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30
Nov 12
My kind of Friday
Some days you spend all day locked away in your office trying to get things done. And when you finally come out you find it is just the perfect time of day.
The Christmas season is now fully on campus:
The moment I began to see my great-grandmother as a poet: “I never know what the day may bring – it might even bring my favorite dreams.”
That was from her memoir, which she wrote in 1980, at around 75 years old. Some of it is prosaic. Some of it is art. I’m just reading it again, because I haven’t read it in several years and then I only skimmed it.
She was a neat lady. She became a rural teacher at a young age. Her first year in the classroom she had students older than she was. She went to school, taught school, brought in the crops. By 1925, was being courted by two young men. One she liked, of whom her father didn’t approve, and one that really liked her that she “really didn’t care for.”
She decided to write them each a loving letter and mail them in the wrong envelopes to see which one of the boys quit visiting first.
Her conscience, she wrote in her memoirs, got the better of her.
“I could never endure seeing Kelsie with some other girl.”
That story is in her memoir. They got married in 1927, had three kids and eight grandkids. She said she never found out why her father disproved. But life moved on. She became a mother, a grandmother, a sales manager, she ran an electronics store and became a secretary, which was work she wrote that she always wanted to do.
Her husband died in the 1970s, and she buried her son soon after. She turned to crafts and hobbies. She learned to paint, practiced all of her many sewing techniques, returned to her poetry. (Everyone in her family was a poet, it seems.) When her mind still turned to her grief she focused for a while on her memoirs, which she finished in 1981, in her mid-70s.
In 1996 she called me and asked me to come to her graduation. She’d been secretly taking classes again, picking up her education where she left it off when it was time to raise a family. Now, decades later, she became the oldest graduate of the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters is believed to be the youngest graduate at UNA.) I made a phone call and had the governor declare it Flavil Q. Rogers day.
She made the section front in the Times Daily, her local paper:
And the state’s largest daily, The Birmingham News. Click to embiggen:
I think this is the last photograph I have of her:
“I never know what the day may bring – it might even bring my favorite dreams.”
I’ll have to reprint large swaths of her memoir now, I think. She’d probably get a kick out of that.
27
Nov 12
War stories
Everybody has them, some are better than others. Some can be told to illustrate a point. Some can be told just to be told. I try not to share too many “war stories” in class because they are usually disturbing or pointless or sound like bragging. But I told some stories today. It is a trip down memory lane for me, some of these things I’d all but forgotten.
Once I was called on my off day to go stand outside in the bitter, freezing cold and watch a hostage standoff. Seems a man and a woman had gotten into a fight. He displayed a knife. She got out of their house, but the three kids were stuck inside. I remember stamping my feet for warmth, wishing for a bigger jacket, watching the SWAT team rehearse down the block and then this kid, maybe seven or eight, dangling from a window in his home. It was just a bit too high for him and he was having trouble letting go. There was a police officer in body armor right under the window and he was reaching to get the kid and his shirt was riding up and then he was on the wrong, in the officer’s arms and being trotted away. All the kids got out safely and we reported from there for the better part of a day.
Not every story is a happy one, of course.
I talked about the guy so cranked out on drugs that he used the toddler in his arms as a weapon to ward off police officers. I always thought watching the police sit on their cruisers crying after that was the best part of the story.
Sometimes, I say a lot about any format, the story is about timing. You turn away, you miss it. You leave early, arrive late, you miss it. Really talented reporters can see everything, hear of everything and are apparently everywhere. Or at least they can make it seem like that. For mere mortals, chance plays into it.
I think I was just driving by when I saw a big scene in this one apartment complex. Stopped in there to find out a police officer had just been shot. Jack Cooper was his name, I remember that a decade later. The guy he was dealing with was worried about vampires and demons and pepper spray didn’t bother him. Somehow he got Cooper’s weapon and got off a shot before being killed himself. That was a pretty neighborhood, and I stood around those cruisers and ambulances for hours talking to and about the neighbors. I got back to the studio that day and received probably the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten professionally. I described things with words, someone whom I greatly respected said, better than the television cameras did.
I didn’t talk today about covering stories where babies were found in the garbage or molested dogs or bodies found in car washes on Christmas morning. Some of that stuff is too depressing.
So we talked about broadcast news writing today, from which I have several years of stories and experience to draw. Some of my best writing was probably done in a studio somewhere, rewriting something I’d written three times before because I needed to get three more seconds cut from the source time. Perhaps nothing makes a print writer a stronger writer than considering the broadcast style.
Of course perhaps two-thirds of this class was interested in public relations, but still. The lesson plan called for broadcasting, so that’s what we talked about.
I miss it, but only a little. I don’t miss being at work at 4 a.m. Don’t miss that at all. That was my last broadcasting job. When I went online in 2004 and that job called for me to show up at 6 a.m. I thought I’d really earned a step up in life.
Now I stay on campus all night watching students put their newspaper together so, really, I’ve finally found the night owl schedule my circadian rhythms have always demanded.
I don’t have quite the same pool of war stories, because our campus is a beautiful little serene place and I now tell tales of improper pronouns and misspelled building names and warning off plagiarism, but it is a great tradeoff.
And now a very mellow tune performed on a frozen pond that, beyond the name, has absolutely nothing to do with the Joe Walsh standard:
I like the kitchen shots. They’re cute.
That is a band about which you can find little information, called Eden’s Empire. On their Bandcamp page they write:
This is an anthem for hope.
We are the sound of Jimi Hendrix strapped to the front of a run-away freight train with Dylan feeding the fire.
We are not rock stars. We’re not selling sex, angst, or anarchy. We’re giving away songs about how hard it is for our generation to find love, purpose, and truth in a world that just wants us to buy more of what put our parents in this situation.
We are over educated, underpaid, and unsatisfied.
We are James Dean with a guitar.
We are twenty something’s and we’re restless.Hurricanes, diplomas, love, and big ideas have pulled us from all corners of the country and dropped us together in the Midwest.
We have no money, no map, and no desire to just dream anymore.
We are on an odyssey, we don’t know what were looking for, but so far all we’ve found is rock n’ roll.
A generational diaspora! Except when it isn’t:
The share of Americans living in multigenerational households reached the highest level since the 1950s, after rising significantly over the past five years, according to Pew.
In the never-ending quest for story ideas and opportunities to prove my entrepreneurial prescience I am always looking for a hook or an angle. And, forgive me if this is just the Ken Burns talking …
But I think there’s some modern John Steinbeck story waiting to emerge. This being a tectonic type of tale on the scale of ultimate stories. Of course there will be WiFi and cable television and hipsters and even more politics this time around, but there might be something to it.
I rambled on here for awhile about Franklin Roosevelt, James Bond and YouTube propaganda. Those paragraphs didn’t add much and I discovered the delete button still works; you’re welcome.
It started out, though, with the idea that the Dust Bowl changed a lot of lives, not just in the short term, but generationally. People who lived in Oklahoma moved to California or Arizona, if they were lucky enough to get in, or back east and they had children and grandchildren and those people live in those places, or at least started in those places and where are they now and what got them there? These are the plates of life, right? So I say it is tectonic. I look at my family history and wonder what were the reasons they moved down from the mountains? I found several strands of the tree that ventured to Texas or Oklahoma, probably be cause they knew a cousin there who told them times were good and your parents aren’t here, anyway. And what prompted them to go there?
If you spend time in one of the genealogy books of my extended family you find they came from Germany in the early 18th century. It is written somewhere that generally people of that place and era moved to recapture something in a new place. Then, according to this family book, some of those particular people fought in Pennsylvania regiments in “the Sectional War” and later moved to north Alabama in the 1880s. The why is left to your imagination.
Another side of my family moved down from Tennessee before the Civil War. They were in a part of the state that typically stayed out of the war and some of the young men finally only joined up when the Union all but pressed them into service.
This is all in my mother’s family. On the Smith side of things, well the Smiths are hard, but I found an old newspaper mention early this year that led me to a new name on a genealogy site which led all the way back to the Netherlands in the 16th century. Those people moved to North Carolina before the Revolutionary War, and eventually worked into Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma, probably just in time for the Dust Bowl.
They, like the other branch in the book above, were all just farmers for the most part, poor in a hardscrabble world during a challenging time. The whys died with them, but they are probably straightforward and logical. Or fantastical beyond belief. Maybe life was good to them. Who knows what war stories they had?
22
Nov 12
Happy Thanksgiving
“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” Playwright, novelist Thornton Wilder.
It was a treasure to cut up all of those delicious Fuji apples and sample the cinnamon sprinkled slices:
It was a treasure to pull it out of the oven, smell that delicious, cooked goodness and imagine eating it later this evening:
On this day of introspection, I’m thankful for my friends, my family, my lovely wife and all of our abundant blessings.
I’m also thankful for you. Thanks for coming by, and do come back soon. Happy Thanksgiving.
16
Nov 12
And now a medical update
I once sat in a doctor’s office while everyone went to lunch. Seems everyone thought someone else had dismissed me. Boy were they embarassed!
It went back to the orthopedic surgeon for a checkup on my collarbone today. I waited for 45 minutes, most of it in the exam room.
And so I read things. Caught up on Twitter, skimmed some emails and so on. If you think about it too much it feels like you’ve been forgotten in the examination room. Fortunately there is that one painting, that one miserable print, for you to contemplate. That’s the one way they’ve left you to pass the time.*
I shot, edited and produced this little video while waiting on the doctor. Still had time to spare. If I’d known I had this kind of time I would have re-shot this to steady it up somehow. I would have brought in a tripod from the car. That wouldn’t have looked odd at all.
They took an X-ray. The doctor spent about five minutes with me. Showed me the X-ray. He pronounced my bones as healing nicely. He said the six screws are hexadecimals. I’ll be sure to pack a hexa-multitool if I ever want to do self-maintenance.
He blew off my muscle spasm issues. I could write paragraphs about them. They are in my left back and shoulder, in the teres minor/infraspinatus facia area. Sometimes it reaches all the way across to the right shoulder. Once or twice it has gotten into my neck. Two weekends ago it somehow got in my head. There is not much up there, but certainly no muscle! I wish this experience on no one.
I blame too much time in the car and not understanding how little exertion I can actually perform. It should seem, though, that after this many months muscle spasms would get better. The doctor has alternately told me six months or a year or Christmas, depending on his mood. A family friend promises this will continue on for some time. These are not the prognoses for which I am looking.
Also, as my mother reminds me: I am not under 30 anymore.
Anyway, the X-rays look good. The doctor says the bones are healing nicely. The heavy wet wool blanket feeling on the front and top of my shoulder has improved recently. I’m pleased with the collarbone.
Nearly — and sometimes entirely debilitating — muscle spasms are a drag. Don’t fall off your bike, kids.
*Also the doctor’s stool on which you can perform wheelies.
For dinner The Yankee and I celebrated with Cheeburger Cheeburger. We read each other trivia questions over our cheeseburgers, laughing and giggling and surely making The Yankee’s student, who was dining a few tables away, think we were perfectly silly.
We walked up the block, where the city had blocked off one of the roads for a downtown festive event. A band was playing. People were dancing, mostly the older folks. All the college kids have skipped town for Thanksgiving, so a special town feels no less special, but a bit less vibrant. It is a great place to be, and so we walked on the sidewalks on a cool November night, looking to harass friends that we might run into.
Finally we walked through one of the town’s two alleys, found the car and headed home. We’re going to watch movies all night. Great night.
