David Murray | Writing Boots

Our big rock candy mountain

03.01.2010 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

I'll hope to regale you in other posts with yarns and insights gathered during a happy week I spent in Phoenix last week. I was there connecting with my speechwriting peeps at a conference, and also my colleagues at McMurry, the company that publishes Vital Speeches of the Day.

After the "speechwriting jam session" I delivered at the conference, a number of people came up and told me the session had given them goosebumps or made them cry. Same here, I told them. Though I'd seen or read these speech excerpts dozens of times before, being able to share them with other communicators was emotional for me too.

Many of the discussions with the speechwriters and with my McMurry mates centered on the new community that's growing around the old magazine, Vital Speeches.

I thought of that group of speech geeks, and my happy position as a facilitator and sometime sparker of these conversations, as I read another anachronistic magazine on the flight home.

Ring Magazine was one thing half a century ago, when boxing was still a major American sport. Now that boxing is despised in many quarters and ignored in most others, it may come as a surprise that Ring still comes out every month. What surprised me, a fight fan but not a fight man, was how wonderful a read Ring still is.

In fact, it prompted me to ask and answer a pretty old question:

What is a great read?

A great read is when you intend to flip through something but find yourself frustrated by frequent stops, because you never see an article that you ought to be interested in. Quite the opposite: You notice the woman in the seat next to you is looking scornfully at the gruesome knockout photo you've been staring at for a minute, like it's pornography.

"I know," you want to hasten to tell her. "It's really awful, isn't it?"

I guess it's natural to feel a little embarrassed when we find ourselves following our real fascinations, rather than studying the things we really ought to care about.

That's the feeling I want my Vital Speeches pals to have when they go to VSOTD.com and its various social media forums. And it's the feeling I want Writing Boots readers to have when they're here.

The world tells communicators they have to think like business people, that the results are all that matters, that strategy trumps tactics, that language is less important than money.

We accept what we have to of all that, in order to get along out there.

But it's not how we feel.

And fresh off this good trip, I'm feeling privileged to make my living and spend my time creating places for us communication tramps to talk about what is important to us—human beings, and how they talk to each other—no matter what anyone else thinks.

Words (still) between us

12.11.2009 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.