several had the saving grace: humor. One poem told of sneaking over to peek at greeting cards that other people had been laughing at. Another told of a robin having a "conversation" with the Fuller's gray goose - not realizing the gray goose was a plastic lawn ornament.
Ione Fuller, I'm putting my reply to you here in the column.
Keep the verse coming.
Another typical mail day had a postcard from Brigham City. I'd written a piece about the cemetery there, and we'd run a shot of a stone bench under a birch tree with it. Bernise Ottley wrote to say, "Thank you for running a picture of my lot in the Brigham cemetery. There is a lot of history there."
Then she told it to me. The snapshot, it seems, took in people ranging from Elder Boyd K. Packer's parents to a cousin of Jerold Ottley of Tabernacle Choir fame. It even featured a shirt-tail relative of the Deseret News photographer who took the photo.
In the end, I know gentle asides like these will have minimal effect on foreign policy. They're not the kind of exchanges that bring down county commissioners or alter the tax structure.
But I'm convinced they do hold things together. While other journalists try to reshape the fabric of society, somebody's got to weave together the threads in that fabric.
Much of the fabric of society is woven by 65-year-old women and others like them, I've come to know. Without them, the world would be as hollow as a tennis ball - full of grand ideas and philosophy but devoid of guts. Take my word for it. While the politicians and pundits supply a context and direction for our daily lives, I write about daily life.
There's no such thing as trivia. There are just people too busy or distracted to see the significance in the everyday.
My "typical readers," bless 'em, aren't like that. They know not only God, but meaning itself, is in the details.