Because I Said So: 4 years of writing, still not expert on parenting

My dad died last week. I wrote a column. But I didn’t write a column about my dad; not exactly.

My sister and I drove 14 hours to Melbourne, FL, to say goodbye to him, but it was never my intention to write about him and us. Yet when I re-read certain phrases – “ … remember the sad …” (I know I meant for that to read “bad”) – I realize that he was more infused in what I wrote than I realized.

Being a parent isn’t a science, the best we can do is feel our way around in the dark and hope that every once in a great while we’re able to flip the light switch on so we can see where we’re going. My dad stumbled around for years without much light, unfortunately, and it took a toll on our relationship. Like many parent/child bonds, it was strained and it was elastic, bouncing back at times and stretched to the breaking point at others.

As a father myself, I’ve learned of the imperfections of parenting, of how easy it might be to make the wrong decision, say the wrong thing and set in motion a course of misunderstandings, resentment and bitterness. Perhaps the greatest lesson my dad gave me on the subject of fatherhood is what not to do and that our actions have consequences. I’ve taken it to heart.

In the end, though, it wasn’t about what had been right or wrong, but what we felt right then and how incredibly sad it is to see a loved one in his final stages of life. In the end, the pain and anger and hurt feelings just don’t matter so much. He was at peace and my sisters and I were at peace with that.

He left me with other things, too, of course: a sense of humor, a love of the ocean, the taste for jazz, some nascent talent and the ability to recognize it in others, and an appreciation for The Marx Brothers and old Tarzan movies. These are all attributes I see now in myself and in my children.

My column last week was about what a crap shoot parenting is, how the best we can do is to do our best, and just a bit about how important it is to remember the good times at all cost, which is the bit that must have been about my dad. We had some good times, though they tended to be overshadowed by the other times. I spent last week trying to focus on the good and will continue to do so, to give my own kids a well-rounded version of who their grandfather was.

This is last week’s “Because I Said So” column:

Four years ago this week, I began writing the "Because I Said So" column. In more than 100 columns, somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 words, I've written about anything from holidays to school days, from newborns to puberty to middle age. I've written about Memphis, movies, music, time travel, books and matters of familial and national security.

What have we learned?

Probably nothing. This isn't an advice column. Oh, please don't seek advice from me. I have been a parent for more than 14 years and have four children, yet every morning when I wake from blissful slumber to a world strewn with dirty socks and baby dolls, I wonder if I'll be able to do it again; if I have the will to delude myself into the fantasy of being in charge for even one more day.

What I have expected on any of those days is for one of my children, most likely 5-year-old Genevieve, to turn her large brown eyes on me and say, "Do you even know what you're doing?"

Of course I don't. I know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I knew once how to hook up the Wii game console to the television and remove training wheels (and then put them back on for just a few more weeks). As a first-time father, however, I knew nothing at all of comforting a child late at night, colic and rashes, where Waldo was (or who Harry Potter was, for that matter), why bad things happen to good people, and explaining how the Internet, the Electoral College and combustion engines work.

As a father of 14 years, I still have only a cursory knowledge of very little, or any, of this, but what I have learned over the four years of writing this column is that neither do any of you. The common denominator in parenthood seems to be a sense of being overwhelmed much of the time and exhausted the rest. I've been stopped by readers in restaurants or the grocery store and told that their daughter also loses her mind when the seam of her sock rubs her toes the wrong way or that their son subsisted for three years on little more than frozen pizza and chocolate milk as well.

Are we bad parents? No, we're just tired. Do we have difficult children? Mostly, yes, especially that little girl with such sensitive toes. But we're doing our best to raise up children into adults who will have children who make them crazy.

I can attest that one of the biggest fans of this column is my own mother, who has gotten to see her revenge played out in public every two weeks for a hundred weeks running. This column is dedicated to her, and to the mother of my own children, and to all the parents out there who struggle and scream, encourage and laugh, day in and day out.

Four years goes by in the blink of an eye, just as childhoods will. Write down the funny stuff, remember the sad, and share it all with your children for years to come. 

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.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

"Like space travel"

They can't all be gems.

I've been told this countless times when a column I've written has gone over about as well as a turd at a wedding. Sometimes I catch them before I send it to my editor, sometimes they get by me and make it in the paper. I woke up Sunday before last to write my column and it was all about Bobby Keys, the session saxophonist and semi-permanent sideman for The Rolling Stones. I hand wrote it all stream of consciousness like I do to get my thoughts and ideas down before going back and rearranging the puzzle of words, metaphors and punchlines. I thought it was ... okay. But then I woke up the next morning and rewrote an entirely new column and felt that it was better. That's the one you read last week.

I thought the original, the Keys version, was more time sensitive because his book, "Every Night's A Saturday Night," had just come out and I'd gone up to The Booksellers of Laurelwood only days before to hear him tell some stories about his episodes with Keith Richards, Elvis Presley, John Lennon and the like. So that column has no home unless I publish it here, which I will.

The book is good. It's not up to the level of Keith Richards's memoir, "Life," but a lot of the stories overlap and Keys is an encyclopedia of the music of the 1960s and '70s. I feel that, by the end, he comes across more as a hanger-on than a respected musician. He spent a lot of time broke, sleeping on someone's couch and hoping that Mick Jagger would deign to allow him to go on tour with the Stones just one more time. And this is when Keys was in his 40s, too old to be living like he did when he was 19.

His stories, though, of playing saxophone on Elvis Presley's "Return To Sender" (he had no idea he was playing on Elvis's record), or of how that great solo on "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" came about (one take), makes it worth any music fan's time to read. There is plenty to just skim past, but you'll want to re-read the chapters about his time spent with John Lennon, and how he went to England to record with Eric Clapton, but ended up on George Harrison's first solo album instead.

Keys pursued his dreams at the cost of family, health and sanity, at times, but he used his talents to the best of his abilities and it's that pursuit that is the theme of this column-that-wasn't. Here it is in all of its unpolished glory:

Because of my love for literature, and in an effort to pass that passion to my children, I took a couple of my kids to The Booksellers of Laurelwood last week for a book signing by Bobby Keys for his new memoir “Every Night’s A Saturday Night.” The kids left my side as soon as we entered to peruse the young adult section, only occasionally wandering by to hear what the longtime Rolling Stones and session saxophonist had to say.

On the way to the store, my son had asked who Keys is and I gave him a brief synopsis, including the fact that while on tour with the Stones they lived the life of excess. “What does that mean?” he asked.

“Drugs and booze,” I said. “The kind of things we don’t do, but others do and then write about so that we can read all about it.”

“Like space travel.”

“Exactly like space travel.”

It’s difficult, isn’t it? Warning your kids against a life of over-the-top debauchery when someone is out there who went toe-to-toe with Keith Richards and, not only lived to tell about it, but is still functioning and succeeding. The key (so to speak), I think, is to focus on what got him there: the talent and drive to succeed.

To this end, I introduced my 14-year-old son, who plays baritone and alto sax, to Bobby Keys. “I hated high school band,” Keys told him. “I liked the band bus, though. It was better than the football bus ‘cause we had girls on ours.”

Okay, so back to the music. Encouraging our kids in their pursuits is easy, it’s the fun part of parenting; the no-brainer. Explaining that things can be carried too far is trickier.

But it’s all tricky. I was talking with someone recently who was saying she’s glad she doesn’t have kids because there are so many difficult decisions to be made.

And there are.

It’s like space travel; it’s like being locked in an airtight capsule that’s whipping around the Earth at 17,000 mph and there are no brakes. There is no stopping to take a breath because there is no air up there. The best we can do is make minor adjustments to the flight path and hope that any single adjustment doesn’t send our kids hurtling into deepest space. Or on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1972.

I love music. I’m a huge Stones fan and would love nothing more than to see my kids excel at something they love as well, whether it’s medicine, finance, painting, cooking or the baritone sax. The trick is to make the right decisions, give a gentle nudge here and there and hope it’s in the right direction.

There may be nobody better for mentoring in pop music today than Bobby Keys, I just should have nudged him in more of a musical direction last week. I didn’t ask him for parenting advice, though he is a father himself. He has a son, his name is Huckleberry.

Bobby Keys during the recording of "Exile On Main St."

Because I Said So: Family has advantages in dystopian, sci-fi future

I woke up last Sunday morning and sat on the couch in my office with a mug of coffee, a pencil and a legal pad to write this week's column, just as I do every two weeks. And I wrote it, and I was okay with it. Then I woke up Monday morning with a whole new column in my head.

Dystopian S

It seems there is no escaping "The Hunger Games." Even if you didn't read the book, even if you won't see the film, it's everywhere and in the collective subconscious. So that's where this week's column originates. I had a vision as I came up through the fog of sleep of my own kids involved in such a struggle and how woefully inept they may be based on what I've seen of their exemplary lounging habits here around the house. It was frightening, and funny all at the same time.

I wrote a story for The Commercial Appeal ('Hunger' Fever: Young adult novel of dystopian future headed to screen as next 'Twilight'; March 15, 2012) on the popularity of the book and the anticipation of the film's release. I spoke with adults and teens, and the excitement was the same in both camps. I haven't read the book, but I had Kristy and C tell me about the plot and characters, and the appeal of a story about a child who has to defend her life, and that of her sister, in this dystopian setting. I don't think I'd ever uttered the word "dystopian" until I began writing the story and this column but I bet I've said it a million times since.

The original column for this week, by the way, had to do with The Rolling Stones, their saxophonist Bobby Keys and encouraging our children to follow their dreams and passions, though not too far; not to the point of throwing a television set off a hotel balcony. I may put that column right here in this space next week as a bonus.

Until then, enjoy this week's column from all of us here at Because I Said So:

I'm in the minority in my house in that I don't read young adult fiction. The kids read it. My wife, an English teacher at Central High School, reads it. I think I can't get into it for a couple of reasons. First, I'm a not-young adult. Second, I don't really go in for fantasy and science fiction and the lot. This may put me in the minority of all of today's readers, come to think of it, but I need the action to take place in real cities and countries; I need the plot to twist on something other than time travel, wizardry or the backs of sparkly vampires.

Regardless of my views on young adult literature, there is no escaping the latest craze, "The Hunger Games." There are more than 20 million books in print, and the film adaptation opened last weekend with a record-breaking box office. Well played, author Suzanne Collins.

It seems that quite a bit of such books has to do with a postapocalyptic world, a dystopian future where a person relies on wits and cunning to survive against roving bands of marauders, dictatorial and all-seeing governments, or zombies. My family wouldn't make it very far in such a world. I hope they're learning survival skills by reading these books and watching these films, but if it comes down to who can get to the dwindling food supplies first, we'll starve waiting for 5-year-old Genevieve to find her shoes so we can leave the house.

In "The Hunger Games," children are forced to fight each other to the death for the amusement of television viewers tuning in to the reality show of the same name. When I asked my kids which of them would win, 9-year-old Somerset was the first to exuberantly claim rhetorical victory, followed quickly by, "Wait, what are 'The Hunger Games'?" Seems she hasn't read the book after all.

My children aren't so competitive, and their strategy in such a format, from what I've seen, would involve them walking around the book's setting of the Capitol looking for their mother so they could tell on lead character Katniss Everdeen for trying to shoot arrows at them.

The advantage this family will have in any end-of-the-world scenario is if the new wasteland and societal machinations work more like the world of Mario Brothers than that of AMC's "The Walking Dead" with its abandoned urban landscape and roaming zombie population. When confronted with flying turtles and fire-breathing plants, there really is no one more nimble than 10-year-old Joshua.

Of course, to survive in any such scenario, the basic necessities are first priority, and we have our own version of "The Hunger Games" that plays out around the dining table. The kids are hungry, I know they must be hungry, yet they insist on playing games. "How much of this do I have to eat?" "I don't like this." "What kind of animal does that meat come from?" I'm defeated nightly.

The Mayan calendar predicts the world will implode or explode or freeze or do something unknown this coming December. I just consulted the all-knowing Google calendar, however, advancing the months until I got bored, so I know we'll be around until at least August of 2041. I also found that my birthday that year is on a Wednesday.

Whether the world and our society as we know it ends tomorrow, in December or on my birthday in 29 years, my kids are as ready as they'll ever be. They've read the literature, seen the films, found their shoes and are ready to take on whatever Hollywood, or Donkey Kong, might throw at them.

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. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Because I Said So: Big family can reward with peaceful little society

I wrote both the column and the feature for today's "M" section in The Commercial Appeal. The feature is on the young adult novel "The Hunger Games" and the upcoming release of the film adaptation. I knew very little about the book going into it, but learned a lot about the the characters, the plot, the genre and the folks who read it.

The "Because I Said So" column today is all about siblings, which I knew a lot about going into. I have two sisters and two brothers, I have a house full of little siblings and I grew up in a big family full of aunts and uncles. I've always admired the way these adults were not only brothers and sisters, but great friends as well. This last year has been a trying time for a lot of reasons, and it is in these times when true teamwork and trust, respect and love become evident. It's been inspirational and made me look at my own kids as a unit independent of Kristy and me. The Quartet will become their own team, they already have in many respects, and my hope is that they'll remain close no matter where life and career and family take them. Siblings are our first best friends and should always remain so.

Big family can reward with peaceful little society

What we create with a large family, other than a large mess and a lot of noise, is our own little society within a society. It has its own rules to be broken and its own hierarchy to be either respected or usurped. It has its own ways of operating to ensure that the machinery of family and home run smoothly.

The best way to keep things operating evenly, of course, is for all of the cogs in the machine to work together, for these brothers and sisters to come together and work as a team, all with the same goal of cleaning the kitchen, agreeing on what will be watched on television or simply passing the potatoes down the table at dinner.

When there is discord, factions develop, and strife becomes the norm; war breaks out over an otherwise peaceful land, and no one is happy. Happiness, and quiet, are the overarching goals every day.

I've been reading "The Saturdays" by Elizabeth Enright to my 9-year-old daughter at bedtime. It's the story of the Melendy family with four children that mirror my own -- two boys, two girls -- living in a Manhattan contemporary to the time of the book's first publication in 1941. Lamenting not having enough money to do what each really wants, the siblings agree to pool their weekly allowance (a total of $1.60) and take turns privately doing what each likes on Saturdays. By the end, they realize they don't want to go off on their own for a day, but decide instead that it will be more fun to have their adventures as a group. It's the story of working together for a mutual cause and respecting each others' wants and dreams.

Much of the time, my kids are at each others' throats with the predictable arguments of sibling rivalry. But there are those moments of peace, a cease-fire as welcome as a clean kitchen when I see them come together in small ways as an older one stops what he's doing to help a younger with homework. There have been our own Saturday afternoons when one child will prepare lunch for all of the others. Sometimes, they pass a dish at dinner without being asked. As a parent, it's what we strive for -- siblings getting along as friends. There is nothing more encouraging for a parent than to see your kids, with ages spanning many years, playing together as a cohesive unit. The only thing better is when they're doing so out of earshot.

There are nights when bedtimes have passed that I hear the kids talking until late, and part of me wants to stomp in there with my scary father voice and tell them to be quiet, to go to sleep and that they have to get up early in the morning. But another part knows that they have many years ahead of waking up early, and I just want to join them, to be a part of the secrets kids tell late at night, the inside jokes passed back and forth and plans being made.

I've witnessed recently that in times of difficulty, brothers and sisters working as a team can accomplish great things; they can oil the wheels of their machinery even as that machinery is coming apart. We should learn to lean on each other and teach our children to look to one another for strength and advice and an ear when times are tough.

Siblings are there for us forever, and sometimes it takes a fictional family to remind us of this, but sometimes it takes only looking to the person beside us at the dinner table and asking them to pass the potatoes. 

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. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Because I Said So: It's not about who wins -- oh, who are we fooling?

Years ago I got caught up in playing chess online. It was a lot of fun, but maybe a little too fun as I found myself consumed with it, having half a dozen or more games going at once. Some matches were quick, back and forth games, while others, those being played with people on the other side of the planet, were longer affairs with turns being taken during each of our waking hours. I finally had to let it go. I finished a final game and never went back to the site. I was spending too much time thinking about my next moves and checking the status of ongoing games.

So when I received an invitation from Andria to play Words With Friends, Facebook's answer to Scrabble, I hesitated (which would be a great Words With Friends word), and when Kristy then joined in the fray, I wavered (also a good play), but I finally had to sip from the pitcher of Kool-Aid being served me.

I've really only dipped my toe into the pool of possible number of games, but I've found Words With Friends to be just as big a time suck as chess was. But it is highly entertaining, and I keep telling myself that I'm using my brain. I'm using language! It's probably educational.

I've won quite a few games while a couple of opponents (Caleb and Steph) seem unbeatable and are probably cheating, though I haven't figured out how yet. My uncle Aldo from Georgia challenged me to a game out of nowhere and thrummed me soundly. In a follow-up game he seemed to have other things on his mind, or perhaps I was actually playing his son, my 7-year-old cousin Aldo, the entire time, because I managed to eek out a win.

It's been fun, if not time consuming. I'm not sure I'll keep up with it, I may just drop it the way I did cyber-chess. Until that time, though, I'll keep searching for the perfect use for this 'Q' and gleaning whatever column fodder I can from the distractions the Internet offers.

Today's "Because I Said So" column in The Commercial Appeal:

It isn't about winning and losing.

I have a child who comes home from school each day, tackles his homework (always homework first!), and then it's straight to the computer or the Wii for an afternoon of video games. Within a half-hour, I can hear his anguished cries of defeat and near, so very near, expletives.

It's an addiction, the video games. I can see the sweat beading on his forehead when he's away from it too long, the trembling in his thumbs. On Saturday mornings, he's the first one up and standing in front of the television playing whatever his current obsession might be. These days, it's one featuring an elf who may or may not be riding on a seahorse and wielding a large butter knife. I'm awakened by the vocal frustrations of his losing a round to a gnome riding a starfish, or something.

The blips and bright lights of this simulated world are all too real for him, the losses far too personal, and this is an issue.

So we stick with the tried-and-true mantra -- it isn't about winning or losing; it's about enjoying the challenge itself. This, of course, falls on deaf ears, or ears too stimulated by the bells and whistles of the game.

I know of what I speak. I should admit to you that I've stopped writing this column no fewer than three times to check on the seven different games of "Words With Friends" that I have going at the moment. I'm happy to say that I'm winning five of them. This makes for a good afternoon regardless of what we, as parents, insist.

If you're not familiar with "Words With Friends," it's the online version of what we used to call Scrabble. Alec Baldwin was recently and famously removed from an airplane for refusing to end a "Words With Friends" game; it's addictive enough to forfeit first class.

As a child, I spent long evenings with my family around the dining room table attempting to parse vocabulary words from the "Q," "P" and five "E's" in my rack. Aunts and uncles would come over, and we'd make a night out of it with snacks and good-natured competition. The adults appeared to be more interested in winning and not losing.
I'm still playing with my uncle Aldo, who is 500 miles away in Cordele, Ga. And I'm playing with my wife and a friend, who are sitting 6 feet away on the sofa (I'm winning all three of these games).

Is this a new era of family game night? Games are being played, perhaps not in the same room, or even the same time zone. The fun is in the games themselves and not necessarily the winning face-to-face (I just took the lead in a sixth game), and my win over a friend in Midtown is no more enjoyable than the experience of the humiliating defeat at the thumbs of one in East Memphis.

My son isn't yet into "Words With Friends," though I expect he will be soon enough. And when he is, I'm sure he'll be a force to reckon with if his scores on vocabulary tests and his skill maneuvering that seahorse-riding elf are any indication.

Until the time I'm able to crush his spirit in cyber-Scrabble from across the house, or across the room, though, I'll continue preaching the ideology we've discussed.

And, of course, to always do as I say and not as I "D-O" (3 points!). 

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. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Because I Said So: Bedtime pleas won't deter parents' voyage into silence

I only have one child left who will stand for me to read to her. The boys consider themselves too old and learned for that sort of thing and G, at 5 years old, will only be read to by her mother these days. But S still looks forward to being read to at bedtime. She doesn't look forward so much to bedtime itself, but seems to enjoy our time together and the stories told.

We just finished up "Treasure Island" and we both enjoyed it. I was worried she would grow bored with Robert Louis Stevenson's tale as it's written with all the formal, roundabout 19th-century speak of the Victorian language. But she hung in there. After a chapter - or during - I would stop and we would discuss what was going on so that we both stayed on course and understood just what the conversation and action was all about. And there is plenty of action for a 9 year old, from threats and gun play to knife-throwing, mutiny and desertion on an uninhabitable island.

It was great fun reading this classic to my daughter and I'm proud of her for staying with it, thinking about it and being willing to discuss it all.

The book and my daughter's own bedtime mutiny is the ballast for today's Because I Said So column copied below. S and I hope you enjoy it, mateys.

I've lately been reading Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" to my 9-year-old daughter at bedtime. Chapter by chapter, we've sailed into the world of buccaneers and squalls, nameless islands and chatty parrots. And night by night, Somerset has pleaded for just 30 more minutes to stay up. The thought of sleep to her, to most kids I would imagine, is akin to walking the plank.

A whole day's worth of fun, hours' worth of television, video games and arguing with siblings, she seems to think, are to be found in that final half-hour before lights out. The unfairness of being forced to her bunk at a reasonable time is quite apparent to her.

Like the characters of Long John Silver, Captain Flint and young Jim Hawkins, Somerset schemes and plots nightly to uncover the treasure of consciousness past the 9-o'clock hour. What fun must take place from then until morning with adults eating ice cream as though it were good for us, drinking a cask of rum, or watching television and movies with explosions and expletives.

Sure, all of that happens, but it's our right.

After four decades of living, my cumulative experience and wisdom have led me to understand one truth, one undeniable right as unwavering as the pirate's code itself: "zzz" marks the spot. Our children's slumber marks the spot at the end of the day when no one is asking for anything, whining over perceived wrongs, destroying my ship-shape kitchen or arguing with me. There is silence over the horizon of bedtime, and it's what we parents set our course for from the moment we wake. The S.S. Because I Said So is fully provisioned and looking to anchor in the protected Bay of Solitude.

My daughter pleads, rationalizes and emphatically insists that she is not tired. The dark circles, half-closed lids and general crankiness, however, tell me otherwise. By the end of a long school day, there is a map of fatigue etched across her face.

And still she begs.

She's not the only one. We've suffered through night terrors, bad dreams, needing another drink of water ... drink of milk ... hug ... trip to the bathroom. Children are a deceptive crew when it comes to evading sleep. The tricks seem to be universal, and not all that dissimilar to ones I employed as a child.

So perhaps I had it coming to me. Maybe we do reap what we sow. Maybe I should have welcomed sleep when I was 9, and looked upon it as the chance for rest and renewal. And if I had, maybe my own kids would think of bedtime in the same way and leave us with calm waters and balmy breezes each night instead of our regularly scheduled 8:30 p.m. mutiny.

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. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Photograph

"I learned how to play this song on guitar when I was your age," I told my son and his friend as we pulled out of the friend's driveway earlier. My son sat beside me and continued to text while his friend worked on a candy bar in the backseat. "MTV had only recently been born, but we didn't have cable so I'd spend entire weekends at my friend's house watching the twelve videos they rotated through. This was one of them."

"What is it?" C asked.

I was elated he'd asked; elated that he was still breathing there next to me with his nose in his flip phone.

"'Photograph' by Def Leppard." I went on to explain who they were and that the drummer had lost an arm in a car accident yet continued to play with a specially designed drum set. Behind me there was the rustle of candy wrapper, and beside me, more click-click-clicking. "MTV began in August, 1981," I ventured, somewhat ashamed that I was able to reel it off quicker than I could any of my kids' birthdays.

I took guitar lessons when I was 13 or so. My poor instructor attempted to teach me the chords and theory and how to play the damn thing. I wanted to learn how to play 'Photograph' and, perhaps, 'Back in Black' by AC/DC. I was an awful student and it shows today, I still can't play. It wasn't completely my fault, though, or his. I have no rhythm. I could memorize the notes, I just couldn't do anything with them. The idea of learning the principles of music was as foreign to my newly-teenage, freshly-MTVed brain, with all of its lasers and pyrotechnics, as the idea of typing a message to someone on a telephone might have been then. 

I watch my kids now as they struggle to master whatever interests them and it's fascinating for me. They seem so naturally talented in ways that I wasn't, or in ways that I didn't recognize at the time. The other night, while the adults were sitting glassy-eyed and brain dead in front of the talentless field that was the Grammy Awards, JP sat at my computer and wrote a story about the Great Depression for school. It is a fantastic piece. I sat and watched S sketching a bowl of grapes with an onion resting beside it as I cooked dinner the other night and, while the proportions were slightly skewed, I saw the same determination and concentration in her face that I see in my sister's when she sketches. C is also a great writer, having won a Memphis in May short story contest last year, and he's an ever-improving baritone saxophone player as well.

I think one of the greatest things about having kids is watching them develop, seeing their talents and interests grow on a daily basis. They may not stick with each one, they'll probably find new ones to explore and work at as they progress through school and age, but I see now that they commit to ideas and see them through, and that they see the value in such endeavors.

It means a lot to me.

In the car this evening, I had a very distinct muscle memory for how to play the guitar solo in 'Photograph.' I'm sure I couldn't play it if you handed me a guitar because I wouldn't be able to play anything if you handed me a guitar, I have no aptitude for the instrument. And my kids may realize they don't have the talent it takes to continue on a particular track, but for now it's great fun for me to watch them and fun for them to make the attempt.

Much more fun, I'm sure, than a history lesson with soundtrack by The Buggles.

Uninspired

Inspiration.

Photographs. Friends. Family. Music. Conversations. Films. Books. Books. Books.

Inspiration is an ingredient for writing, but there needs to be more. You need to be hungry and driven enough to even step into that kitchen in the first place. It's work. I surround myself with the things I need visually and aurally to propel me to write - old family photos, background music, whatever I'm reading at the moment, and my muses. These are integral to keeping the words flowing, but it takes something more to begin, and I'm finding it's so much easier to start when I'm only halfway there.

Some writers are scared of the blank page, but I welcome it. I'm more confident and comfortable knowing I need another 40,000 words than with the thought that the 80,000 I have need to be overhauled. I'm not talking about my initial read-through and revision upon completion of a first draft. I enjoy that. I love the part where I read over a chapter and make changes to sentences, tweak a turn of phrase and bend a metaphor or two. But this idea that there are flaws in the storyline, or with a character? I can't figure out where to get started. There must be some fissure I can push my finger into that will allow me to peel back the rough rind and work with what's in there.

The inspiration wall over my desk is hung with old photos and new, with hand-written quotes and memorabilia that have helped me get to the completed drafts of two novels. I listened to months' worth of Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Thelonius Monk, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins and dozens of others to put myself in the right mind to write 5 NIGHT STAND. And yet, neither the photos nor the music seem helpful when it comes to revising. That's work.

Others have been writing and posting about inspiration lately. Bobby, over at Spillmanville, waxed eloquent about music and food and drink. Everyone everywhere is inspired, whether a writer, painter, photographer, musician, photographer, chef, computer programmer, teacher, landscaper or architect. It's something personal, something from within that is touched off by something from the outside, and I hope you find yours.

I know this, too: successful writers will tell you not to wait around for it. That to wait for inspiration is to sit at your desk and stare at that blank sheet without ever filling it up. So I don't. I sit down and write, surrounded by the things and sounds that fill my imagination.

But right now those blank pages are all filled up and I'm glancing around for the spark that will ignite the fire to light the way back into this thing. And right now I'm only finding a confidence-shattering darkness.

Because I Said So: Dinner table plays host to cycle of life on school days

I tend to write my column about larger themes - the importance of family and friends, memories of childhood, time travel. I don't think there is any right or wrong way, this just happens to be what is more comfortable for me, to begin with something small and simple with my kids and shine a brighter light on it. It works most weeks. This week, though, I decided to find something small and stay small. That small thing is actually quite large - our dining room table, a massive piece of oak that seats nine most nights - but I found it to be piled high with metaphors, memories and, yes, themes.

Please enjoy this week's "Because I Said So" column.

There is a floating island of marine trash in the northern Pacific Ocean. Have you heard of this? It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, and it's a swirling mass of plastics and chemical sludge collected from around the world that some reports claim is twice the size of Hawaii.

Our dining room table is a lot like that.

We're a family that eats meals together. We have dinner every night in our dining room at a massive 4-by-8 solid oak piece of furniture my wife got me for Father's Day years ago. Can't see it? That's because all 32 square feet of it is covered in backpacks, jackets, folders, papers, novels, textbooks, mail and other paraphernalia.

You know that giant magnet Wile E. Coyote uses to try to pull Roadrunner into his clutches from across the desert? Or the tractor beam Darth Vader's henchmen use to pull the Millennium Falcon into the Death Star?

Our table is also a lot like these.

When the front door opens in the afternoons, a strong wind blows in and carries with it hungry and energetic kids with their conversation, laughter, shouts of complaint and the rumpled husk of a school day that is pulled along in their wake. The dining room attracts it all and looks like a side-of-the-road ditch, like one of those weedy patches where people seem to know to dump old sofas, bags of garbage and lonely, single shoes.

The only difference is that my kids don't bring old sofas home from school.

No sofa, and there are no environmental groups clamoring for volunteers and grant money to clean up my dining room. Perhaps a chain gang of prisoners could come in every day with their orange safety vests to spear last week's graded homework, lunch boxes and my daughter's socks.

The kids somehow find their way through the detritus to the surface where they are able to carve out a nook for homework and snacks. It must be like descending through atmospheric dust clouds to land on a strange, heretofore-unseen planet, or hacking through a dense jungle with machetes to gaze upon a remote Incan pyramid littered with juice boxes, mittens, crayons and pencil shavings.

By dinnertime, it's all cleared away again. I don't know how it happens, but they manage to leave their video games and texting long enough to scrape it all onto the floor and shove it into neutral corners, rendering the table surprisingly clean enough to eat from.

Somehow, though, early the next morning, it's all back as they prepare for school once again. The dining table becomes a staging area, a conference table where important documents -- permission slips, graded homework, progress reports -- await signatures. Lunch boxes sit lined up and ready to be stuffed into already overstuffed backpacks.

It's the cycle of school-day life, a messy microcosm that sees the clutter of a workday metamorphose into suppertime conversation.

This scene must be played out everywhere by those with school-age children, whether it's an entry hall, kitchen table, mud room or back porch. Every house has such a place, a low spot where things collect like rainwater, a Bermuda Triangle of shoes and coats, spiral notebooks and last week's quizzes.

This table has developed character through its marked and nicked surface garnered from gatherings of friends and family, and piled high with meals and math. It is a family phenomenon, a geologic anomaly in an otherwise (mostly) clean house, brought about not by earthquake or hurricane, but by children -- a force of nature the likes of which I never reckoned I'd reckon with on a daily basis.

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. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Behind The Wheel: The Rude One

This is another part in my ongoing series about the time I spent as a chauffeur in Panama City Beach, FL, in the mid-90s. Because he's made the news in the past couple of days for some asinine remarks, I thought I'd write about the time I drove Mark Wahlberg. Actually, "drove" should be in sarcastic quotes and "Mark Wahlberg" should read "Marky Mark," because that's who he was at the time.

Almost 20 years ago Panama City Beach used to host MTV for a week-long spring break festival that was taped and aired to the world. They may still have such programming, I don't know, I'm not even sure if MTV is still on the air. But back then it was a big deal and we were contracted to handle all of their transportation. Marky Mark showed up and did his little song and dance number or whatever it was he did back then and on the day he was to fly out I showed up at his hotel to pick him up and drive him to the airport. I was in a 15-passenger van because Marky Mark didn't travel alone. No, he had a whole group of lackeys and hangers-on, enough to fill up a van. So I stood outside the hotel and waited. And waited. And waited. I went back into the hotel to discuss his absence with the front desk several times. I called my boss, who called Marky Mark's handlers, and they searched the grounds for him. After about an hour of this, word came down that he was on the 11th hole of the hotel's golf course and had decided to leave the next day. He just didn't bother to let anyone know. Asshat.

It's pained me over the years to enjoy the movies he's made and to almost - almost - become a fan. I like a lot of the movies, and came close to putting his rudeness of two decades ago to rest. But then he goes and comments on being a real-life vigilante and I'm reminded that he's really just a big, goofy face on screen. Or on MTV, if it still exists.

I wasn't much of anybody back then. I'm still not. My time wasn't worth as much as Marky Mark's time was, but it was still something to me, and to my boss and his small business. Yet Marky didn't take that, or anything, or anybody, into consideration.

I drove a lot of celebrities back then and, while most were aloof and needed to be pointed in which direction to walk, they were at least cordial. When I returned to pick up the Marky group the next morning, there was no mention of the previous day, just a bunch of kids in long shorts and backwards ball caps. I got back at him though. I snubbed him, I didn't even tell him, as he exited the van, to have a nice flight as I normally would have. That'll show him.

The word today is that Mark Wahlberg, the movie star, apologized for his recent statements, which is big of him. After all of these years, I haven't received an apology, and I hope my snub still stings.

Going Deaf, Quietly

I'll go on a tear sometimes when I find myself in a used bookstore and buy up an armload of books without really studying them first. I bring them home and set them in a stack on my desk or a table where they'll be left for a few days just so I can gaze upon them.

I love books.

Eventually, of course, those books need to be given a home and I'll spread them out among various bookcases or, if they're lucky, place them within the same case where they'll be allowed to remain a family. And then, occasionally, I'll wander through my shelves and look for something to read.

This is how Deaf Sentence by David Lodge (Viking, 2008) found its way into my house, onto my shelf and, recently, into my hands again. I'm not even sure where this book came from or why I might have picked it up. I'd never heard of the author and the cover is hideous. I always take the dust jackets off books while I read them to preserve them, but I would have taken this one off regardless; it's awful.

The book, however, is good. It's the story of Desmond Bates, takes place in a town north of London, and involves his elderly father, younger wife, children, step-children and a crazy American Ph.D. candidate. Bates is a retired professor of linguistics who is going deaf and describes, in detail, what it's like to go slowly deaf. That must be how deaf people live, within their own heads, hashing things out, paying attention to every detail that doesn't involve sound. Bates is very thoughtful and reflective, and Lodge takes his time with this character.

As Bates goes slowly deaf, he deals with the mundane, day-to-day tasks of a retired person. In these days of repetition, however, is thrust an aging father near the end of his life and a student studying the linguistics of suicide notes. The characters and their plights weave in and out of each other and leave the reader, at times, wondering how and why it's all going to come together in the end.

It does come together, just give it time.

The reason one might not be compelled to give this book the time required is because it's a quiet book. And that speaks to me. I like quiet books. I've documented here many times my fondness for the books of Richard Russo, Paul Auster and Richard Bausch, and they all write what I would call "quiet" books.

I received a rejection from an agent recently for my manuscript, The Simplest Pattern. The rejection was full of encouragement and compliments, but did say that it is "too quiet." I know this has more to do with the market than with what this agent thinks makes a good book, but it still stings. Probably more than anything, it stings because it's completely out of my control. It's how I write. It's how I wrote The Simplest Pattern, it's how I'm writing my next book and it's how I'll write my tenth book. I can't change the way I write (not to that degree), nor do I want to, but neither can I change the market place.

I'm not sure what the market was like when Lodge wrote Deaf Sentence, which was published in 2008, and was his 14th novel. I don't know what the industry was like when he wrote and sold his first novel. This is the first book (though it won't be the last) by Lodge that I've ever read, but I'm sure there is not a lot of difference in voice between that first and this fourteenth.

Coming across this book on my shelf was a treat, and I looked forward each day to finding a nice, quiet place to read it.

(Near) The End

I keep a book of essays close by and pick it up every now and again to see what those who have written and published novels have to say about it all. The book is called The Secret Miracle: The Novelist's Handbook (Holt, 2010). The book is neither a handbook nor much of a secret to those of us who write, but it is a great resource for inspiration and for confirming that, as we peck our way through 300 pages of fiction, we're not completely insane for the task.

The book is broken up into questions addressed to many well-known, prolific or just-beginning writers, and their answers. A recent question caught my interest: "How do you approach the end of a book?" I think many of us readers and writers have the impression that, for those who write for a living, writing (and finishing) a novel must be commonplace. This book, and this question in particular, disproves such a myth. Answers include, in part, "With mounting anxiety (Paul Auster) ... "With very intense exhilaration" (Christina Garcia) ... "Oh, with relief" (Colm Toibin) ... "Dumbfounded awe and moments of panic" (Francisco Goldman) ... "With caution" (Daniel Handler) ... "with fear and excitement" (Jennifer Egan) ... "In great haste, with my breath held (Michael Chabon) ... "You don't approach it. It approaches you." (Claire Messud).

As I reach the end of the book I'm working on (and my third manuscript), I know just where each of these writers is coming from. Whether you've worked on a book for eight hours a day for a long time, or 500 words a day for an even longer time, finishing that book is an exciting, frightening, happy and sad thing to do. As Edwidge Danticat answered, she approaches the end "With great trepidation ... By then I'm also dealing with my own sadness about leaving these characters behind ... "

Long days and nights have been spent with the characters I've created. I find myself in mundane situations - taking the kids to school, walking through the grocery store, cooking dinner or making a transaction at the bank - and wondering how this or that character might behave in such a situation. I drift into sleep thinking about them and wake up with them each morning. And now, it's nearly over.

That's not to say the work is over, of course. I'm only talking about a first draft here. Finishing a first draft reminds me of being a kid (most things remind me of being a kid) and made to rake the leaves in our yard. We lived in a house in East Memphis shaded by massive oaks, magnolias, dogwoods and one angry, little crab apple tree. Every so often I was told to go out and clean up the yard. I would rake and rake and rake the leaves into a pile, or a series of piles, yet each time I thought I might be finished I would look back and more had fallen. Or I'd find that I partially scattered a pile while raking another. And when I went to neaten up that pile I disturbed something in my wake that needed attention. I must have looked confused and lost in our front yard, going from corner to corner raking up a few leaves here and then to the next to rearrange.

This is how the end is to me. I'm a matter of days from finishing this first draft, yet I'll add some detail as I'm going along and realize it references back to something that should have happened three chapters prior. So I go back and add that bit in (I rake those leaves into a pile), and that disturbs a thought or two in the following chapter. Or I'll think better of a conversation in the last chapter, revise it, and then make a note to myself that a main character needs to mention that paragraph in the next chapter.

My yard must look like a mess, but it's getting there.

Of course, once it's where I think it should be, once that massive pile of leaves is there in front of me so I can stand back, lean on my rake, and marvel at it, I know my task isn't complete. I know the next thing I'll want to do is to let some of my friends, those who are willing, run through that pile of leaves energetically and with reckless abandon. They'll want to know how deep the leaves are, how soft, examine the color and smell of them, and try to determine from which trees they all fell. And they'll make a mess of it, I know. That's all part of it. I'll come in behind them with my well-rested rake and try to put it all back together again and, hopefully, those friends will be willing to help.

The greatest anxiety, of course, comes after it's all finished; once those leaves are bagged up and are placed on the curb for pick-up. Because then the fear becomes that they won't get picked up at all, and that they'll just sit there as traffic whizzes by, becoming moldy and breaking down into compost.

I've already got a couple of bags going to worm shit out there, I can see them from where I sit. Here's hoping the end of this book will come easily, that the revision will go smoothly and that someone will stop at my curb and heft that bag into their truck.

Because I Said So: Our time machine is wrapped up in a new year

TARDIS (it's a science fiction thing)

A new column for a new year. This is my latest column in The Commercial Appeal.

My great-grandmother, Catherine Zanone, always preached that if you work on the first day of a new year, then you'll work for the entire year. Sage words of superstition from someone who lived and worked through the Great Depression.

I've always heard, as well, that whatever you do on the first day of a new year, you'll do the entire year. It's where resolutions come from, I suppose; the get up and go to actually get up and go, whether to the gym or a walk around the block.

I don't cotton to resolutions myself. Yet, on the first day of 2012, among other things, I sat and watched the first episode of the new season of a wildly popular British television show called "Doctor Who." It's a show I've never watched, which makes me the minority in my own home. This past summer, my wife and kids spent mornings at the pool and then long afternoons watching past episodes and whole seasons of "Doctor Who" together. It seemed an entertaining bonding experience for all of them.

I thought I would make an effort this day, this first of the new year, to take an interest in their interests. I have to say, I still don't get it. Just like resolutions, neither do I cotton to the show's genre of science fiction. But my kids get it. They gasped and commented on subtleties gleaned from past shows; they laughed and cheered at this Time Lord (the Doctor is a Time Lord, for those fellow uninitiated).

Near the end of the episode we watched, the Doctor says that with the aid of his TARDIS (his a time machine, I learned) he has access "to everything that has ever been or ever will be."

I've written here plenty about time travel -- I don't know why that is, whether there is a reluctance in me to see my kids grow up, or the desire to speed that process along. I believe time travel is possible, not in the science fiction concepts of "Doctor Who," Audrey Niffenegger's novel "The Time Traveler's Wife" or Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, but in flashbacks triggered by trips through family photo albums and stories from our childhood, from our parents' childhood, and all the way back with tales of the Great Depression from generations past.

The new year, and a new beginning, is its own time machine. That auspicious stroke of midnight is a time to reflect on the past year while looking ahead to the future, both immediate and beyond. It's a moment between calendars, just between taking the old down and hanging a new, that is filled with nostalgia, reflection and possibilities.

And, sure, it's a time for resolutions. The time to promise to be a better person or to make a difference; to change who we are and become who we want to be, whether a better parent, better storyteller or time traveling Time Lord. It's a time to vow to do something as simple as recalling the good from the past year or promising to sit and watch a favorite show with your child.

It's all up to you -- everything that has ever happened or ever will happen to you is in the palm of your hand.

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. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Because I Said So: Christmas spirit should be more than seasonal

Coming up with column ideas is not an easy task. I don't know how others do it several times a week, it's difficult enough for me to do every two weeks.

At this time of year it seems there is even more pressure. It's Christmas, and with that there needs to be a big splash, right? This is the column meant to be a present under the tree, with a big, red bow, for my readers.

This is the fourth Christmas I've written a "Because I Said So" column. Some are funny, some are touching; all, I think, are hit and miss. Hopefully, though, I've hit more than I've missed.

Please enjoy this year's offering, and please have yourself a Merry Little Christmas, from my family to yours.

Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge remind us to seize the moment and to treat every day as though it were Christmas.

George Bailey and Clarence the angel remind us that no man is a failure who has friends.

Buddy the Elf reminds us that the best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.

And Clark Griswold and Cousin Eddie remind us that it's illegal to empty a chemical toilet into the storm sewer.

My 5-year-old daughter reminded me the other day that there are still no presents wrapped beneath our tree. There are presents, to be sure, just not wrapped as yet. But we're busy, aren't we? We parents with our jobs and bills and responsibilities. It's easy to let the time of year slip away from us, or for its meaning to get lost in a knotted string of numbers and details.

It was quite a number of years ago that a man came in to shop at a little retail store I had Downtown and we chatted at the register. I'm sure at some point I talked about my four kids because, as he was leaving, he stopped, turned around and came back in to thrust something in my hand. "That's for your kids," he said before leaving again. I looked down at a hundred-dollar bill. I was speechless. Times were tough, and the money would come in handy; it was all so unexpected.

I told my kids about the stranger. He was rail thin and had a long white beard and white hair. Months later, during December, my daughter mentioned the man out of nowhere and said he must have been Santa Claus.
I had never even considered that.

Stories abound lately to remind us what the season is about and that it shouldn't be merely a seasonal feeling. They remind me of the good Samaritan who wandered into my shop that day. Across the country, anonymous donors are paying off layaway balances at Kmart stores, ensuring a Christmas morning for kids who might not have otherwise had much of one.

And, in probably the greatest gift of the holiday season, troops from all over the country are returning home from Iraq. Men and women who have been away from loved ones for months and years will be able to see their families and hold them in the light of a Christmas tree at last.

Bing Crosby, among others, sang that he'd be home for Christmas. Make a home in your hearts for the less fortunate during Christmas this year, and in every season of the next year. It's what Scrooge would have wanted, it's the spirit that George Bailey was searching for and it's something even Clark Griswold found.

The spirit of the season is all some people want to see wrapped up beneath the tree this year. My daughter will be taking inventory.

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.

"Not Just An Anonymous Number"

I'm not going to get too much into the whole online shopping vs. local shopping debate this holiday season. I've done plenty of both; the UPS man is making just as many trips up our driveway as we are out of it. For 10 years, though, I owned a small, specialty retail store in Downtown Memphis, so I have a soft spot for the entrepreneurs out there who have so much riding on every holiday season. My solidarity with them is also why this op-ed piece by the great Richard Russo for The New York Times (Amazon's Jungle Logic) struck home with me. Likewise, it's why I find this rebuttal by Farhood Manjoo for Slate (Don't Support Your Local Bookseller) absurd and argumentative merely for the sake of contradicting.

The argument and editorials have made their way around the internet quicker than a picture of a kitten in a Christmas stocking, so instead of opining either way I'll leave it with the great Paul Auster, not weighing in on the subject at all, but simply being interviewed recently for BAMcinématek (the Brooklyn Academy of Music). In speaking of the owner of a tobacco shop he frequents in his neighborhood to buy his Schimmelpenninck cigars (the place is the basis for Auster's short story "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story," which was the basis for the film "Smoke"), he hits the nail on the head regarding the importance of supporting local shops and shopkeepers. In my opinion anyway.

I started  thinking about him and how in neighborhoods in New York, in big cities, you have these relationships with people. They're not friendships, certainly not friendships, but they're warm acquaintance-ships that enhance daily life, make it better, make you feel that you're not just an anonymous number living in an anonymous Metropole; we had some very nice conversations.

Beneath The Underdog

I read a lot, or try to, and I like to write about what I read. In doing this, though, I've taken a page from Nick Hornby and his excellent column in The Believer, "Stuff I've Been Reading." Hornby doesn't write about books he doesn't like. I respect that, he's a novelist and probably doesn't appreciate critics going around bashing his work, so he doesn't partake of that. Instead, he writes glowingly about those he does like.

But sometimes disappointment just overcomes me and I have to say something about it. Such is the case with Beneath The Underdog: His World As Composed By Mingus, the memoir of jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. This is not a current book by any means, it was first published in 1971, and I've had it for years. I don't recall where I got it, I probably picked it up at a used bookstore at some point and knew I'd want to read it one day. That day came last weekend when I finally grabbed it off the shelf to find out what Mingus was all about.

Turns out Mingus was a pimp, which I did not know. He also played some jazz, he was a very progressive bass player and composer, which I did know, and about which I know very little else, still. But I do know a whole lot more about his being a pimp, and about his sex life.

Mingus was born in 1922 and grew up in the Watts area of Los Angeles. The book, while a memoir, is written in third-person by someone (or something, some spirit perhaps) who is with Mingus at all times. Most of the prose is in conversation with one person or another. It's a lot like listening to one side of a phone conversation. There is a stream of consciousness, beat quality to it, which is just fine for a book on jazz, but it gets tedious after a while.

Also, it's not a book about jazz. If I'd known Mingus was a pimp and wanted to read a memoir about Mingus the Pimp, then this would be the book for me. But I wanted to read about Mingus the bassist, Mingus the composer, Mingus the civil rights champion. I got very little of that. There are brief glimpses, of course. There is Mingus on stage with Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, but then it's right back to Mingus and a date or wife or mistress and their very graphic, very explicit sexual encounters. It got to the point where it read more like the collected writings of a college student recounting sexual conquests to his fraternity brothers, in detail.

And what of Mingus the civil rights activist? I knew before getting into the book that he wasn't fond of white people, but I came away with almost no understanding of why (not that a black person born in 1920s America needs to explain himself on that, but still, I'd like to know his experiences). He bashes white men and culture, and the South in particularly, though there's only one story glossing over a trip to the South. He wrote "Fables of Faubus" on the great album Mingus Ah Um as a derision of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who tried to block integration in Little Rock's public schools. It's a great song, a great album, and there is no mention of it in Beneath The Underdog. And, as much as he did comment on his hatred of the white man, Mingus's treatment of women, by his own account, was little better than the white man was treating the black man in the first half of the 20th century.

I prefer an autobiography over a scholar's biography of jazz artists because in the writing, or telling, of their story, there is a certain improvisational feel as you get with all good jazz music. They tell their story with segues and language that make the reader feel as though they're listening to a record or a late-night jam session. I recently read Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography by Sidney Bechet, the jazz cornet master. He was born in 1897, and so of a different generation than Mingus, but certainly no less hard a time for a black man to live in. Yet Bechet talks more of the music than anything; he had a great passion and respect for the music - he treated it gentle - and it is this love of his profession that shines through in his autobiography.

As gentle as he might have treated the music, it was not a gentle time by any means, and being a jazz musicianer (as Bechet calls it) was not such a gentle job. Bechet was a bad son of a bitch who spent time in a French prison before being deported from Paris for accidentally shooting a woman (he was aiming for someone else). For all of its sweet sounds, jazz is not the cherubic grin of Louis Armstrong or the limp tones of Kenny G (shudder). It's the music of a painful and dangerous American past, in it is the story of slavery, Jim Crow and civil rights. Sure there were pimps, hustlers, gangsters, drug addicts, killers and thieves among its characters, but there was also, always, the music as a salve. Mingus's memoir, unfortunately, is much too heavy on the former and only a few notes struck on the latter.

Mingus was insane. He had his demons and portions of the book are told through a conversation between Mingus and his psychiatrist, Dr. Wallach. Near the end of the book, when Mingus has committed himself to Bellevue's psychiatric ward, is when he writes the most about music and wanting to be out of the hospital so he could pursue his music. The rest of the book is the perverse rantings of a misogynistic hustler and that's a shame because Mingus, for all of his myriad faults, was one of jazz - and all music's - great composers. Or at least, that's what I've heard.

On My Desk: The Chicagoan

The Chicagoan

Because I Said So: Sci-fi has become fact for wired-in generation

Column 12/8/11

I recently had the pleasure of sitting in on a lecture given by hometown son Joel Seligstein, Memphis City Schools graduate and current Facebook software engineer. He was in town from California to visit family and to speak to the eighth-grade CLUE class at White Station Middle School about his work.

It was like going back in time for me, sitting in a school auditorium again, a time machine lacking in leg room with the same small seats, the same smell of adolescence and apathy I remember from so long ago. Except this was the future. We were all there to hear about how the machines make Facebook run.

As a testament to Facebook's popularity, it wasn't until close to 20 minutes into the talk that Joel even asked the assembled 100-plus students how many use the social network. Naturally, nearly every hand went up, including mine.

But I wonder. Certainly many of those students, if not all, have accounts, and have for years. But how active are they? Two of my four children are online, yet their interaction seems limited to a status update here, a snarky comment there. My theory is that their lack of activity is due to the fact that I and their mother, and our friends, are on it. Many people still tend to think of Facebook as a kid's toy, some sort of video game, yet I know close to 700 adults who participate.

When we were kids, our parents' social network consisted of neighbors and work colleagues whom we never saw. We didn't want any part of their social networking. We preferred them to be as anti-social as possible, to focus all of their attention on us and our need for action figures and the new fad of cable television.

People my age find the Internet and its social networks so fascinating, I think, because it's science fiction to us. It's all 1970s drive-in movies, it's George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick, it's "Logan's Run" and "Alien." And, with such a large population in cyberspace and on social networking sites posting so much detailed information about their users, not unlike a menu, I'm afraid it's a little bit of "Soylent Green" as well.

Social networks satisfy our nostalgia for the future.

While our children have grown up in the computer age, we never even dreamed we'd be living in a world that requires secret passwords. Secret passwords! And computers in our pockets. Pocket-size! To do anything as simple and mundane as banking these days, we have to have a username. A code name! I regularly receive text messages on my pocket computer from my 13-year-old son that require a decoder. Aggravating!

Short of jetpacks and flying cars, it's everything we were promised as kids, running around outside (the Internet has deleted any reason to even go outside anymore) and pretending to be The Six-Million Dollar Man, Luke Skywalker or Charlton Heston.

But our children take it as a matter of course. iPod? Same-old, same-old. They take their 4G Network for granted just as we must have taken, I don't know, sticks, for granted.

As our kids grow, they'll expect more and better. They'll expect faster and no spam (there was no spam in our childhood scenarios on Tatooine or in the Fortress of Solitude). Kids today will walk in the clouds, in a cloud technology that allows a middle school student in Memphis to show and tell with his new Facebook friend in California.

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.

Behind the Wheel: The Legend

As a chauffeur based out of Panama City Beach in the mid-1990s, I met some celebrities. Some were big, some were just rising, some were little-known or on their way out. None had the talent, though, of Dave Brubeck. And I didn't even drive him! He was playing a concert at the Marina Civic Center and staying at the Marriott at Bay Point where I came across him in the lobby and stopped to say hello. He was very gracious to take a moment (to take five) and talk with me.

He was old then and today is his 91st birthday. Happy birthday, Dave Brubeck!

Hav-A-Tampa

When I owned Memphis's oldest smokeshop (FYI, this shop is now home to The Brass Door, an Irish pub), I met a lot of characters. A lot of people passed through the door looking for this cigar or that tobacco, or just to see the building and get a sense of the city's history. There was some history there, too. History that included local and regional politicians, actors, films, writers and businessmen.

And did I mention characters?

A guy stopped in one day, having walked across the bridge from Arkansas. He was traveling by canoe from Kentucky down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. We talked for a while, he wore thick glasses held together with tape and clothes that looked like they'd been traveling downriver, and he was in to buy some pipe tobacco because the smoke helped keep the gnats and mosquitoes off of him while in his tent. He said canoeing the river was just something he'd always wanted to do.

I wrote a story shortly after that about a man escaping from a tragedy, a man who wasn't on the run from any law, but from a memory and an accident; that's all it was, just an accident. He's canoeing the Mississippi River from his home in Illinois to New Orleans (though he has no real destination, other than "away") and the entire story takes place as he's close to drowning on an island just outside Memphis.

The story is called "Headwaters" and it's never made even a ripple when it comes to being published, but I've always liked the piece. I pull it out and tinker with it from time to time, see how Ben (that's my man in the canoe) is coming along with the water swirling around him and threatening to pull him under.

Since writing that story, I've penned (penciled?) a couple of novels and am working on a third now. Within all these swirling words and papers, I'm also trying to find an agent to sell a book, trying to keep the rejections from filling my lungs and pulling me under. In this search I've come across some blogs (too many to count, really) kept by literary agents and editors across the country, and I follow some of them for their wisdom and insider information. One such blog is called Glass Cases and is kept up by Sarah LaPolla, an agent with Curtis Brown Ltd. in New York. On her blog, she invites writers to submit short-short stories to be featured there. The pieces are to be kept at 1,500 words or less; there is no pay, there is no promise of representation. It's just a place where one avid reader can present a story to other avid readers.

I sent her an excerpt of "Headwaters" - I call it "Hav-A-Tampa" - a while back and she said she'd be delighted to feature it. And so here it is. The excerpt is a memory Ben has, as he's swirling and sinking in the Big Muddy, of a trip to Memphis as a child with his daddy.

I hope you'll enjoy it, I still do. And it's nice to see a home for it, even if it is just part of it. It's nice to know Ben has maybe found a foothold and can breathe again, even if it's only for a short while.