11/30/2020
Cliché of the Year: A [Fill in the Blank] Like No Other?
Notice how often the phrase like no other creeps into news reports and conversations? A public health crisis like no other. A divisive political climate like no other. An economy like no other.
Like no other is rapidly acquiring the status of a cliché.
To be sure, clichés achieve their status because there’s a good deal of truth to them. Most of us know at least one person struck by COVID. Partisan politics have divided families and ended friendships. Economic hard times threaten immediate calamity for some, even as it exacerbates the chasm between the richest and poorest Americans.
But is this really a time like no other?
Where pandemics are concerned, early in the Twentieth Century the Spanish flu took countless lives and disrupted whole societies. Political divisiveness? During the American Civil War, family members took up arms against each other. Meanwhile, the Great Depression remains a benchmark for economic catastrophe.
So why do we persist in describing our time as like no other? Probably because what most of us know about other horrible events comes from history books, rather than experience.
To cite another cliché, this time, it’s personal.
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11/24/2020
Thanksgiving, Robinson Crusoe, and a Glass Half-Full?
When I started this blog, I promised myself not to write about the usual stuff around holidays. Well, this Thanksgiving I’m going rogue.
2020 has been the most difficult year many of us have lived through. Hopefully, the toughest any of us will ever experience.
Remember Robinson Crusoe? Shipwrecked and alone on an island, he made a list of “evil” and “good” things—things for which he was thankful. It begins:
Evil: I am cast upon a horrible, desolate island, void of all hope of recovery.
Good: But I am alive; and not drowned, as all my ship’s company were.
Evil: I am singled out and separated, as it were, from all the world, to be miserable.
Good: But I am singled out, too, from all the ship’s crew, to be spared from death…
A glass-half-full kinda guy, this Crusoe.
Our individual lists will vary. But broadly speaking, here’s one way to look at where we stand today. (Crusoe’s “Evil” is a freighted word in modern English, so let’s rename that category “bad.” )
Bad: We’re in the midst of a pandemic that has caused more death and suffering than any of us could have imagined. It’s unsafe to visit in person with loved ones outside our own household, a particular hardship during the holidays.
Good: But we’re told three effective vaccines are on the way. In the meantime, masks plus distancing plus hygiene can help slow COVID’s spread. Podding can be a mixed bag, but in many cases it’s brought us closer to each other. And many now have a better appreciation for workers we may have taken for granted. Health-care folks, for sure. But also those who stock and deliver groceries, postal workers, people who bring packages to our doorstep. (An incomplete summary, but you get the idea.)
Bad: Politically, we’re as deeply divided as at any time since the Civil War. Friends are no longer friends, and some family members no longer speak to each other.
Good: But voter participation reached new highs in November. More Americans than ever understand that policy and the people who implement it matter to them, personally. The twists and turns of the post-election season have been a giant civics lesson for many of us.
Bad: Job losses, foreclosures, and business closings in a time of pandemic—economically, many are suffering through no fault of their own.
Good: But maybe—just maybe—more of us have a better understanding of the gaps in “safety net” programs and the ever-widening chasm between the obscenely rich and everyone else. Maybe—again, just maybe—the experience will lead to better policy all around.
This list, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Readers: What do you think? Drop me a line.
In the meantime, have a great holiday! And stay safe.
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11/16/2020
Public Broadcasting: Keeping “Viewers Like You”
I was thinking about a writing a short story in which public broadcasting would be an element when I received a fund-raising email from the local PBS affiliate: Philos + Anthropos. Show us some love.
I smiled. Who else would lead with Greek words that happen to be the roots of philanthropy? I also was a little flattered the sender thought I was smart enough to see how clever they were.
But a moment later, I realized this was the problem with public broadcasting in 2020. The organization’s head tends to be stuck in a past when it often was the sole source of quality drama, documentaries and mindful children’s programming.
That near-monopoly ended with the dawn of cable TV more than forty years ago. In recent years, streaming services—which charge a user fee but have no interruption for commercials or fund-raising—have made for fierce competition.
So why do people like me continue to support public television? In my case, not because I’m smarter than everyone else. (Or even anyone else.)
It’s because I like some of the programs, many of which can be streamed. I think of my PBS contribution the way I think about the monthly fee for a service like Netflix. And there’s a dollop of nostalgia for the days when PBS really was unique.
For all that, organizations that fail to change with the times tend shrivel up and blow away. So what’s PBS to do? I hope they keep some of the shows I watch and the kid fare. But it seems to me there’s a crying need for expanded, objective news.
Sure, on the national level, there are three big cable news networks. But each deliberately puts a right or left spin on the news. I rarely watch.
Local TV news too often consists of a reporter shoving a microphone into the face of crime or disaster victims to ask how they feel. And, given consolidation within the industry, conglomerate owners often dictate a slant on much of the rest.
There are big obstacles to beefing up local and national news coverage, of course. Mostly money. Yeah, lots of money.
But expanded, straightforward new coverage is also an opportunity for PBS, if it wants to keep “viewers like you.” And me.
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10/31/2020
Anyone for a Good Listen? Ask and You Shall Receive
Is election week looking scarier than Halloween? When the stress and confusion start to wear you down, why not take refuge by listening to flash fiction?
Ask via the “Contact Us” form, and by email you shall receive a free recording of Yours Truly reading either or both of these stories:
Request either recording or both. The stories also are available on this site at no cost. So you could read along, if you want. Or just read.
Enjoy. Vote. Be safe.
10/25/2020
Leading by Example: A Memoir
Those who know me will be unsurprised to learn that I was as full of opinions in high school as I am now. Back then, during a time at least as fractious as this one, I shared those opinions in the pages of the student newspaper.
The paper’s gatekeeper was its faculty adviser, Mrs. G, who’d been a real journalist on a big-city daily. She didn’t preach the First Amendment, the cornerstone of American journalism. But she demonstrated it, never spiking any of my opinion pieces, even on topics as controversial as Vietnam and civil rights.
In fact, some of my work was reprinted in the Sunday bulletin of the parish that sponsored the school. The vice principal/football coach, a growler with a brush cut, even told a parent group he thought the paper’s editorials were the equal of the local big-city dailies. (They weren’t. But a nice shout-out, all the same.)
One day during my senior year, I pitched Mrs. G on devoting an issue of the paper to school matters, mostly critical opinion pieces by me and some other students about the way the place was run.
This was a parochial school…parochial in every sense of the word. During that era of miniskirts for women and shoulder-length hair for men, at our school girls’ uniforms skirts could not rise above a specific level, nor could boys’ hair be so long it touched their ears. Step a little out of line, and (if you were a boy) your backside might be introduced to the vice principal’s fraternity paddle.
Even respectful requests for changes in school policy were met with a simple, “If you don’t like it here, go elsewhere.” (Remarkably similar to “America: Love it or leave it,” a slogan popular among Americans who wanted other Americans to just shut the eff up.)
Mrs. G might reasonably have asked if I imagined that what the other students and I wrote would have more influence on school policy than my editorials had exerted on Congress, the president, or the United Nations. Or she might simply have said no. At that school, okaying content such as I proposed could conceivably have cost Mrs. G her job.
She let the other students and me publish everything we wrote—even a comment from the vice principal’s beloved football team captain, who called the school a “dictatorship.”
Pissed-off doesn’t begin to describe the vice principal’s reaction. It was one thing to criticize U.S. foreign or domestic policy. But the other students and I had, um…overreached in criticizing the school and, by implication, him.
He confronted me in the hallway, insisting the school was not a dictatorship. (While “dictatorship” was not my word but that of the football captain, in the moment it seemed imprudent to correct the record.)
That same afternoon the vice principal decreed that the student paper would henceforth be subject to his review prior to printing. Because, of course, censorship is not a distinguishing characteristic of dictatorships.
I wondered if I might get detention or even be introduced to the vice principal’s fraternity paddle. But, other than that tongue-lashing, there were no real repercussions for me or any of the other students. Most of us got pretty good grades and never had caused any real trouble. A few were student leaders. And we hadn’t gone rogue. Per the rules, Mrs. G had signed off on everything.
I don’t know exactly what happened to her. There must have been some tense moments with school administrators. But Mrs. G didn’t lose her job, although she left a couple of years later on her own terms to teach at a different school—a place with a much better academic reputation.
Soon after I graduated, my alma mater hired a new principal who allowed at least a little more wiggle-room for students. And, I think, she curbed the vice principal’s romance with that paddle. (At least, I hope so.)
In the years since, I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t always come at tough decisions the way Mrs. G did.
But it wasn’t for lack of a role model.
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10/15/2020
“On Moving On”—Where the Pieces Came from
Sometimes, readers ask where a story comes from. Often, the most honest answer is, I don’t know. But I do know sources of some parts of “On Moving On:”
For me the real question—the one for which I have no answer—is why those elements came together as they did in this story. For that, props to my subconscious. (I guess.)
Something else curious. It wasn’t until a near-final revision that I added the lines at the very end:
In the bedroom, Price is arranging the sweater on the plush pad he uses for a bed. I consider taking the sweater away from him.
I let Price doze peacefully...
A reader observed, “…Price gets hold of the sweater as if telling the [main character] not to throw everything of Pearl's out in his grief.”
That hadn’t occurred to me, but I think the observation is spot-on. "Moving on" doesn't have to mean removing all traces of a loved one. Usually, it shouldn't.
Sometimes even authors don’t really understand their stories until someone else explains.
Thanks to that reader, and all of you!
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10/5/2020
Because the world is way too much with us
Pandemic. Social Unrest. Political discord. A president in the hospital.
The world is way too much with us.
So this week, just for fun and because it's October, a vampire story: The only Good Vampire.
Really short, too.
Stay safe, everyone.
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To read the three stories mentioned in this blog, click on the title links above
9/28/2020
Three-Pack: An Experiment
This is an experiment. See what you think, and let me know, okay?
This time, instead of an individual story, the site features a three-pack of narratives that share a common element. In this case, aging characters.
By way of background, in my reading I began to pay more attention to characters in their sixties—yeah, people like me. Most fictional elders I came across served as mentors, tormentors, and so on. Foils for younger protagonists working through their issues. Often, stories like these focus on the misery of the younger person who witnesses the elder’s decline.
Like a lot of others, I’ve been that younger person. Tough stuff.
But what about the person inside that failing body, that decaying consciousness?
Full disclosure: I’m fine health-wise. And like a famous politician, I too managed to ace the cognitive exam during my most recent annual checkup. Still, I decided to try to get inside the heads of declining elders. To write stories with them as main characters.
As in the three stories you’ll find here:
Elegy. The main character is a retired professor of Anglo-Saxon literature. He understands that he can no longer depend on what his mind tells him. Still, he tries to find a way to reconcile with his son—a struggle he thinks of as similar to that of Beowulf, the most famous Anglo-Saxon hero.
Final Thoughts. A man has only a few more hours to live, and he knows it. Even so, he finds himself curious. What will his final thought be? He hopes for something big, something important. I think that happens for him, even if he doesn’t quite realize it. What do you think?
Bigger Lies are Coming. The main character’s long-time friend is in the late stages of dementia. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but this guy discovers he has some issues of his own.
What you think of groupings like this? Would you like to see more in the future?
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To read the three stories mentioned in this blog, click on the title links above
9/20/2020
Of Pandemic Precautions and Health Providers
This started out as the blog equivalent of an old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn—the same kids who shoveled his snow for free the previous winter.
By way of background, I had a number of healthcare appointments scheduled during the first the weeks of September. Routine stuff, but nothing that could be handled by phone or computer. I felt fine. So, to minimize my potential exposure to the new coronavirus, I asked my primary care doc if I should just postpone the appointments. Nope. He said doing so would pose a larger risk to my overall health.
Every professional with whom I came in direct contact was masked and otherwise careful. Distancing rules were observed in waiting rooms. And in one place, as soon as a chair became vacant, a staffer wiped it down with disinfectant. Even better, in another office no one waited in a confined space with other patients. As far as I could tell, in that place we all stayed in the parking lot until a private examining room was available.
But that’s not what my inner curmudgeon wanted write about. He preferred to focus on the one worker, in one office, whose mask did not cover her nose.
I still don’t think that’s okay. Healthcare workers should comply with whatever rules exist for doing their job.
On the other hand, for the hour or so I was in that office, I did not see the staffer in direct contact with patients and all coworkers and patients were appropriately masked. It’s also possible that other precautions were in place or that some combination of mitigating circumstances led to the half-staff mask.
I reminded my curmudgeon that what he sees is not always all there is. That people are people, radically inconsistent and unpredictable. That more relevant still, these days the mere act of showing up for work in a healthcare facility constitutes going above and beyond.
Healthcare workers, please follow the rules. But thanks to all of you for what you do for the rest of us.
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9/14/2020
Squashing a Grasshopper: Exploring the Attic
I know flash-fiction authors who can write a darned good story in a few hours. I’ve never been able to do that, but every once in a while I try.
I figured “Grasshopper” was a good candidate, because I’d already worked out the bare bones based on news stories about executives taken away in handcuffs. The first draft didn’t take very long. But that version is nothing like the story you’ll find on this site. Writing is rewriting, so Ernest Hemingway said.
For me, rewriting is like poking into dark corners of an attic I haven’t visited for a long time. Originally, I wasn’t going to describe Phil’s appearance. But then I gave him a big mustache like the one a former boss of mine sported. I had thought of Phil as a somewhat passive victim. But, nah. He was more like someone I worked for who fancied himself a sort of treacherous Yoda. (Disclaimer: As far as I know, neither man ever committed a crime.)
Should I use the Yoda analogy? Nope. Yoda is overused in pop culture. Ergo the “Grasshopper” reference from Kung Fu, a silly 1970s TV western. By the end of each episode the hero, educated in an Eastern religion emphasizing peace, always has his hand forced into kicking the @#$% out of a villain.
Changes like that often mean rewriting other parts of the story. And that process sometimes leads to other discoveries about character, plot, setting. Fun, but time-consuming.
Which is why it’s never taken me less than a week—and usually much longer—to finish a story. I don’t give up until ideas for making it better stop coming. Why would a reader expect anything less?
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August 30, 2020
Athlete Protest: This is What Democracy Looks Like
The June 23 post (scroll down), was about the hoopla as Major League Baseball returned for a pandemic-shortened season. I welcomed that sport back—all sports—for the sake of the off-field jobs they provide.
In the course of that epistle, I said or inferred some nasty things about millionaire players. I still consider many of them entitled egomaniacs. But last week, a large number of professional athletes did something I admire.
They decided not to play in protest of Jacob Blake’s shooting by Kenosha, Wisconsin police.
That shooting has been and will continue to be politicized. This is the world we live in, especially this close to a general election. But the point the players were making is that enough is enough.
Mr. Blake is a Black man. According to the Washington Post, since 2015 Black Americans have been “…killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.”
That’s not okay with the players. Why would it be okay with anyone?
Last week’s professional sports protestors came in for criticism for last-minute decisions, poor communication, lack of coordination and on and on. Their protest was not stage-managed nearly so well as the two weeks of political conventions we’ve just endured. But the conventions—for most of us, that’s not what real democracy looks like.
Real democracy can be spontaneous and messy. But it’s driven by people who, like many professional athletes, see injustice and decide to act.
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August 23, 2020
What’s Legal Is Not Always Right…Or Even Effective
According to news reports, as so many people began working from home, there was a spike in organizational demand for a particular type of software. Spyware, which lets employers count workers’ keystrokes, take screenshots, monitor online activity, and so on.
From what I read, most of the time this is legal. But what’s legal is not always right. Or even effective. A web search on “How to trick employer spyware,” got one researcher more than two million results.
And disrespectful…don’t get me started.
Sure, some executives will tell you that monitoring ensures accountability. For the sake of argument, let’s say that in a given organization there is a high percentage of workers who dodge working. Someone hired these folks, right? In the name of accountability, shouldn’t the hiring honchos be broomed? (Or, in the time-honored way of large organizations, transferred to jobs where they can do less harm?)
Fun fact: Company spyware usually is conspicuously absent from executive computers, tablets and phones. (Probably company-funded limos and private jets, too.) Can you spell hypocrisy?
For all this, I concede the need to measure individual performance in the interest of helping people be as good at their jobs as they can be. A win-win for both the organization and the individual.
But be up-front about it. Transparent. Set a reasonable goal and timeline to achieve it. Then, let the results speak for themselves.
If you get what you need from folks who act legally and ethically to achieve it, keystrokes and screen time don’t matter.
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August 17, 2020
About “The English-Only Rule”
Where do story ideas come from? Headlines, overheard conversations, a line of poetry—just about everywhere.
To be clear, I don’t know of anyone who went through the trauma Hania does in “The English-Only Rule.” But the setting for that story—time, place, feel—that comes from stories Mom told me. She was the daughter of immigrants and came of age in a neighborhood where the conversations of daily life were conducted in Polish, a time and place when most children started their formal schooling largely ignorant of English.
Because the stories on this site are limited to 1,000 words or less, I had to leave out any number of tidbits I’d like to have used. For instance, the basement of Mom’s family home once had been a speakeasy. In that basement, her father brewed beer for his own consumption, apparently unconcerned he’d ever be caught.
But Mom worried. She’d stand watch at the living-room window and shout a warning down the stairs whenever a police car happened to be making its routine circuit.
One of my favorite stories is about the candy store where Mom traded her pennies for Mary Janes, a chewy candy. Everyone in that neighborhood knew you could play the numbers there, too. One day on a candy run, Mom walked in to find the owner nervously conversing with two burly men in suits. Gangsters? Feds? In any event the owner, with a quick jerk of her head, signaled Mom to beat it. Which she did.
I don’t have fiction to go with those events. Not yet, but stay tuned.
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August 11, 2020
So, What’s New?
Remember back in January, when “what’s new” was still an innocuous question? When the response only rarely touched on job loss, foreclosure, severe illness and worse?
The pandemic has changed that and so much more. At this writing, the United States has recorded five million COVID-19 cases and more than 160,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To make matters worse what we’re told about the virus keeps changing. The value of testing. Which businesses should be allowed to reopen, and under what conditions. Who should self-quarantine.
I can sympathize with folks who simply throw up their hands and go back to doing the things they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done them. But I won’t be joining them anytime soon.
I’ll continue blow kisses to grandchildren I’d rather hug. Keep shouting good wishes to neighbors, when I’d really rather have a long, quiet conversation. Avoid large gatherings, even if the host scoffs at my caution.
Because for all the uncertainty, one thing the last couple of months have demonstrated is that when enough of us go back to doing what we always have done, a lot of us who might otherwise stay healthy will get sick. And some of us will die needlessly.
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August 5, 2020
Not so much to be understood, as to understand?
I heard about a survey showing that a lot of Americans think that even the news media they prefer are sometimes biased. But their real concern is that outlets they consider biased in the opposite direction will lead others astray.
Because those who disagree with our viewpoints—even people we like and respect—must have been led astray, right? Frustratingly, they stubbornly persist in their blindness no matter how patiently and deftly we eviscerate their logic. Heck, a lot of the time they even interrupt, trying to convince us that we are wrong.
As if.
Because it’s hard, isn’t it? To listen—really listen and try to understand—rather than mentally prepare a retaliatory verbal sally. To do that even though once some interlocutors finish, they often will not hear us out in return.
In Christian tradition St. Francis, a guy born nearly 900 years ago prayed, “Grant that I may not so much seek…to be understood as to understand.”
Just a thought as this political season kicks into high gear.
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July 27, 2020
Thoughts on “Final Thoughts”
In “Final Thoughts” a family arranges itself around the hospital bed of a man whose next breath could be his last. He realizes this and hopes for a final thought—“Something big…Something important.”
I wrote the first draft soon after my father died. His hospital room was much more crowded than that of the character in the story. It was Christmastime, so I was in town, along with my spouse and our kids and siblings and nieces and nephews.
None of the things that happen in the story occurred during the several days Dad lingered. And unlike the character in “Final Thoughts,” my father was unconscious. He didn’t respond in any way obvious to us. Nor could we tell what, if anything, was going on inside him.
Still, I kept turning the experience over in my own mind. Suppose things were slightly different. What might a conscious-but-dying person think about?
It depends on the person, of course. But the main character in “Final Thoughts” mostly ruminates about events in his life centering on family, and a pillow that’s “…bothering the heck out of me.”
As to that final thought—well, I hope you’ll read the story and let me know what you think.
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July 21, 2020
How Should the Story End?
In the June 15 blog (scroll down), I asked reader opinions on the ending of “Hemingway Would Understand.”
Early in that story the narrator, a twelve-year-old boy, admires his macho Uncle Pete. As Pete cleans a gun in the basement, he schools both his five-year-old son Arnie and the narrator in things “a man should learn”—drinking, guns, misogyny. Pete allows the narrator to fire the gun he’s been cleaning. At the sound of the shot Arnie cries and Pete’s wife runs down the stairs, where the couple have a very loud argument.
Here are the final lines, as they appears on this site:
…In my mind, I kept hearing Uncle Pete’s words: You have a choice. What’s it going to be? I stood there for what seemed like a very long time. Smelling cordite. Listening to the adults argue. Trying to choose.
I made a choice I knew would displease my uncle. I knelt beside Arnie so that we were at eye level, and I gave him a hug. He stopped crying a little and hugged me back.
Even harder.
In the blog, I asked readers what they thought of the lines that began with “I made a choice…” Should I leave them in, or edit them out?
A reader who likes the story as it stands wrote, The last two sentences really touched my heart. In fact, a small “awe” came from my mouth & my eyes teared up.
Another reader, with a different point of view: I would prefer cutting the last two sentences (and so would probably Hemingway, drunk or sober)…
I can see the appeal of both endings. But I lean toward cutting those final lines, and wondered why I hadn’t done that. Looking through some old notes from the site that first published “Hemingway,” I see that an editor there suggested the change.
I think I should’ve stayed with my gut. An ending like that would be more ambiguous. Some argue on technical grounds that the story arc would be incomplete because we wouldn’t know exactly what the narrator will choose.
To be pretentious as hell, I’d argue that to the extent art imitates life, life can be pretty darned ambiguous.
And, as another contributor suggested, [If you] end with "Trying to choose"…the reader can guess what [the narrator] did: hug his cousin, shout at his uncle, whimper, and/or run, screaming, up the stairs…
During the course of the story, the narrator grows increasingly uncomfortable with Uncle Pete’s philosophy. Remember, we’re in the character’s head. The details he shares at the story’s end—the unpleasant odor of cordite, shouting, crying—imply revulsion at Uncle Pete’s ways.
My opinion, anyhoo.
Thanks to those who responded!
7/13/2020
About “Elegy”—Carpe Diem?
This is the story of a long-retired professor of Anglo-Saxon literature, a man who’s always lived a life of the mind. Now, that mind is in severe decline and likely to erode further. In a lucid moment, he sets out to mend fences with his adult son—a quest no less daunting than that of Beowulf, an epic hero whose tale the man once lectured about.
A good deal of fiction about people in this situation is told from the perspective of broken-hearted loved ones. My siblings and I—and probably a lot of you—could tell first-hand the gut-wrenching experience of helping people close to us deal with the frustration, anger and embarrassment of minds that betray them.
But, I wondered, what might it be like to be such a person? To be unable to understand a once-familiar world. To lack the ability to make oneself understood, even during occasional moments of clear-mindedness.
Is this story what it’s really like?
I don’t know. Although, if I live long enough, I suspect I’ll find out.
Carpe diem, my friends.
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7/6/2020
Words, Words, Words…and an Apology
Somewhere Jimbo, (which is not his real name), must be smiling.
According to the org chart of the company that paid us both to develop marketing materials, I was his supervisor. But Jimbo could be supervised only in the loosest sense. For instance, I once told him not to use the word irregardless in his copy. “Actually, it’s not a word,” I said, trying not to show how much smarter knowing that made me feel.
Jimbo didn’t protest, and I never again saw that word in his drafts. But irregardless never disappeared from his casual conversation. For instance, he might say something was “true irregardless,” adding “which actually is not a word.”
Well, guess what? Merriam-Webster says that irregardless is a word. Its first use as a synonym or regardless or irrespective, was in 1795.
Jimbo and I eventually moved on to different companies, and long ago lost touch.
But if you stumble upon this post, old buddy: My bad.
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