It has come to our attention — mostly because one of my grandmothers brought it up today — that there might be some confusion about the Christmas card. So, if you received this lovely image on thick stock of our happy and charming faces, please allow me to explain.
To my family: this is not someone in The Yankee’s family.
To The Yankee’s family: these are not people from my family.
At a football game late in the year we saw Aubie Claus here taking pictures with kids.
He and Mrs. Aubie Claus let us take a picture, too. File this under one of those unique little college town experiences.
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.
I ended my last class of the fall not dissimilar from the way I began it. I think most of my classes will start and end with words to this effect from now on:
Challenge every word. Walk out of here today with that in your mind. Challenge every word. The bulk of our mistakes can be corrected by vigorous copy editing. This isn’t the sexiest thing in the world, I know, but it is so, so important to the work you do.
It is hard to edit your own work, but it is vital that you do so. Walk away from your story. Read it again after you’ve worked on something else, or eaten dinner or done something fun. Have someone you trust read it. Trade copy editing favors with a classmate. Challenge every word.
The simple truth is that there’s not a person in this room or alive that can’t benefit from a good dose of proofreading. It is tough, often it is particularly for young writers, to admit it, but we all must. Every writer is made better by good editing. Put aside your ego. Realize that the first words you wrote likely aren’t your best words. The AP style mistakes, the grammar, typos, misspelling, you think these are small things, but those small things add up so quickly. Ours is a craft that we display in public, so you must challenge every word.
‘Is that the best word? Is the subject-verb agreement correct? Is this in an active voice? Am I showing rather than telling? Can I tell this in a better way?’ These questions and more are what you should be asking yourself.
Don’t stop writing, even over the break. Writer’s write. If you stop practicing this craft your skills can atrophy. And remember, it shouldn’t be in there, and you aren’t done with the piece, until you challenge every word.
It is my goal to give that speech enough to make eyes roll. But, one day, someone will be sitting at their desk thinking ‘challenge every word …’ and that will make the eye rolls worth it.
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.
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.
Holiday travels this week, so we’re padding this out with videos and memories. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
Honestly, this entire week on the site has been an excuse to work up to this picture. (Also published, and well-received, on dearphotograph.com.) Since Thanksgiving is a day of family and friends, I’m putting it here.
The photograph was taken in the spring of my freshman year at Auburn. My mother brought my grandmother, and her lifelong friend to campus to visit. They toured the campus, saw the arboretum, took photographs with Tiger VI and even got to “sneak” inside the stadium.
They played a little tackle football, with my mother tackling her mother while Ms. Lucy was the quarterback and referee.
I love that picture, and this year at homecoming I took it into Jordan-Hare Stadium to take the picture of the picture. That’s almost precisely from the same spot, looking to the south end zone.
And what makes it especially nice, this new photograph, is that the two teams playing at homecoming were my alma mater, Auburn, which I love, and my employer, Samford University, of which I am also fond.
This is a charmed life, and so precious little of that has to do with football, but it is a neat way to mention it.
At the big Thanksgiving lunch today I offered the blessing for those that were there and those that cooked this delicious meal. I asked for us to take all of our free minutes of the day to consider the things for which we are thankful and I asked for our friends and loves ones who couldn’t be with us to be watched over and cared for in their absence.
On this day of giving thanks, it is foolish and whimsy to consider something as silly as football, even in a place where it stains the culture as it does here. We have so many things for which to be thankful. I hope you find yourself in a similar situation. And I want you to know I’m thankful for you — be you an old friend or casual search engine visitor — have a lovely day.
