On communication, professional and otherwise.
A few million published words into our career, we don’t believe too much in the romance of around writing. But sometimes you do have to appreciate a young Hunter S. Thompson at work in his Nash Rambler in the Northern California woods with a cigarette in his mouth and a Schlitz tallboy on the front seat. You have to figure out whatever he wrote there was just a little better for this setting.
I hadn’t seen this Flip video production since Scout and I made it, a decade ago. Watching it again, I couldn’t stop crying.
Why? my wife wondered.
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I think it’s because I realized this little drama takes place precisely, almost to the very day of the teetering middle of Scout’s youth.
This single, melodramatic and cornball video captures the beauty of the baby (and the baby’s dorky dad) …
… and the seriousness of the young woman. (And the beginning of the dad’s loss of innocence in the matter of her sports, too.)
Scout’s parents prepared ourselves for the end of her soccer career.
But the middle slipped by undetected—and it came back to hit the old man hard.
Anyway, if you haven’t pre-ordered my book Soccer Dad by now—what does a guy have to do?
I shrink a bit from the title of my first book, An Effort to Understand, because it didn’t exactly bind up our nation’s wounds, did it?
But I thought of its subtitle, “Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half,” when I saw the video that retired Chicago public TV news anchor Phil Ponce made a week and a half ago.
Titled, “A Father’s Message to ICE,” the video is Ponce’s attempt to speak to ICE officers directly. “I put in my mind the figure of somebody who believes in what he or she is doing as an ICE agent and thought, ‘How could I meet them halfway, so I could have a conversation?’” Ponce told Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg, who was among a number of Chicago media people who helped make this viral around here.
Ponce’s not-plaintive question at the end, “Does your job, and the way you do it align with the values you were raised with? The culture that nourished you? That answer will define your life. Piénsalo con calma y cuídate.”
Which means: Think about this calmly and take care of yourself.
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Ponce told Steinberg he spent days writing the script for the 2:41 clip. “I agonized over it, trying to walk the line between being overly preachy and too sympathetic,” he said. “I thought, ‘How would I talk to my children if one of them were an ICE agent?’ If I were talking to my own kid, I wouldn’t yell at them. That’ll not get you anywhere. That’s not what a loving parent does. You have got to respect someone, attempt to establish common ground.”