News - Local/State - Andrew Dys

Saturday, Jul. 26, 2008

You readers know how to give it to me (mail, that is)

Almost nobody gets real, hand-delivered mail anymore.

Except me.

I so anger some readers they must respond, on stationery using real ink pens, notebook paper with pencil or crayon, even typewritten.

The column about being the parent of a teen, and my flailings about like a shipwrecked sailor to handle it, brought immediate scorn.

"Dear sir," stated one recent letter, typed.

Uh-oh, anybody calls me sir, I get nervous. Bill collectors also write, "Dear Sir" before the repo man takes the car away.

"You're the same guy who advocates a lack of manners and no respect at graduation ceremonies, aren't you!"

Yes, that's me. The clapper.

"Maybe you are a loser," she wrote.

I asked the lady who sells me my lottery tickets for a ruling. She looked at me, shook her head like she does twice a week, every week, after running the tickets through that green machine that spits out broken dreams, and stated for the record: "Yes, you are a loser."

So that letter writer is clearly correct.

The next one, on stationery with bluebirds on it -- I am thinking, "Little old lady, great, little old ladies love me" -- started with, "What a disaster you have created --."

Now that's more like it. Disasters, and me causing them, is right up my alley.

"Please grow up yourself. ... Maybe it is not too late."

Well, Tuesday afternoon, while doing a story about how hot it was, I spied two guys atop a water tower 126 feet above the ground. I did a U-turn over five lanes of traffic to interview them. A woman, not a day over 80, in the required gray Buick of her age group, her eyes barely peering over the steering wheel, honked at me and threw up her tiny hands in despair.

It has been worse. One lady marched into The Herald, demanded to see me after the graduation clapping column, and promptly stated: "You stink!"

She marched off without another word.

I sniffed under my arms: She, of course, was right.

Via heraldonline.com, again about clapping, one woman wrote: "You are a despicable human being."

My response: Who tattled on me?

Then I had the gall to write that motorcyclists being able to run red lights isn't freedom.

Immediately, I received an e-mail that stated among other stuff: "Since you are so against individual rights and freedoms, maybe the government should ban elitist reporters from passing off opinion as news."

I have been called many things: "Jerk, despicable as we all know now, bed-wetter. Vile. Idiot." And that was from readers who like me.

But never elitist.

I checked the odometer on my old beater of a car, saw that the mileage was closer to 200,000 than new, then remembered I now drive a Saab instead of the 1986 Mercury Cougar that was my trademark. The car is pushing two decades old. I bought it from a guy whose teen used it to run over trees, I think, for less than a family of five pays to go to Carowinds for a day. But could it be true? Have I arrived?

If my car's air conditioning worked, I would roll up the windows and toast myself in the chill.