The sun sets on Pine Valley

I love my grandmother. She and my mother indoctrinated me into soaps in January of 1970, when a new show premiered called All My Children. Grandma was an avid fan of soap operas, and along with my mom, kept track of the comings and going in several fictitious towns, stemming back to the early days of General Hospital when Dr. Steve Hardy was a heart throb and many of the story lines unfolded in front of the nurse's station or while sipping endless cups of coffee in the kitchens of Port Charles' first families.
   While daytime dramas will still unfold in Port Charles, they will not in Pine Valley or Llanview. This is a blow that marks the end of an era. The remaining soaps are sure to follow, despite what the network executives parrot. Rumors of the end of All My Children and One Life to Live raced through the Internet months ago and were denied. The ax dropped shortly after that denial. And some of us have been floating ever since, unsure of what to make of the end that looms.
   There is no shame in admitting to being a fan of soap operas. We fans are a hearty and weather-beaten lot, having taken our licks over the years. Others love to poke fun at us who have loyally followed years of multiple story lines that can swing from the preposterous to the dull and boring.
   For those who deride soap fans and scoff at our fandom, I ask that you look inward. Who amongst you can cast the first stone? It is a the rare person who isn't a die hard fan of something, whether it be baseball, a reality television show, WNPR, Danielle Steele novels, coffee, chicken wings, hot baths, running, knitting, scrap booking....you get my drift. As my grandmother would say, different strokes for different folks.
   In daytime dramas, actors come and go, as do the plots that thicken and thin, but it's us, the fans, who have been the constant. The land of daytime drama has asked a lot of us and yes, we do complain but we remain steadfast. There are plenty of sports fans who can't claim that. We are expected to believe that people come back from the dead, enemies can actually find out they are biological siblings, mothers do forget to have given birth, children grow up into teens in less than a year, and almost everyone has an evil twin.
   For me, soap operas are entwined with my coming of age. I watched Secret Storm, Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless, Ryan's Hope, Search for Tomorrow, GH, AMC and OLTL. I was glued to General Hospital in college, following Luke and Laura. But while I have kept a passing interest in those shows that weren't shut down like a cheap massage parlor, my attention has been on AMC, as someone who can claim veteran status for following it for 41 years.
   I am not ready to never return to Pine Valley again. It's times like these I want to turn to my grandmother and reiterate the words of a young Tara Martin. "Oh, Gran, why does life have to be so hard?"