I’m not going to be on the radio the next couple of weeks, Thomas Toscano, my partner,  is going to be off for a while on a medical leave, and I can’t run the station’s old equipment by myself. So we’ll have a breather.

As it happens, Maria and I are bearing down on our first podcast together, we did one trial and are recording the second version tomorrow or Friday. I have plenty to do.

The podcast links and buttons will go up on our blogs next week, stay tuned.

The Talking To Animals broadcast is coming together I believe. For the last two  weeks, there have been a steady stream of callers with thoughts and issues that are interesting to me and others. The station’s phone seems to be working, calls are getting through.

This is what I wanted the most, to have a dialogue. A wonderful woman named Cynthia Daniello has been a bright spot for me. She is elderly, wheelchair bound, living in an assisted care facility in the Northeast.

She has been calling the show every week for some weeks now, and she has a dazzling knowledge of animals. She grew up on a farm, lived with horses, worked in a vet’s office for decades. She wants her life to have meaning and purpose, she doesn’t want to vanish from the consciousness of the outside world.

So she shocked me today by saying she would take up my suggestion and start a blog and write about her life but also help answer questions people  have about their pets. She worked with animals all of her life, and knows her stuff.

I’ll write about the blog and link to it when it goes up. Cynthia is the real deal.

This alone has been worth doing the broadcast, I will share her journey with you. Once her son arrives for a visit, she’ll have her blog up and running.

Go, girl.

I have worked hard to make the broadcast work, and have come to love it, especially the interactions with callers, who share their worries and concerns about their animals, mostly their dogs.

I think I have  been helpful I work hard to research and understand their problems and the possible solutions. I want the broadcast to be useful, civil and thoughtful. We are getting there, even though every single program could be the last, I’ve known that from the beginning.

No commercial radio station would ever give someone like me two  hours of air time every week, that is the joy of community radio.

I can use the time off.

Maria and I are enjoying our weekly talks about the farm, a good warm-up for our podcast together.

Thomas is a perfect counter-weight to me. I stick close to science, he veers off into the mystical, even the supernatural, and this yin-yang is both refreshing and entertaining. He has a great intellect, and I sense he has often been at odds with the world. This is a condition I know only too well, it’s only in recent years I have settled down to come to terms with me.

Thomas and I have what the pros call chemistry, from the first we have complement one another, me poring through my books, leaning on science, Thomas letting his fertile mind roam.  I cannot really imagine the broadcast without him.

There have been times when I wanted to strangle him, times when I wanted to hug him.

He is one of a kind, when he talks about music, his eyes and face go soft, he is transported. We might just become friends one day. He can be edgy and abrasive, but his e-mail is soft and gentle and poetic – his true soul, I think.

We have a good chemistry together on the air, and we chat easily off. Thomas and I get along very well, but it does get tense sometimes. We connect with one another, but are also very different in many ways.

He seems very much alone to me, and sometimes very angry. It is almost as if he is in conflict with the world. I could cry when he talks about his music, he is a conductor by trade, and I believe he misses conducting dearly. If you’ve ever read about them, you may know that they are not like other people.

There aren’t many conducting jobs around Bennington, Vt.

I asked him how he came to be here, and he doesn’t really know. I think he had nowhere else to go when he left Brooklyn a few years ago. He is trying to save the station pretty much all by himself.

It hardly seems possible to me.

I think if we worked together every day we would kill one another, as it is, we have great fun doing the broadcast.  We e-mail each other every few days. The broadcast is really beginning to work for me, we did it, and I thank you.

People ask me all the time now how long I’ll stick it out on WBTM, and I  try to answer honestly. The station seems like it’s on life support. Thomas has been running it almost entirely by himself and he is tired and drained.

It does not seem to me to be a sustainable situation.

I’ve hardly ever seen anyone else around there. There is no advertising, marketing or promotion of any mind, and the stations Korean war equipment is coming apart.

So I’ll enjoy the broadcast while I can, and for as long as it goes. I thank you for  your support of this program. I’ve wanted to do it for years. Putting together a successful radio broadcast together, is for me, a cherished dream, as long as it lasts.

God Bless Community Radio, once the last station falls, it will be CNN and Fox News all over the world and on every screen.