From Marianne: When Strangers Send You Presents

Bob came home from work the other day carrying birthday presents. Not from friends or family.

From listeners.

Whoever sent them had wrapped everything in the cutest paper covered with little root beer bottles. Inside were a couple of shirts that were so perfectly Bob, they could have been picked out by someone who'd known him for years.

It reminded me of something that happened 37 years ago.

I was a morning TV news anchor in Miami and expecting my first baby. Every weekday I spent two hours in people's living rooms delivering the news and trying to connect with whoever was watching.

As my due date got closer, gifts started arriving at the station. First, a hand-drawn card. Then baby clothes and toys. Then more gifts than I could possibly count.

I wrote thank-you notes until my daughter decided to arrive early. After that, there was just no way to keep up or to keep everything. Some gifts, if I'm being honest, were a little questionable. But one has stayed with me all these years.

A woman I never met sewed three soft cotton baby blankets by hand.

I kept them. They wrapped my daughter as a newborn and one of them eventually became the blanket. The one she couldn't sleep without. The one that survived years of bedtime and her entire childhood.

Think about that. A complete stranger made something with her own hands that became part of my daughter's childhood. She never knew that would happen. Just like whoever picked out Bob's birthday shirts has no idea how much they meant to us.

People often ask what it's like to be on television or radio. The truth is, after a while, you forget you're in thousands of homes. But they don't. They've had breakfast with you and driven to work with you and maybe even folded laundry while you chatted in the background. Somewhere along the way, you stop being a stranger.

And every once in a while, someone reminds you, the connection you hoped you were making… was real.