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:
The mind and body are amazing things, really. I complained yesterday, a day when I felt as bad as have since, I dunno, let’s call it the end of August. There have been a few other unfortunate days as I recovered from the crash and the helmet and the medication and the surgery and more medication. Yesterday was high up on the list of lowlights. My mood was off; I hurt. It was generally lousy.
I woke up today a new guy, which is to say, like myself again.
This is important because it remins me how I should feel. For the first time since July I felt like myself again. There I was tapping out miles in Orange Beach and now here I am, finally, me again. In between I’ve just been a fraction of myself, perhaps.
The amazing thing, the mind-and-body-are-amazing-things part, is that it took feeling so much more like myself today to realize how far off I’ve been since July. You have an accident and get acclimated to your new condition so quickly, subtly, that you just accept that this is how you are and forget how you are supposed to, in fact, actually feel.
I still hurt some, mind you. That’s improving on its own slow schedule. I finally learned how to not overdo it. I still have painkillers, but they stay in the medicine cabinet and I don’t have that foggy miserable feeling that I’ve come to associate with modern chemistry.
All of this sounds pitiful, but I mean it to say I feel like me again. And while I can’t move furniture or anything just yet — maybe next year — my discomfort doesn’t dictate every thing I do now. Just some of the things. Most important, I feel like myself again.
Samford is getting ready for the Hanging of the Green and the Lighting of the Way. This marks the beginning of the Christmas season here. The tree in Reid Chapel will be decorated. Garlands will be displayed. There will be hymns and prayers and carols. It is beautiful, really.
And then everyone will go out into the crisp night air for a message from the university’s president, more carols, a concert, Silent Night and then then, in the dark, the Christmas lights will come alive, the Lighting of the Way.
Prior to that, just lots of luminaries:
When you go into Reid Chapel there are just the little white bags. During the Hanging of the Green every one of these on the long quad will be lit. Whoever does that knows how to hustle. There are hundreds of them:
And then everyone goes back to studying, or home, or into Harry’s for hot chocolate. Finals are coming up fast.
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.
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?
You can’t put that in a picture: the smells, the smiling sun, the sometimes crisp air, the crunch of leaves, the smell of that first wood fire in someone’s yard competing with the smell of a fresh lawn. You can’t capture that in a photograph and you can’t share it in a video. But we surely do try.
It was also election day today. I visited my polling place after breakfast. We vote in a hotel. The parking lot was full and so was the overflow lot next to them.
They have the sign-in stations organized by the alphabet, of course. I visit the Q-S line, which had three people in it. I was through the line quickly. Here’s my ID, there I am in your roster. Sign here and take your ballot.
She said they’d been busy since they opened at 7 a.m.
I sat down at a folding table. I was soon joined by a young lady who was making her first vote. She was pretty excited by this prospect, and busy asking her mother what all the amendments on the ballot meant. Her mother didn’t much know either. We had quite a few, and they aren’t written for a low reading level.
I ran my ballot through the machine, watched with pleasure as the tally ticked up one line. I politely turned down the “I voted” sticker, which seemed to throw the nice lady for a loop.
Someone lost their Voter ID registration card. I returned it to the help desk — there was a help desk — feeling it was part of my civic duty. Hopefully they can mail it to the lady.
I received emails from some of my students who were telling me they may be late to class. They were going to vote. One of those extra perks about teaching college students: they’re all getting their first vote this year.
They all made it to class on time, too.
We had a guest speaker in class today. At the end of his presentation there were still two more hours before the polls closed. I encouraged all of the local students, if they had not voted yet, to consider going to do so. “It will mean more to you as you get older.”
Our guest speaker agreed.
Went upstairs to the Crimson office. The news editor was designing a front page for a Romney win and another for an Obama win. I convinced her of the wisdom of designing a third one, a question mark. She started working on that.
Of course the race was all but over by the time I returned from dinner. They’re working long into the night on the paper.
I remember my first election coverage in 1996. I was writing for my college paper. I attended a county watch party. It was held in the same hotel where I voted today. A very inebriated lady of considerable local influence spent most of the party hitting on me. I left there to go to the other party’s headquarters and spoke with a newly elected congressman on the phone. From my place I called a new senator. His staff told me I would be a terrible reporter. I asked too many questions. It was a badge of honor.
I worked on that story late into the night, typing until morning time. I think I had two front page stories that issue.
Elections are like Christmas. And that’s one of the nights the recovering journalist misses being in a working newsroom.
I remember sleeping in my car for two hours on the night of the 2000 election. That was after watching the deadest watch party ever. The candidate hadn’t talked to the media or much of anyone, felt the whole ordeal was basically hers because she deigned run and was stunned when she lost badly. I feel asleep in my car that night, though, after working probably 20 hours, listening to the radio in the early morning. When I nodded off we didn’t know anything about what was really going on in Florida. I woke up before the sunrise to find we still didn’t know anything about what was happening in Florida. I worked all that Wednesday, but don’t remember much about it on zero sleep.
When they talk about the boardwalk in New Jersey they mean Seaside Heights:
That’s amazing. I’ve been there, we visited a few years ago. Here’s one tiny sliver of the boardwalk:
I have other photos, of course. They are on the one SD card I can’t seem to find at a moment. But nevertheless, terrible scene in New Jersey, among many places. The Yankee spent part of her summers on that boardwalk. And, like Gov. Chris Christie said, it’s all gone or in the ocean.
What awesome might the ocean can throw at the shoreline. No one talks like that, but we all think it as more and more of these stories come out.
By late Monday, the conditions were frightening. The lights were out. There was no water. The toilets didn’t flush. There were power failures in the emergency room and the transplant unit. Medical personnel had to bring more than two hundred patients down the stairs and get them to other hospitals all over the city and beyond. Earlier, Virginia Rossano had been going through a seizure—just as planned. But now was no time for that, and she was given Ativan, a drug that relaxes the brain and relieves seizures.
Medical personnel (including one med student) put Virginia on a kind of sled and began moving her out of the building. “Three young men carried Virginia down twelve flights of stairs, so slowly, so methodically,” Cathy Rossano said. “They were phenomenal.”
The delicate process, repeated with hundreds of patients, took nearly a half hour, and, when they got to the street, the Rossanos encountered a line of ambulances, many of them with volunteers who had driven hundreds, even thousands, of miles to help. “There were people from California, Texas, from everywhere,” Cathy Rossano said. “Our guys were from somewhere in Illinois.”
I think I can use that as a good example of an anecdotal lead for the next year or so. It starts with a medical procedure called a craniotomy, which is not something you’ll ever forget once you hear it. It has great detail of getting patients out of a non-working hospital and has that everyone-came-together-and-made-it-out happy ending. Definitely worth your reading time.
He is flushed and beaming. The song ends, and he releases his commissioners, who seem happy to bask in their governor’s attention and also happy that he did not crack their windpipes. We’re all feeling elation—if the E Street Band at full throttle doesn’t fill you with joy, you’re probably dead—and it strikes me that this is the moment to ask the governor a trick question: “Do you think Mitt Romney could relate to this? To a Bruce Springsteen show?”
He looks at me like I’m from France. “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” he screams over the noise of the crowd, and then screams it again, to make sure I understand: “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!”
What about Newt?
“He’s been married three times!,” Christie answers. “He’d get this. You know what I mean?”
Not really, but I accept the point: something about longing and sin and betrayal and the possibility of redemption.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on Christie is a fairly usable thumbnail on the governor, so it isn’t just the Newt joke. There are a few other good lines worth remembering, too.
(Update: Aww, look, Springsteen whom Christie says “feels guilty that he has so much money, and he thinks it’s all a zero-sum game” actually complimented his governor in a Halloween show at Rochester. Probably made the guy’s day.)
