On communication, professional and otherwise.
by David Murray // Leave a Comment
On the Vital Speeches blog, Dutch speechwriter Annelies Breedveld explains why writing for American audiences is so much more fun than writing for her own Calvinist countrymen, whose favorite cultural proverb is: "Act normal, that's crazy enough."
Americans, meanwhile, "get to use the Bible … and words such as 'hallowed ground,'" she says. "The Dutch don't like that language as much."
by David Murray // 28 Comments
Boy did I get into trouble the other day.
At the bar with some friends, someone said something about how tragic was some event or other, based partly on the number of children who died in it.
And I said, "What makes it so much more tragic that kids were killed? Is there something the matter with grown-ups?"
(Thanks, second margarita!)
And off we went.
I know the road. I've been down it many times before.
And I think I know the road better now, having a kid myself, than I knew it as a childless intellectual.
The road was built by parents like me, who, whenever they hear about a child dying, immediately think of their own child dying, and begin to shudder and wail and make other panicky sounds. (For the blissfully childless, let me explain that when you have a child, you find yourself perversely imagining accidentally dropping your child from your shoulders onto the sidewalk or into the Chicago River and you can even bring yourself to cry out in horror, in public.)
I see some hospital documentary with a kid in trouble in an emergency
room, I nearly crush the remote switching the channel.
Universal parental terror of our child's death is why we have 500 Notting Hills for every one Lorenzo's Oil.
So I believe I understand the source of the news convention: 457 people killed; 56 of them were children. And I respect the emotion of it. But I don't think it holds any intellectual water.
I believe kids come to the world fresh and bring a funny new perspective, which is why I'm always quoting Scout. (The other day she said she believes she's beautiful on the inside. "A little bloody, though.")
And of course older people have done more bad things in life. ("Old people are quieter because old people have more to be quiet about," my old dad always used to say.)
But by the same token, neither has a three-year-old done a thousandth as many beautiful things than a solid 50-year-old. Nor, for that matter, has a child barely prevented him- or herself from doing a fraction as many terrible things.
So no, I don't believe kids are "better" than grown-ups, and if you do, then you must wish a young death on every child—to prevent the inevitable rotting.
The other argument that the death of a child is more tragic than the death of an adult is that the more "potential" is wasted when a child dies. If this were really our reason, then we wouldn't make the senselessly rough delineation between "children" and "adults" in the plane crash (so a 17-year-old is a precious child and an 18-year-old is a disposable grown-up?).
No, if we were coldly calculating human potential, we'd say, "The bomb went off between a hip cafe and a community grocery store, and the average age of victims was a tragically low 31.9."
But that would be silly, of course.
The last and best line of defense of the indefensible argument that a child's death is more tragic is that grown-ups, because they've been participants in society, are more complicit in whatever bad shit happens—car crashes, wars, bridge collapses—than children, who after all were just born here.
But that means you actually place some tiny percentage of the blame on the administrative assistant who was killed at his desk thanks to Timothy McVeigh's odd notions about patriotism.
It's not that kids aren't innocents (although if you have one, you know those blond curls hide larcenous hearts set on candy and Chuck E. Cheese).
It's that adults, in most cases of accidental mass death, are as much innocents as the kids are. And their deaths are every bit as terrible, and depending on the number and depth and nature of their relationships in the world, arguably even more so.
I guess I'm bracing for a fight on this—because I sure got one in the bar the other day.
I also realize that this issue has nothing to do with communication.
Except, communication works better in an environment of intellectual honesty than one of instinctual terror.
by David Murray // 9 Comments
Last year at this time I was in Middltetown, Ohio, taking care of my 86-year-old father, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. (He died Jan. 7.) Yesterday, in hopes of finding solace for a friend whose mother has cancer, I went back there.
Back, as I remembered it with the help of the Writing Boots archives, to that cocoon where Dad and I lived for a little while—the brightly lit living room where he gaped at the newspaper all morning as I fiddled with my laptop, but never let him out of my peripheral vision.
That part hasn't changed. In fact, my friend, not much about my relationship with Dad has changed. The phone calls have ceased, but the words remain. —DM
***
Words between us
Dad
can't write anymore because the pills make his head fuzzy. He wants me
to come up with something to write back to "all these people," a
half-dozen family members and friends who have written him letters
telling him what he's meant to them.
I instinctively resist
because I think writers can't ghostwrite for writers, a notion he seems
to think is a cop-out. "I asked David for help writing these letters,"
I hear him telling my sister on the phone, "and he put on his hat and
went out the door."
So I try.
I tell him
he's already done his part in the lives of these letter writers, and
all they really want to know is that he received their letters of
appreciation. "Thank you for your fine letter," I propose he writes on
cards that I'll address. "And I want you to know that it meant a great
deal to me, and so do you."
"But that's what you'd write," he says. "It's not what I'd write."
Between reruns of the above episode, words hold us together.
He
remembers a fragment from a poem he once knew: "like a bubble it burst,
all at once and nothing first." We search in vain for the rest of the
poem.
We make fun of the hospice nurse, who can't
pronounced a particular one-syllable Middletown street name correctly
because of her southern accent.
At the dinner table, he
stares at a photograph of himself in the cockpit of an airplane that has the numbers
N1451R on the fuselage. "Five-One Ringo," he says over and over because
doing so makes him feel like pilot again.
Reading Old Cars Weekly,
he grumbles about the term "swapped out" as it's used to refer to
engines that are replaced with other engines. The "out" part, he says,
is "totally unnecessary." He says so with such increasing force that
I'm compelled to remind him, defensively, that I didn't invent the
term. "Well, you need to do something about it," he says with only the
hint of a grin.
Words to us are things, every bit as much
as airplanes and automobiles and Oxycodone pills are things, and we
hold onto them, one on each end, and we spin around together.