May 19, 2017 4 min read

Week four of my university writing class is not about writing, but about listening.

I require the students to listen to a half hour of programming on National Public Radio and be ready to come to class the following week to talk about it. It always amazes me that most of these students have never listened to NPR and its unique, enlightening, comprehensive and often funny programs. These millennials, with their uninterrupted access to visual images, seem not to know the pleasure of hearing conversation without having a picture to go along with it.

“It’s strange to just sit and listen,” said one student.

Back in the days before everything came with a picture, the images were our own, cobbled in our mind’s eye from nothing but sounds and our imagination. When I got my first transistor radio, in junior high, I would lie in bed each night and listen to top 40 songs on KQV, picturing the singers. In my version, Jim Croce was black and Roberta Flack was white. I was wrong about both, of course. Even after learning the facts, the image remained. While on my walk last night, the sound of Flack singing “Killing Me Softly” wafted from a patio and my mind went right back to the picture I’d built of the singer all those years ago.

And how disorienting it was to see what Elton John looked like. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was the first album I ever bought. I would sit for hours, leaning against our wooden console stereo, staring into that round, bespectacled face as I tried to match that soulful voice with the album art. To me, he still doesn’t look like how he sounds.

It seems that sound enters the brain through a side door – out of reach of the optic nerve and its highway of images. Remember the first time you heard your own voice on tape? I was embarrassed at mine. Is that how I really sound? We experience our own voices as gentler than others do. After years of hearing my voice on my television work, I’m finally used to it, but it still sounds a little strange to me.

When the farmer and I first connected, he was living in Argentina. We’d known each other as young children, but hadn’t spoken in decades. Our renewed friendship developed through e-mails – our only mode of communication for several months.

That first phone call was startling. Aware that he stands six foot six, I expected a low voice, but what I heard was deep and resonant. He could be John Wayne in a radio play.

“You don’t sound like I thought you would,” I said.

And often, the radio people don’t look like I’d pictured them, either. As with everything else, NPR shows videos on social media now, and I can see photos of all those personalities. They rarely match up with what’s in my head.

That’s one of the distinct joys of radio. It happens inside my head, freeing me to build the picture as I listen. Reading gives me the same thing. While TV and movies and that whole endless stream of images does the work for me – fleshing out faces and moments and stories – it robs me of that personal element of imagination. Without visuals, I get to decide what a moment looks like.

“Radio can be better than TV,” I tell my students. They are skeptical, but I hope that someday they will agree.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.