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25
Dec 11

Peace on earth

Not to be Santa-centric, but this particular Santa’s helper is family. I hope your Christmas has been a blessing of family and friends and peace and joy very kind.

We had the chance last night, in a dimly lit church, to sing Silent Night with a fine and internationally renowned baritone. It was about as moving a musical experience as you can ask for. I hope for you that your holidays provide moving moments and lasting memories.

I hope to remember the man I met this week who thought he had cancer in his kidney. A checkup sent him to an oncologist, which meant tests and then an operation. It was not cancer, but he was bleeding internally. Still lucky — timing is everything and he could have bled to death — they removed half a kidney. It is, he said, “the best Christmas in 15 years.”

I hope to remember the Jamaican immigrant, who’d already worked two jobs on Friday when we met and will work two jobs on Christmas day. He’s been here for six years, he said. “And this is the number one country, the best country in the world.”

There are hundreds, thousands, of little stories like that which don’t involve any of the lovely presents we’ve purchased or received. I hope you remember to count them in your blessings, too.

And for no reason whatsoever, remember that Christmas when the world felt very small, and all of creation seemed so much more immense. Our reaching outward, seeking a goal, stretching for some larger discovery and achievement, meant an especially poignant look inward:

“(G)ood night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”

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18
Dec 11

Happy Birthday

Lazlo Hollyfeld, the impossibly old undergrad living between the walls in Real Genius was 28 when he won 32.4 percent of the Frito-Lay “Enter-as-often-as-you-want” sweepstakes.

By the age of 30 Alexander the Great had built one of the largest empires the ancient world had ever known, ranging from the Ionian Sea to the Himalayas.

Rocky Balboa — in Rocky III! — was a washed up ex-champ fighting to regain his title at the age of 34.

I’m now older than all of them.

history / photo / site / Thursday — Comments Off
15
Dec 11

Sick, making this a photo day 4

I feel like I’m about 65 percent of myself again. I’ve been stuck in the house for four days, so it seemed a good time to get out.

I visited the DMV. Most people have a problem with that, but I’d rather go to the satellite office of our DMV than to the local post office. I had to renew my license today and was done in less than six minutes.

Still coughing, but still breathing. The coughing is more of a real cough than the sound of all of the ancient gods engaged in a battle royale in the next room, as has been the case the past few days. I haven’t had any fevers since Tuesday. My congestion has just suddenly disappeared. It seems I’ve rounded a corner.

The biggest problem now is a lack of energy and endurance. But, then again, I do have a birthday coming up.

Speaking of birthdays, when I turned 30, almost to the minute, I came down with a little bug of some kind. “Nothing too serious, happens all the time. I’ll be rid of it in a day or three,” or so I thought at the time. Kept that thing for weeks.

This better not be like that, but I think I’m getting better.

Today’s photo is from the World War II memorial in Washington D.C. We went into the capital after the game on Saturday night. I haven’t discussed that here yet, which probably works out well. I still have content after a week of doing nothing!

Anyway, they call this the Freedom Wall. It holds 4,048 gold stars, each representing 100 servicemen and women who died or remain missing from World War II.

Hanging 405,399 stars would have been too imposing. Just the 4,048 is impressive enough.

family / history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
Dec 11

Reload early, reload often

More grading. All day, it seems.

This is downtown Homewood, late in the evening. Had dinner on the southside with a college buddy. This was part of the drive afterward:

Normally this road isn’t so empty, but Homewood rolls up the sidewalks by 9 p.m., even during the Christmas season.

A wide version of this is now one of the rotating footers at the bottom of this page. There are now 17 of those. The bottom of the page has to catch up, though. There are 38 images in the header. Reload often!

More grading tomorrow, and the last class of the semester.

Pearl Harbor links. One of my uncles, if I am remembering this story correctly, was at Pearl Harbor soon after the attacks. This is him, a few years ago:

Here’s a story from yesterday about some young local boys who rotated through there in 1943 on their way to the Pacific front.

Every now and then I tell a story about something like this, because it astounds me that a lot of these people were my students age. Like these kids, who happened to be in Hawai’i to play football when the Japanese flew in. That’s a great read. And it is hard to imagine those could be my students.

Historic Page Ones.

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1
Dec 11

Merry Jabez

This is Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry:

He was president of Samford University, some 143 years ago, two campuses and one name ago, when the place was still known as Howard College. The statue, seven feet tall and tipping the scales at a metric tonne, was delivered to Samford two years ago after a long tour in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.

He was replaced there by Helen Keller, and so now he’s back on campus. Not that he’d know this place. Birmingham wasn’t even a town then.

Curry, was a Mexican War veteran, Alabama lawyer and member of the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, the Confederate Congress and an officer in the Confederate Army. Later he would become a Baptist preacher.

He was also a Horace Mann universal education disciple. Booker T. Washington proclaimed “There was no man in the country more deeply interested in the higher welfare of the Negro than Dr. Curry.”

Curry was appointed president of Howard College in 1865, where he served for three years. Later he was an ambassador to Spain.

The sculpture had been stained by tobacco smoke and marked by generations of U.S. Capitol visitors with pens, proving people are stupid. But he was cleaned for his return to Samford, where he is on display in the Beeson University Center. He has a (presumably) unauthorized and sadly dormant Twitter account. And, now, is wearing what is presumably a university sanctioned Christmas hat.

Had a nice conversation with the fiancee of a former student today. (She is designing at Oxmoor House here in town.) He is a storyteller. Check out some of his recent work.

HUG: Greece (4/4) from 1504 Pictures on Vimeo.

Among other things, he’s also working as a research assistant on the first authorized biography on Jerry Lee Lewis. Those will be interesting interviews.

That would be the tale you told at every gathering, if it happened to you. It was just another day in Jerry Lee’s world.

Just another fine day on campus for me as well. I taught about broadcast writing today, and focused on radio scripts. We’ll do television next week.

So I did the spiel, told some of my own war stories and showed written examples. We talked about the active voice and visual structure and actualities.

I gave them two stories from the paper to re-write as an exercise. “This one,” I said, “is probably a 30 second story. This one is probably 45 or 50 seconds. Write them out and read and time them.”

I wrote a version of the longer story. It was 42 seconds.

It has been almost eight years, but I’ve still got that clock in my head.