Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Other voices, other rooms: American dreaming, in an interrupted sleep

by // Leave a Comment

A couple weeks ago in this space, there was an interesting conversation about how to teach an inclusive American history that brings people together in a shared national narrative that’s not so depressing we all want to shoot ourselves.

(As boring as that sounds.)

You revise The American story by telling more complete versions of American stories—one by one.

For instance, last week on the 52nd anniversary of the first moon walk, a local Facebook group ran this post, which might jar young people today, with its seeming sense of innocent national unity.

A whole baseball stadium of fans and players, praying and singing together as one? Wow! This must be what the old gaffers are going on about when they talk about American Consensus Lost.

But get ready to be surprised again, childerns, watching the (unbelievably fabulous) documentary Summer of Soul, where the people attending the Harlem Cultural Festival listened to an 18-year-old Stevie Wonder at the very instant the above ballpark prayer was taking place. And they told reporters they thought the moon landing was a waste of money that might be spent helping poor Black people, in Harlem. The movie quotes the Harlem poet Gil-Scott Heron, who wrote “Whitey on the Moon”: “I can’t pay no doctor bill (but Whitey’s on the moon) / Ten years from now I’ll be paying still (while Whitey’s on the moon).”

The recurring history lesson being that human beings do great things, human beings do terrible things, human beings here are oblivious to human beings there, nothing is ever nearly as simple as it seems, and if you’re going to be a responsible citizen of this country, you’re going to have to work all your life, going to have to be “woke” not once, but every morning you live.

And to the extent that you’re unwilling to do that, you will be marginalized—and you goddamn well should be marginalized, in an ever-roiling democracy like this.

But to the extent you are, it doesn’t have to be terrible and violent and mean and traumatic. It can be—as the above is to me—in the great American storytelling spirit that includes interrupting and saying, “no, no, baby, that’s not the place to start; you gotta go back to the beginning” … “sweetheart, that’s not exactly how I remember it” … “while you were laughing it up, you know what I was doing?” … “Hold up: You forgot to mention you were wearing assless chaps at the time.”

We’re used to that kind of raucous group storytelling in own lives, with our own family and friends, to add meaning and color and a more complete truth to the stories we know firsthand.

Then why are we so gobsmacked and offended when people ask us to do this kind of thing with history we know has been handed down to us in a simplified version by variably reliable narrators?

Nostalgia today, for nostalgia yesterday: Seven summers gone

by // Leave a Comment

Been rambling around the country for the last six weeks straight—Des Moines, Iowa, Athens, Ohio, Rochester, N.Y., Tampa, Florida, Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado—with my 17-year-old daughter Scout, who’s performing for college soccer coaches, hoping to find her place.

A friend asked me how the big tour was going. I told him I knew I would one day be nostalgic for this time together.

But in real life, she alternates between sleeping—her record was Chicago to Columbus, Ohio without waking up—and gaping at the handheld device that shows her all the fun she’s missing with her friends back home. Her only distraction comes from wondering both silently and aloud when, exactly her dad transformed from the Master of the Universe into such a confused and worthless old nincompoop.

And what am I doing? Wondering the same thing, while listening to what I call “books on tape,” about fly-fishing and baseball. Freaking out about missing highway exits. Drinking tall boys back in the motel room, and threatening to yell at the goddamn kids running up and down the hallways. And asking Scout as she heads off to the tryout, whether she has remembered to put on “suntan lotion.”

I told my friend what I’ve been really feeling nostalgic for was a trip out West seven years ago, which involved a dashing, daring dad and his adventurous young daughter putting pennies on lonesome train rails, creeping close to grazing cattle, kayaking across glacier lakes, climbing treacherous mountain trails with one hand on the bear spray. I remember looking over at Scout on that trip, somewhere in the Badlands, her hand out the car window riding up and down in the wind, and already aching, for the fleeting moment I was living in.

After that trip, I wrote:

There’s a wonderful video that went with that post, that YouTube keeps taking it down, because it’s full of Joni Mitchell music coming out of the CD player, with Scout and me singing to it, at the top of our lungs.

They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.

Postscript:

Feels important to add here, this short excerpt from my book:

I picked her up from a sleepover way up on the North Side. She had her learner’s permit and she was driving us home, down Western Avenue.

She was tired, and we were quiet.

And suddenly it popped into my head to say, “You know, don’t you, that I love you just as much now that you’re a complicated teenager as I did when you were a simple, pure-hearted little kid?”

She said, “That can’t possibly be.”

And, after I nodded that it was indeed, she looked through the windshield into the middle distance, trying to fathom how.

A reunion with the people we love is a reunion with ourselves

by // Leave a Comment

The subtitle of An Effort to Understand refers to the importance of “hearing one another (and ourselves).”

What the hell does that mean?

Last week on a vacation in Colorado, it meant getting some quiet on the deck of a wonderful home in the foothills outside Boulder. Enough time to not give a shit that the phone was charging in the house and my drink was empty and I was staring up at the night sky not knowing where my next thought was going to come from.

Sleeping in, lolling in and out of a slumber so sweetly childlike that I was several times shocked and disgusted at the sight of a guest bedroom mirror that revealed a large, terrible-looking bearded old bum lying in my bed.

Reconnecting with a pal I worked and played with during some greenskeeper salad days on a golf course during college summers. We talking about our very different lives—and how we’ve come to feel good about what we thought we’d do with our lives, what we did, what we haven’t done—and what we might do still.

Reunions with my large Colorado family—all my sisters moved out there from the Midwest, one by one—one at a time and then all at once, after two years floating off the solid shore untethered. All week, it was as if we were on a dock that felt like it was still moving, trying to steady each other with atrophied muscles.

Anyway, I think my people heard one another last week (and ourselves).