Because I Said So: Low-tech telecom new frontier for digital kids

S reads

The kids get a kick out of seeing their name in print. G's teacher still has a column featuring G hanging in the classroom and G reminds me of that almost daily. When I told S that today's column mentions her, she demanded to read it beforehand. I didn't let her, I have enough editors as it is. Instead, she waited until this morning and read it in the newspaper while she ate her waffle. She seemed pleased. It doesn't seem to matter whether I'm making fun of them or not, they just like knowing they got a mention. And that their names are spelled right.

Being in the same room with S as she tries to learn the nuances of an actual, land line telephone is maddening. I couldn't even describe it all in the limited space - the way she'll answer the phone with silence, waiting for the person on the other end to speak first; or the way she is stopped cold with her deer-in-the-headlights eyes when someone other than the kid she's calling answers the phone. Don't even get me started on her use of the speaker phone.

I couldn't catch it all, but I think I got the gist of it down for today's Commercial Appeal. It's something we all go through, it's something we all went through. So, if you will, please take the phone off the hook and give today's column a read.

For more than a decade, we haven't had a home telephone. Like so many others, we grew tired of telemarketers, wrong numbers and the double billing on top of our cell phones.

But our kids continue to age and become more social. It had become time for either a home phone or pockets full of cell phones when a giant corporation made us a deal promising free HBO, a land line and terrible service.

How could we say no?

The kids have never known a home phone. It was like a prop from one of those classic films they like, one from the 1980s. They approached the thin, silvery wand the way a pet might advance on a new animal in its territory. They walked around it, sniffed it and pushed at it with their filthy paws.

Once we convinced them that it was OK, that it was like any other piece of technology they know, they relaxed. It was lifted gingerly from its cradle to be further scrutinized and then pointed at the television. It was aimed at the Wii and searched over for an Internet portal. In an effort to dial up YouTube, my son may have dialed Japan.

Alexander Graham Bell shouted into the first telephone, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!" My 9-year-old daughter first shouted into her new telephone, "It's Somerset! Hello? Is this thing even on?"

The receiver was not a room away as he had been in 1876, but blocks away, and I'm certain Somerset's friend heard her as much through the windows and over air as she did through the telephone.

A recent cartoon in The New Yorker shows two children walking, each carrying a backpack as if to school, and one says to the other, "So, hw ws yr smmr?" The caption reads: First Day Back To Verbal Communication.

We've taught our children to say "please" and "thank you," to clear their dirty dishes and to hold the door for those behind them, but phone etiquette is a new frontier. They've grown up in a world of cell phones, texts, instant messaging and the shorthand required to navigate these networks. It has seeped into their speech. The phrase, "May I speak to ..." is as foreign to them as how and why to make an emoticon is to me.

Technology is not lost on kids today. They are able to grasp the intricacies of buttons, touch screens, mice and cursors. It's the concept of technological regression they can't quite fathom. The rotary phones of my childhood would have been out of the question for these children of the 21st century. They would lose interest in whatever it was they or their friends had to say by the fourth digit in the telephone number.

"My voice travels through wires?" they said that day, looking at the cordless phone.

"Eventually, yes," I said, exasperated. "It's like a telegraph machine. Go look it up on Wikipedia. No, you can't get to Wikipedia on that phone."

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

 
© 2011 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Voice

I just finished reading Tabloid City by Pete Hamill and I like it. It's a pretty good book. I see that it's received some bad reviews, but I don't pay so much attention to reviews of other people's work.

I read Hamill when I need a little Hamill. Whether fiction or nonfiction, it's always gritty, fast-paced and nostalgic. Overly sentimental? Sure, but that's Hamill. He lives in a world that doesn't exist anymore and it happens to be a world that interests me. So I read him and will continue to despite the reviews.

I don't compare Hamill to other writers the way I don't compare Woody Allen to other filmmakers. His movies are so uniquely "Woody Allen" that they should only be measured against others in his oeuvre, if I may use that word. I watch his films because of the look, the dialogue and the characters. The same is true with Wes Anderson.

It's all voice. It's style. And these writers and directors have their very own. Some - many - may think of them as one-trick ponies, but it's what they're good at, it's what is comfortable and it's that comfort and mastery of their own voice that shines through and keeps me coming back.

Rodrigo Fresan (Historia Argentina, The Velocity of Things, Kensington Gardens), in the book of essays, The Secret Miracle, The Novelist's Handbook, says of style:

I'll go further: maybe that is what style is in the end. Maybe, now that I think about it, a writer's style is nothing more than the ghost of his shortcomings rather than the reality of his virtues. I'll try to explain myself. You end up resigning yourself to what you can do, and throwing aside what you'll never be good at, and so others perceive as achievements what in reality are the dregs within reach, with luck, each time ennobled and purified. What a writer does and what he wanted to do are two different things, and, as time passes, what he does solidifies into the only thing he can do well, what he does like no one else.

Voice is difficult to come by in writing - it takes many hours and many, many sentences written and rewritten - but once found, it feels like the ground below has opened, allowing you to free fall into the story you wish to tell. As exhilarating as it is to hear that voice, that style, in your mind as you work through a character or a plot, it is just as frightening to have someone edit that work for fear of the voice disappearing or being diminished. I think we become as protective of pacing and rhythm as of a favorite character, and think that no one else will take the care to hear it the way we will.

Even in revision of myself I worry that I'm plucking out words or moving punctuation in such a way that waters down the way I meant a certain passage to be read in the very first instance of putting it on paper. With one manuscript in the ether, and while awaiting word on its (hopefully) safe landing, I have turned my attention to the revision of another, the first I finished in 2010. I spent the weekend with several parts where the main character types his thoughts and those thoughts are what we read. I break from my voice and jump abruptly from third into first person, which isn't so comfortable for me. As in dialogue, the trick is to make what he types come across in a way that only he would say it, and that's not so easy. Not for me. In re-reading it, I realized it was simply my voice in italics. So I shortened some sentences and moved some punctuation around. Threw in a few words I might not normally use. I'll go back later and read it all over again. I'll try to take myself out of it and search the dregs for what remains, try to ennoble and purify it.

Hopefully the new copy will be as exciting to me as the original was two years ago when I first wrote it. And hopefully a voice will be heard and carry through, and that pony will be one readers want to ride again and again.

Shirt Happens

My mother sent me a text a few days after the start of the school year and it was one of those texts where I could hear the laughter in the few words on the little screen. She sent it because she'd just seen the first day of school picture I'd posted on Facebook, the one with my kids standing in front of the porch steps, still sleepy, dressed for school and with backpack, lunchbox and hoodie.

It was the hoodie that did it for her. It was the start of the school year, August, and the temperature that morning must have already been in the 80s. Yet here was my teenage son wearing a hoodie for his walk to school.

When I was his age, we called them jackets, and I guarantee I would have had one on, too. I complained about C wearing his without even realizing I was looking at my own 13-year-old self. And this is what set my mother off. And then it set me off, laughing along with her text because it had come full circle.

Shirt

I don't know what it is, this need to cover up. For me back in 1983, it might have been an uneasiness with my changing, gangling body; a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. None of this was new to me, nor is it new with C, it's all part of being an awkward adolescent.

I don't wear the hoodie/jacket all the time now. But now I have a shirt. It's different shades of brown, a couple of pockets, and worn thin at one elbow. I call it my writing shirt because it helps me write. Not really, of course, but that's what I tell myself. There are no characters in the pockets, no plot line up a sleeve. Trust me, I've looked. It's just something comfortable I like to put on that gives me the sense that I'm about to do something, it's like Superman's cape or the prologue to any great story.

I'm not even sure where I got the shirt. I think it was a gift long ago in the age of grunge from my sister-in-law. It rarely leaves the house, worn and unsightly as it is, and is almost never worn in the summer months. But this time of year, when the temperature dips into the 50s, it comes back out and I ease into it the way I might ease into that great story. Hopefully.

I've been told by the women in this house that this shirt is what not to wear. Its very existence has been threatened. These are people who would seek to expose Superman's secret identity, to erase that prologue. I don't need the shirt to write any more than I need pencils or a thesaurus. It's simply another tool in my arsenal, a cloak to drape over my awkwardness at putting my thoughts and feelings on paper for the world to see.

These are moments like adolescence all over again, and I say use everything you've got to help you feel comfortable with it.

Because I Said So: Eat, sleep, go to school: forgettable life of a teen

When I started writing this blog, my kids were 9-, 6- and 5-years old. One of them wasn't even born yet! Now, as they get older and increasingly more private and awkward and, frankly, embarrassing, it becomes more and more difficult to write about the specifics of them for the public to read.

But it's also part of my job.

I wrote about C for today's column. Not just about him, but about all teens everywhere. It's hard raising a teen, but it's even harder to be one. Can you remember it? Being a teenager and having to deal with school pressures, peer pressures and parents? I wouldn't do it all again for a hundred dollars.

So this column is about my own 13-year-old, but not just him. It's about me and it's about you and it's about all of those cute little kids out there who are growing and morphing into something truly odd and a little frightening: the teenager.

There is an oddity inside my home. Under my roof lives an alien creature nearly 51/2 feet tall and all arms and legs. And feet. It communicates through a series of grunts and shrugs and text messages. There is a very good chance it is either eating or sleeping right now.

It is the teenager. I don't claim to have discovered the species. It's not the first of its kind, I know, but what scares me is that it is not the last, either. Not by a long shot. By my calculations, we will eventually have three living and eating in one house all at the same time.

The horror.

Where can enough food be found? What will conversations sound like with bleary eyes buried in phone texts and only a guttural growl à la Chewbacca given in response to a cheery "good morning!" (at noon!)? Will clothes one size too small be in fashion by then?

My current teenager is forgetful. This is in the case of "Don't forget to take out the garbage" and not "Don't forget there's chocolate cake." His lapse in memory is a recent development and one that is not at all welcome. Dealing with career and family is difficult enough. It's frustrating having to deal with myriad wants, needs, complaints and whining, and then come home from work to get it all over again from a house full of kids. Selective amnesia is of no help whatsoever.

I'll admit I was caught off guard. A rookie mistake. I was stymied by my otherwise good kid's sudden case of scatterbrain, unsure of how it could have crept up so suddenly and with no warning. And then I attended open house at White Station Middle School. I spent an entire day one evening moving from classroom to classroom and visiting all of his eighth-grade teachers so they could illustrate what a day, a week, a semester in their classes will look like.

Most of the teachers began their presentations with "As your child has probably told you ... ." Only they didn't follow that up with "... I'm hungry." What they followed it up with was an overwhelming list of upcoming projects, syllabi, schedules and expectations.

Suddenly it all made sense -- the insouciance, fatigue and lack of concentration. Sitting in a desk with tennis balls on its metal feet, my own mind was bombarded with the memory of what it was like to be that age. The students experience a daily stream of facts and figures, essays, fictional and historical characters, theorems, formulas and hastily eaten lunches. There is bell work, class work and homework. There will be a test on this.

Sip from the fountain of youth and once again be so young? No, thank you. Not if it means being made to drink from a fire hose of knowledge for 180 straight days. It's a pressure I'd blocked out until that open house, a scab best left unpicked. I only wish that, like a teenager, I'll be able to forget it all again as soon as possible. And then take a nap after another snack.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg. 

© 2011 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

On My Desk: notes & novels

The Simplest Pattern
&
A Life Out of Balance

 

 

Behind the Wheel, pt. 7: My First Time

As you both know, this is the semi-regularly series where I share stories about the brief time I spent driving a limousine while living in Panama City Beach on the tropical panhandle of Florida. I need to go back now to the first run I ever did before I forget it all. It's a good tale, and one I've told many times. In a way, it was the perfect job, it was the one that would define all others to come. Though I couldn't know it at the time, it epitomized every run I would ever do and characterized the position of chauffeur.

It was a wedding run, the bread and butter of the limousine trade. Typically those jobs lasted the three hour minimum: pick up bridal party at a house, ferry to the wedding site, quick wedding, drive the happy couple to the reception. Occasionally I'd wait around at the reception to take the newlyweds to their final destination, a hotel, but usually not.

This one was different, though I didn't know it yet. This one lasted all day long. I drove from PCB north, just outside of some small hamlet or other with its Winn-Dixie, post office and feed store, and little else. The panhandle of Florida is affectionately and rightly referred to as Lower Alabama, and I got as close to that physical and descriptive line as possible that day.

The bride and her family lived way out ... somewhere, I don't even know where I was, but they had some land and I pulled onto that land and right up to the double-wide trailer where I was greeted by the father of the bride. This man was just as nice as could be and beaming with pride for the day. I loaded him and his wife up and drove about a hundred yards through a field and over a rolling hill to his daughter's single-wide to take her aboard.

There was a time when I was plagued by panic attacks, and I found out that day that the worst place for one of these to hit was at 60 m.p.h. on a winding, two-lane road. My throat constricted, my heart was beating through my chest and I couldn't get enough cool air from the dashboard vents on that July day. I felt as though I were suffocating in my wool suit. And who would wear a wool suit in July? I would, it was my only one.

I drove that winding road with its tight S-curves while the father leaned through the dividing window giving me turn-by-turn directions, and I was dying. I mean, I thought I was actually dying, that I would have a heart attack at the age of 24 somewhere just south of Alabama, drive off the road and take these nice people to their great reward along with me.

(It was nearly an hour from PCB to the pick-up and then another 20 minutes or so to the wedding site and that was the longest I'd spent behind the wheel of a limousine at that point. The only other drive I'd done was to drive the boss through town to see that I was capable. I sped through the tail-end of a yellow light as it turned red that day. Still got the job.)

And then finally, blessedly, we arrived. Or, rather, we approached. I was pointed from the backseat to an entrance into the pine trees that cover as much of Florida as sand does, and was told to turn just past a balloon tied there - the saddest, loneliest, Mylar balloon I'd ever seen. I pulled into a rutted dirt drive, slowly because the trees crowded in and the passage was just wide enough to allow a 100-inch luxury car through. This drive wound through the trees, bouncing the car and, though the panic had stopped, wonder, and not a little bit of apprehension, settled in.

The darkness of the forest canopy gave way to a clearing with a mobile home just beyond and three young men waiting on the lawn before me. There was no wedding that I could see. There was no structure large enough for a wedding that I could see. Just these three boys, one with a hose and the other two with buckets and scrub brushes on extension handles.

"You're gonna pull up there and these boys are gonna wash the car real quick," the daddy said, and I turned to look at him, my pale, panicky face only inches from his fleshy head. He was serious.

Sitting in the car, all of us - mom, dad, bride-to-be and me - with a garden hose blasting the hood and doors and windows with water, brushes and soap scrubbing the roof, I began to think that this must be a joke. I expected to pull around that trailer and see my boss there laughing at me. I'm being hazed, I thought. This is some sort of virginal chauffeur ritual.

The pit crew finished and I was instructed to drive around the trailer and across a grass pasture for the second time that day. On the other side of the trailer was a wedding scene. There were folding chairs set up in rows with an aisle down the center, and a young man in his finest standing up front with a preacher and a backdrop of white lattice. I pulled the car right up to the center aisle and my faction of the wedding party exited. From the backseat of a Lincoln limousine, the bride marched right down the aisle to get hitched.

I stayed in the car, but a guest near the back of the onlookers didn't stay put. Just after the ceremony began, he got up and walked to the trailer and disappeared inside. When he reappeared and passed in front of the car, he looked at me, winked, and pointed to the pocket of his Levi's and the can of Coors beer he had there. It was for after he finished the one in his hand, I assumed. I gave him a thumbs up.

After the nuptials, and after the speeches given over a karaoke machine, everyone mingled and congratulated and everyone, every last one of them, took turns sitting in the back of the limousine in that grassy pasture.

I drove the bride and groom back down those winding roads to a nearby country club for the reception and stayed while they celebrated. It was a long night and I spent the time sitting in the car, standing outside the car, washing the  windows (there was no cleaning crew at the exit of the pine path), listening to the radio and reading. That is the life of a chauffeur.

At some point someone came over and stood next to the driver's side of the car, just stood and looked in until I lowered the window. "Hungry?" He twitched his head to the left. "Good groceries in there."

We ended the night back at the family compound and I settled up with the father of the bride who pulled an impressive knot of cash from his front pocket to pay the standard fare, and then peeled three $100 bills off for me. I figured this for a lucrative, entertaining way to make a living.

Nice people. Odd job. Weird, wild day.

No Comment

Christopher Blank recently wrote a guest column for The Commercial Appeal on the topic of those who comment inappropriately on that newspaper's website. It's not possible for me to better Blank's writing, but I would like to add a few cents to the discussion here on my blog.

This isn't personal, I'm not here to defend my own stories and speak only to those who comment on those stories. I don't engage with commenters online because it's futile. That exchange serves no purpose in bringing someone around who is intent on disagreeing and being disagreeable. And I'm not talking about those commenters who have legitimate issues with issues, those who may, in their heart of hearts, be against a new law or perceive a flaw in the legal system or really, really want (or don't want) bike lanes on a particular street in their neighborhood. I'm talking about the people who log on with the sole mission of belittling and antagonizing the writer.

I know a lot of the writers at The Commercial Appeal and all around town, and consider many of them friends. They're good writers and hard workers, and reporters don't get into this business for the glamor or to be in the spotlight. It certainly isn't for the money. They're talented storytellers and, for the most part, enjoy what they do and it's simply rude to attack them personally in a public manner.

And that's the crux of it, isn't it? It's just rude. In an attempt to encourage discourse and familiarity, almost the exact opposite is happening because of those who are not beholden to any personal or professional ethics or, it would seem, decent Southern manners. It's rude to speak in the way they do to someone who is just trying to do their job, and it's rude to allow the means to do so to persist.

I also believe it's just bad business to allow anonymous commenting. I think the practice adds no value to the experience of reading a newspaper. It certainly adds nothing to any discussion within the community, and it shows a lack of respect for the reporters, editors, copy desk, layout and everyone else it takes to get a newspaper on paper and online. It would be like owning a restaurant and allowing anyone who may or may not be a paying customer to stand in the middle of the dining room and insult your chef. That, too, would be bad business.

The comments section should be, if not done away with altogether, treated as letters to the editor are. In that situation, phone calls are made to verify who the letter writer is and then printed with full name and city. If nothing else, this takes away that cloak of anonymity for the cowards to hide behind.

There are plenty of other outlets for those who wish to react anonymously to what they've read in an attempt to make their friend(s) giggle. I suggest Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, Blogger, WordPress or a third-party forum of some sort.

Now, to get personal for a moment. These comments are showing up on my column, "Because I Said So," more and more frequently. What I do is not journalism, I'll be the first to admit that. I'm not out there taking down corrupt politicians, recording great strides in business and culture for our city, or righting wrongs in the community. It's a silly little 500-word column where I attempt to make people laugh by poking fun at my kids, childhood in general and myself as a father. I don't purport to give advice, nor do I seek it. Yet the anonymous commenters show up time and again to suggest I hit my kids, to suggest I'm boring the readers with my story and, in some cases, to suggest they could do a better job - either with writing or with parenting.

To be clear, I give a shit what these people think about me or my family or my writing, but my mother reads that column online from Florida, and my grandmother from Georgia and, as they get older, my kids are reading it more and more. They enjoy seeing their names, they laugh along with me as they read what I thought of something they did or said, and then they don't really know what to say when someone with a string of initials and numbers instead of a name suggests I beat them or that I'm not a good father because of something I did or said.

There are those complimentary commenters, of course. There are those who seek me out through e-mail, on Facebook or Twitter, or approach me at the grocery store; I'm accessible. They share with me when something I wrote is the same scenario in their house or that it took them back to when their own children were small. As nice as this is, and as much as I appreciate these readers, I would be willing to give that up at the end of a column. They'll find me in other ways, these are intelligent, patient people.

Like I said, I can take the negative. I'd be amenable to discussing the matters at hand with these readers, but I won't do so with someone who doesn't believe enough in what he writes to put his name behind it. My full name is on everything I write, as are the names of the reporters and editorial staff at The Commercial Appeal, The Memphis Daily News, The Memphis Flyer and every other news outlet in town and out.

But they're not just names, they're people, and they deserve better.

-- Richard J. Alley

Death of the Icons

I was barely 7-years-old in 1977 when Elvis Presley died. I remember sitting in the back room of my Aunt Jeannie's house, we were living there for a few months at the time between houses and this was my bedroom. While playing with a friend, the television was on and a newscaster announced that Presley had died. I wasn't sure why at the time, but I knew this was significant. Perhaps the news broke into a television show or the broadcaster seemed more grave than normal, or maybe they showed footage of the mass of people that had begun to collect outside the gates of Graceland. Whatever it was, I ran to the front of the house to tell my mother about it.

The days that followed were full of news footage of those crowds that refused to leave and a funeral procession miles long. There were editions of The Commercial Appeal and Memphis Press-Scimitar with bold headlines another mile high. It was as though royalty had died because, frankly, it had.

Being from Memphis, it's almost blasphemous to recognize August as the death month of anyone but Elvis Presley. But he does share it, and the worldwide news of this icon being taken at so young an age must have overshadowed the death of another icon of entertainment. On Aug. 19, 1977, only three days after the passing in Memphis, Groucho Marx died in Los Angeles at the age of 87.

Has there ever been anyone funnier? As much as Elvis did for music, surely Groucho and his brothers did the same for comedy; for Broadway; for film; for television. Is there anything more iconic than the swiveling hips, the hair, the sneer of Elvis? Sure: the greasepaint eyebrows and mustache, the cigar, the rolling eyes, the duck walk, the wisecrack of Groucho.

I began watching Marx Brothers films as a kid whenever I could catch them on television and I now own all of them on DVD. I still love them and my kids do as well. Growing up, we had a vinyl record of Groucho at Carnegie Hall telling stories and singing songs accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch. I wore that record out as a kid. Groucho could tell a story as well as he could impart a bawdy line to Margaret Dumont.

I don't mean to say one should be celebrated over the other. This isn't Elvis vs. Groucho. Just a way to remember both and thank them both for what they meant to pop culture, entertainment, joyous rebellion and my childhood.

[Stay tuned, 1977 and the death of the icon isn't over yet. Charlie Chaplin died in December of that year ... ]

Because I Said No

Sometimes the writing of my bi-weekly column, Because I Said So, for The Commercial Appeal rolls right off the tongue of my pencil without much effort at all. And sometimes I have to pry the damn thing loose with a crowbar.

I spent most of last Sunday, and all of Monday, working up a column. It felt like I was forcing a square peg into a round hole. I wrote three versions of the thing, I really wanted it to work. Alas, it just didn't. For stupid little reasons, in my mind, it just wasn't working for me.

Around mid-day on Monday, panic begins to set in for me if I haven't completed and polished a column to submit (deadline is Monday ... Tuesday at the latest), so at some point I pulled out a column I started a month or so ago and tried to rework that to no avail.

Monday evening, after dinner and throwing the Frisbee around in the yard a bit, as the kids were being put to bed by Kristy, I sat down and wrote a whole different piece in about 15 minutes. And that's the one you read in the paper today.

As a bonus, though, I'm offering the original (version three) here. Maybe it - or parts of it - will show up in the CA at a later date. Maybe not. I'm just making this all up as I go.

Last weekend I took my sons to the Summer Twin Drive-In. During intermission of the double feature, we watched the advertisement for the concession stand – a piece of archival film spotlighting soft drinks, pizza and hotdogs from the 1970s – and I told them that this was where I first saw “Star Wars” as a six-year-old boy. I also saw “Grease” there and, if memory serves, a re-release of Disney’s “Dumbo.”

I went on to tell them I saw “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” at the Park Theater, “Ghostbusters” at the Paramount in Eastgate Shopping Center, “Romancing the Stone” at the Plaza Theater and “The Empire Strikes Back” at the Highland Quartet.

When the movies ended that night and we lined up to exit the rutted and potholed drive-in, it was after midnight and my sons wished me happy birthday. Newly 41, my capacity for buckets of popcorn and gallons of Coca-Cola had outlasted that of those venerable venues.

Around the table the next evening amidst gift wrap and with a cake on fire, I asked the kids if they knew who the president of the United States was when I was born in 1970. “George Washington?” Joshua answered.

His piece of cake was delicious.

I told them that the year I was born Richard Nixon was president, Henry Loeb was the mayor of Memphis, we were at war in Vietnam, The Beatles had just broken up and Apollo 13 barely made it back to Earth.

They stared back with a mixture of confusion and sugar. These are the subjects of movies and documentaries, links in a browser that will take them to songs, audio of speeches, cast lists and countless facts and figures.

How is it possible you were alive then? they wondered. How were you able to stay awake through a double feature?

I napped.

The times of our lives can be marked on a calendar and they can be archived alongside world events and pop culture. History comes alive for children when we give them the context for it. These personal touches act as anchor in the vast sea of time and recollections in an ambiguous “past.”

I recently watched the final shuttle launch with my kids streaming on a laptop computer the size of a spiral notebook and told them of watching the first in a fifth-grade classroom on a television the size of the teacher’s desk.

I can pass along the “where were you” moments of the shootings of a pope, a president and a rock-n-roll peace icon, and can tell them where I watched the Berlin Wall come down, Live-Aid and nothing at all when an ice storm quieted things in Memphis.

My memories sink into their memories, into their own gray matter wiki of facts and comprehension, even though much of what I tell them is met with that same sugar-glazed look I’m sure I had when my elders began their own stories with “In my day …”

Second Line

[Warning: spoilers]

I recently watched season one of Treme. I'm a huge fan of The Wire and had high hopes for David Simon's series set in post-Katrina New Orleans. While I don't think Treme is as engrossing as The Wire yet, the characters and dialogue are just as well written and the look is as honest as gritty.

With all of the sadness and loss that the hurricane wrought (both real and fictional), and with all of the joy of finding lost loved ones and coming to the realization that the city - the essence of New Orleans - was not completely washed away, the most poignant scene for me was the very last of the season.

During the second line procession after Daymo's funeral, the camera stays on Ladonna who seems in a trance. She watches the others move and dip to the brass band leading the march and slowly she begins moving with them. She starts to feel the groove and sway with the bass drum, trombone and trumpet until she's finally moving along with the other mourners, flinging her handkerchief from side to side. Ladonna grieves, in these last few minutes of the episode, for Daymo, but also for Creighton and Toni, for her own damaged marriage, for the pain of waiting so long to learn Daymo's fate and what it has done to her mother, and for New Orleans herself (both real and fictional, it seems).

The New Orleans funeral second line must be something to be involved in with so much sadness coming through that somber trombone and laying someone to rest above ground, so close to life. And yet it must be filled with joy, too. All of New Orleans is joy: the music is joy, the food is joy, the people are joy. You can't keep that down in a parade whether it's through the Quarter or leaving a cemetery, and Simon and the great Khandi Alexander as Ladonna, do a fantastic job of summing up the entire series in those final minutes.

I've been to New Orleans quite a few times, but the last time was only two weeks before Katrina hit in 2005. I've been thinking of going back. I finished writing my first novel (still unpublished) last year just before I turned forty. Much of it takes place in New Orleans of the early- to mid-20th Century. I'm working on my third now and there are large portions of it that will take place in the same city and same time period. A bit of research may be in order.

This is an excerpt from that first novel, Life Out of Balance. It's part of what I submitted to be accepted into the Moss Fiction Workshop at the University of Memphis in 2010:

... He wants to drift, to let his mind wander and he finds himself back in New Orleans, awash in blues and grays long-since vibrant; a chipped and faded skin holding in a life and pulse as old as time. The city was fading with time and age and looked, not as though the salt air and sun had come to do damage, but as though the city itself had been at sea, adrift and at the mercy of the godless elements there.
            And perhaps it had been. Maybe the genesis of New Orleans, that distinctive pool’s back story, her architecture and ways still intact, begins with breaking away from France and finding herself a current, skittering along coastal Spain and making some stops along the dark continent where she picked up even more customs, habits, sins and gods. The long trip across the ocean would give her people the time to argue and fight, talk it over to come to an agreement and eventually fall in love. They slept with each other again and again before putting into port at the Lesser Antilles, all the way up the Caribbean where pilgrims and voyagers, both willing and unwilling, would come aboard with rum still sweet from the cane. A visit would be made to the Dominican, Haiti and Cuba before banking off the lawless coast of Mexico like a snooker ball and finding a pocket of relative safety in the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf would funnel her tired and restless crew into the soft underbelly of a new nation and its denizens would pull themselves to land on wisteria vines, tie the whole damn city to centuries-old water oaks hung thick with Spanish moss and declare themselves home.
            These people of the world who had come to rest at the bottom of a bottle of wine would stand together on wrought iron balconies rusted through with sea salt and proclaim aloud and defiantly to their new neighbors, “We are New Orleans and we don’t give a good goddamn about your rules, laws, morals and ways!” And they wouldn’t, either. Their speech was a mixture of French, African and Spanish, stewed up in a cauldron of sea foam, pepper and red beans as though the very Tower of Babel had been erected to throw its seamy shadow on these new and pristine United States of America. They would come to understand over time that it was no tower, but an ancient tribe unto itself which some thought from Sodom and others, Gomorrah.

Listen Up

Much of my job is spent sitting at a big, wooden desk in my home office, pacing around the house, lying on the couch and standing on the front porch staring into the middle distance. There are phone interviews and dealing with the children, but there is no office small talk around a water cooler. There is no water cooler. And neither is there office politics or mandatory birthday parties for strangers who work in Accounting. There is no leaning over the cubicle wall to ask my office mate if he wants to go to the Olive Garden for lunch today. There is no cubicle wall.

Much of the day, there is silence - sweet, sweet silence. At times, though, the silence is too much even for me and that's where the other facet of my job comes in: the sit-down interview. I enjoy this part of work because I ask strangers all kinds of questions and am afforded the opportunity to get to know someone for a brief time. I rarely sit down with a list of questions, I'm more of a conversational interviewer and these people don't even know that it's because I spend whole days - weeks, sometimes - alone and am just looking to talk.

Recently, the tables were turned and I sat down across that table from Ed Arnold for his People I Know podcast. This is a great concept where Ed asks people - people he knows (this "knowing" may only be through Facebook or Twitter, but that's the world we live in) what makes them tick, why they do what they do and what they love.

It was a lot of fun. We just struck up a conversation over cocktails one Monday evening at Le Chardonnay in Midtown. The waitress (a friend of Ed's, I can't recall her name) was great, as was Jackie Ellison of Itchy Shutter Finger who documented it all on camera. Thanks to all of them.

So, if you've got 37 minutes to spare, give it a listen. And, while you're at it, give some other episodes a listen, I am in great company with well-known Memphians such as Mo Alexander, Lindsey Turner, Steve Ross, Brent Diggs and Bill Perry.

People I Know

Love, Frank

The Invisible Bridge

I finished reading The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer last week. I won't warn you of any spoilers because history itself is a spoiler, isn't it? The book begins in 1937 and follows Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jew just beginning his studies in architecture in Paris. That pretty much tells you where this 750-page book is going, doesn't it? Perhaps I'll spoil it a little by telling you that young Andras doesn't escape and emigrate safely to America in the first few pages.

Orringer takes us instead on a roller coaster of emotion as Andras's early years are filled with excitement, new experiences and passionate love. There are problems, of course - jealousies, some violence, little or no money - but those problems are made relatively small by what will come later, by what history tells us happens later. The uncertainty of youth, in hindsight, is more exciting than problematic.

The Invisible Bridge is a work of fiction, but there is much truth to be found in it. Not just the historical accuracies, but the truth that is found in all fiction - the love, the loss, the heartbreak and unbearable happiness and sadness that can often be found upon the very same page. Human emotion is as much a part of fact as any name, date or location. It's something that we all have within us and can identify with without regard to color, creed or station. The line between fact and fiction is a narrow one, as thin as a heart's blood vessel or brain's nerve ending at times; it is often blurred, as well it should be, despite what The Oprah demands from her stable of writers.

Through the course of her novel, Orringer gives us the good, the light at the end of the tunnel and then, just as quickly, blacks out that light. She heaps sorrow upon us, sinks us into a blackness from which there must be no exit, and then she lights a torch to show us the way out. Just as Andras exalts in the neat, straight lines of a new building's design, Orringer constructs a family through marriages, births and friendships that are stronger than reinforced steel, and then razes it through the atrocities of our past and the barbaric aspirations of a few lunatic madmen.

I read much of this book on a Florida beach while on vacation, and that setting made the story all the more unbearable at times. To read of work camps and death - though in the guise of fiction, there is no denying the truth here - while debating whether to have my next cocktail at the water line or up on the deck of our beach house seemed ludicrous. You should read this book, but be deliberate in where and when you read it because there is no telling when the rawness of the story and the immediacy of its emotion may seize you.

Behind the Wheel, pt. 6: The One That Wasn't

I've written here before about my time as a chauffeur in Florida and the celebrities that I've driven. While watching some old footage of a USO engagement on Turner Classic Movies last night, I was reminded of the biggest celebrity that never made it into the back of the car.

Bob Hope by Al Hirschfeld

I got the call one day that we'd been hired to drive Bob Hope around for a weekend when he'd be in the area for his annual event entertaining troops at Eglin Air Force Base outside Ft. Walton. I was as excited as I'd ever been about a job, more excited about meeting Mr. Hope than I had about any other celebrity I'd driven. Certainly more than KC and his Sunshine Band. In fact, in the shadow of Hope, there were no other celebrities. He was a direct line to Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, Myrna Loy, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn ... all the greats, and he was as great as any of them. This was 1995, so he would have been in his early 90s, but just to be around him, responsible for getting him from here to there, would have been quite an experience.

Alas, it was not meant to be as the event was canceled. Or, at least, his staying at the hotel we worked with in Panama City Beach was canceled. The story I was told is that that very hotel was to be occupied the same weekend by O.J. Simpson, who had only earlier that week been found not guilty of murder. You'll remember the first place he went after the verdict was PCB where his girlfriend lived. Dolores Hope, the story went, got wind of Simpson's impending occupancy and, instead of subjecting her husband to the certain media circus that would ensue, she canceled the whole thing. I don't know if this story was true or not, but I like to think that the Hopes had enough integrity and taste to not want to be associated with any (alleged) murderer.

On a side note, I took a group of attorneys from the Alabama Bar Association that was staying at that hotel out to dinner one night in a 15-passenger van and Simpson was entertaining guests at that same restaurant. I stood around outside and chatted with his body guard, the tall, swarthy looking brute seen in all the footage of Simpson going here and there after the verdict.

I would have much rather spent that time talking with, or just in the presence of, Bob Hope.

Chapter One of Chapter 16

A while back, Margaret over at Chapter 16 (an online journal dedicated to books and writers, and supported by Humanities Tennessee) asked me to write a story on how the flooding in Memphis had effected the people here. I had to turn her down, even though turning editors down is the last thing I ever want to do, because I knew she needed the piece in a timely manner (the river had crested and we were already in the waning days of water) and I was just too busy with some other larger projects.

She was kind enough to offer another assignment a few weeks ago and I accepted. She asked me to write a feature on Victoria Ford, daughter of former state senator John Ford, and part of the Ford political dynasty, though not of the machine itself.

Victor had recently won a national Scholastic Art & Writing Award for five essays chronicling her young life, and that of her siblings, within this controversial and broken family. The award has been won in the past by the likes of Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath and Joyce Carol Oates.

I spoke with 18-year-old Victoria at length on the phone and found her to be intelligent, funny, optimistic and grateful. If you've seen any of her family members' antics on the local news or read of them in the papers (John Ford is currently in prison for charges of bribery), you know what an amazing leap this is. Her course is set and, if she follows it, she will go far.

See the story here, and below.

“You may not understand this now, but she isn’t coming back. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Day after that. And no, she hasn’t left anything behind—a sticky note on the refrigerator door or a quick message for the answering machine, her voice a distant echo calling your name and mine. Nothing.”

So begins the award-winning essay “To a Restless Little Brother Calling for Mama in His Sleep,” one of the five essays that last month helped Victoria Ford, eighteen, win a national Scholastic Art and Writing Award—and a $10,000 college scholarship. Past winners of the prestigious award include Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, and Truman Capote. For Ford, the awards ceremony, held May 31 in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, was a moment to remember, one that surely marks the beginning of a life of creativity and success.

Victoria’s last name might not be so well known as the literary giants who took home the Scholastic prize years ago, but it already carries a kind of notoriety in her hometown of Memphis. Harold Ford Sr., the first African-American Tennessean elected to Congress since Reconstruction, was her uncle. Harold Ford Jr., now retired from Congress, is her cousin. Other family members have been elected to the city council, the county commission, and the school board in Memphis. Victoria’s father, John Ford, was a state senator for three decades, another cog in the familial political machine.

Among young African Americans growing up in Memphis, Victoria’s story is far from typical. Memphis is a city with higher-than-average rates of poverty, drug use, single-parent homes, and criminal recidivism, but Victoria grew up in a two-story brick home with a mother and father. She attended an above-average city school.

All families have skeletons, however, and all families weather their own storms. The problems of Victoria’s family were played out on television newscasts and above the fold on the front pages of daily newspapers in the state: in 2005, FBI surveillance caught John Ford accepting a bribe which would amount to $55,000 when all was said and done. During Victoria’s childhood, her mother, Tamara Mitchell-Ford, was imprisoned three times on DUI charges. In 2008, when John Ford finally reported to federal prison, Tamara Mitchell-Ford was already in a state penitentiary.

Victoria now lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her aunt, Megan Mitchell-Hoefer, in a lively home with six other family members and “always something to write about.” She attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a school that her fiction teacher, novelist George Singleton, describes as being a lot like “that bad TV show Fame.” Prospective students must interview and audition and present portfolios of creative work, he says, “so it’s hard to get in.”

“She’s very well-rounded and balanced,” says her aunt, Mitchell-Hoefer. “She’s very family-oriented, she’s a homebody.” This, despite an atypical family home. Also atypical is the way Victoria deals with the spotlight, the skeletons. Her essays tell the story from her point of view, from that of her brothers and sister. They are emotional and impart details from within the home and, in some instances, within the very closet where she has struck up a conversation with those bones. She is candid, unapologetic, sad, and hopeful. She misses her father; she worries for her mother.

Tamara Mitchell-Ford was pregnant with Victoria’s brother, called Johnjohn, when she went away to the correctional center for the first time—“her vacation, as she liked to call it,” Victoria recounts in an essay titled “Like Nothing Else In The Known World.” It’s an essay in which she also writes of her brother’s birth and how quickly she, even as a preteen, learned to change diapers and babysit for ever-increasing amounts of time.

“I bounced Johnjohn in my arms before his nap,” she wrote. “He cried, tears running down his cheeks and over his dimples. I learned that he just needed a rhythm. I’d lay him across my stomach, hold his head close to my chest, and pat his butt. Sometimes I sang. Once he fell asleep, I’d be gone with him.” The essay ends with Victoria’s discovery of empty bottles of booze hidden around the house, and with finding her mother in a car left running in the garage.

It’s easy to understand her protectiveness toward the now six-year-old Johnjohn and why she considered putting off college for a year or two to look after him. Advice from her teachers and aunt changed her mind: “I had a long conversation with my teachers at the Governor’s School about it—we’re very close—and my teachers said, ‘It will work out; your brother will have a place to stay; you have to go to college; you have to get an education.’ They were really supportive.”

Mitchell-Hoefer, whom Victoria calls “a hero,” echoed the faculty: of course Johnjohn would stay with her.

This fall Victoria will be part of the first-year class at the University of Pennsylvania. “I was very set on going to a school in North Carolina to stay close to home because I really wanted to be with my little brother,” Victoria said. “When I got into Penn, I thought, ‘I think this is right.’ I need to be someplace that’s big and someplace that has lots of different types of people and different programs that I can immerse myself into.”

Victoria puts a happy face on nothing that happened before she got to South Carolina and the safe confines of her aunt’s home. In “Letter To My Father,” she is probably the most blunt: “I just don’t feel like I know you as much as I want to” and follows it with “rather, the internet knows more about you than your own daughter.” She cites a Wikipedia article and blogs that contain no mention of his children. What comes through in Victoria’s writing is a painfully honest innocence. She loves her family, but she doesn’t ask readers to forgive them, or even understand their shortcomings.

To help the healing, she reads the poets Larry Levis, Matthew Dickman, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman, and the fiction of Richard Ford, yet she is still unsure about her career path, undecided as to a college major, though she is certain that writing will be involved. Singleton thinks he sees the future: “She’s won most of her accolades in non-fiction and poetry, but I kind of think she’s a stronger fiction writer. In years to come, I would imagine she would be writing fiction.”

That’s an opinion shared by her aunt, the elementary-school principal who knows promise when she sees it and imparts sound advice for anyone considering a creative vocation: “I think that she’s going to dibble and dabble in other areas, but I think she’s going to come back around to writing. It is something that she is passionate about, she loves it; anything you love, no matter how much money you may make doing it, you’ll always be a happier person when you’re doing what you love.”

"A Collection Large and Full of Treasures"

This is how freelancing works in this town:

I was working with photographer Justin Fox Burks on a job for the Memphis Flyer last January and he suggested I contact Rhodes College because they use freelancers for their magazine. I contacted my friend Stephanie Chockley who works at Rhodes and gave me the contact for Martha Shepard, who edits the magazine, and she said she'd be delighted to work with me. The first assignment offered was one on the college's acquisition of the Shelby Foote collection of papers, memorabilia, manuscripts, etc. This was perfect. I'm a Foote fan and, as I've written before, I used to sell him his pipe tobacco years ago. Martha put me in touch with C. Stuart Chapman, Rhodes alumnus and biographer of Foote, for a sidebar and as an invaluable resource himself.

And then yesterday that article went online and can be read right here.

As moves go, it wasn′t such a great distance. Only a little over two miles to be exact, from the study of a turreted, fairy-tale-like house on East Parkway to the Gothic, shady campus on North Parkway. Nevertheless, the acquisition by Rhodes College of the Shelby Foote Collection of writings, papers, hand-drawn maps, photos and memorabilia is such that it will take researchers and students on a journey through decades worth of history, stories and lessons.

It was a memorable experience to go to the Paul Barret Jr. library on the Rhodes campus and be able to hold a first edition of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and the hand-written manuscript for September September. The hand-drawn maps of Civil War battles and troop advancements were something I hadn't expected, and a treasure to see, a real insight into the way Foote worked. The same goes for the spiral notebook that held some notes and, for lack of a better word, doodles.

For anyone who appreciates literature and what goes into writing a novel (not to mention a 1.2-million word narrative trilogy), to stand in the hushed, paneled room of a library and hold such items is nothing less than spiritual. It was very much like being in church.

It was a pleasure to work on this story and with those at the college, and I wish to thank Martha Shepard, Justin Burks, Elizabeth Gates, Stephanie Chockley, Tim Huebner, Marshall Boswell, Ken Woodmansee and Stuart Chapman.

The Tale of the Taco Bell

There are a thousand different reasons a person might take up a pencil and jot down his thoughts, his dreams, the story of his life or someone else's. Ego, tragedy, catharsis, the need to make people laugh, think or cry are all good enough reasons.

For me, it's all about seeing my name in print and standing back as the accolades wash over me and that, my friends, is what happened to me yesterday. Last April I wrote a story about the Taco Bell Tuesday Club for The Commercial Appeal (Taco Bell Tuesday Club: Old friends swap reminiscences, tall tales at weekly gathering). The club is a group of mostly septuagenarians who all hail from the same neighborhoods, schools, ethnicities or businesses in Memphis. They gather every week to tell lies and eat tacos and, for most, it seems to be the highlight of their week. Their numbers have grown, ninety-plus now, and in no small part to their story that ran on the cover of the M section two months ago.

Their de-facto leader, Ernie Barrasso, called me shortly after it ran to tell me how much they all enjoyed and appreciated the story, which was very nice of him to do. I don't get many of those calls, but when I do they seem to be from older people, people who are genuinely pleased and grateful to have their story told. I just enjoy hearing their stories and being able to share them. Barrasso asked me to come by the Taco Bell at Poplar & Estate in East Memphis to pick something up he had for me. I told him I would and then promptly forgot. I felt awful that I forgot and told myself I'd stop in there on some subsequent Tuesday, but, of course, I could never think to do that.

So when he called me last Monday and asked if I could come by the next day, I promised him I would. And I did. He quieted down his troops to re-introduce me as the one who wrote the story, he drew my attention to the poster-size story from the paper that now adorns the Taco Bell wall and he presented me with the framed photo below. It's a picture of Barrasso selling Elvis a car on So. Third Street and it is signed by Ernie Barrasso himself. It now commands a prominent place in my office.

I didn't go to college, didn't know anything about journalism school, really, and have no formal training as a writer. I'm just a young man with a passion for the written word and the dream to be recognized as the bard of burritos, the de Tocqueville of Taco Bell.


See you next Tuesday?