Blog 9 by Ruthie Heavrin

Our family phone number was one digit away from Blockbuster's number. People would call us and ask if we had Little Mermaid in stock or if Man of the House has come out on VHS yet. Sometimes, I would actually go and look at our personal collection of DVDs and VHSs to see if we did indeed have a copy of Die Hard 3. "Yes, yes we do," I would tell the person on the other line. Although this has nothing to do with sharing the same name as a million other people, it did get me thinking about who else shared our number. After one such Blockbuster mis-dial, I gave in to my curiosity and called 335-8686 from a variety of area codes. "Is this (706) 335-8686? Really? Cool, I'm, (909) 335-8686. Does anyone call you and ask for Blockbuster? No? Well that's weird because - hello? Hello?" Apparently, none of the other 335-8686'ers were as ecstatic about having our fairly easy to memorize phone number. When FB started, I added all the Ruth Heavrins. There were none so I added none of them. One man named Michael Heavrin tried to add me, but since I had never met him before, I told him, "Sorry, I only add people I know." He protested and said that we might be related. Might wasn't strong enough for me. I guess my need for connection slipped away after my phone number rejection. After reading "Being Brian," I realized that I had gone about my 335-8686 project all wrong. I needed connector questions like Brian Doyle. He asked them about real life and real issues. He brought together not just Brians, but a larger group of humanity searching for human connections. That's the irony of his piece. Everyone knows it would be ridiculous to assume that these people are connected by just their name. They are connected by being people, not Brian. They (and we) are connected by suffering from poverty or watching the world slip on the seven o'clock news. What we could all learn from Doyle as writers is to connect our readers in unusual, new, and interesting ways.