DAYS OF MINUSCULE BIG THINGS
AND GIGANTIC SMALL STUFF
Listen to Jim here: http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/daysofminusculebigthings.mp3
or read on…
Everybody who visits my life submits a manuscript for review.
Each customer, visitor, neighbor, pedestrian, drive-by-er, social media associate, broadcaster, beggar, salesperson, hustler, campaigner, seducer, attacker, bystander…each bows under the weight of personal baggage, and—again, whether consciously or comatosely—each reveals mysteries and secrets to me, to be digested later within the solace of my red clay diary.
Just a few tidbits from recent days…
An out-of-town visitor remarks with great enthusiasm that her time in Birmingham has been amazing and beautiful. She loves it all—the green hills, the hospitality, the kindnesses of strangers, the unexpected thrills emanating from the city’s shops and bistros and parks and museums and playplaces.
I love hearing how strangers view us, and I wish again that the town’s own denizens each felt as positive about our remarkable environs.
An NPR reporter, cold-reading his copy instead of testing it aloud, proclaims, “…Russia will not allow no fly zones over Syria.” I have to pull over to the curb, stop the car, and decide whether to rebuke or laugh out loud. Let’s see, does the announcer lack grammar training, as in “We don’t allow no fly zones down here,” or could he sober me up with proper pause and inflection, “Russia will not allow no-fly zones over Syria?” You just have to know in advance that the term no-fly zone is all the rage.
A young daughter and mother listen and lean forward as I answer their questions about the blank diaries and classic literature that abound and overlap in the shop. I suddenly realize that my ranting zeal about the craft of writing and journaling is actually being listened to! So I become more careful and specific about what I’m expounding. They issue forth from the shop, ready to compose great works on screen and paper.
Shop employee Marie laughs as I share another emanation I just heard on the air—an interviewer rapidly and efficiently raves on about the government’s outrageous “ex-pen-DITCH-yours of millions of dollars…” Expenditures of dispronounceables such as this make my scalp tingle. Maybe the on-air person needs an adjustment of expendentures. Then Marie says she just heard another newscaster talk about “the voe-LIGHT-uhl situation in Syria.” It’s a volatile world out there, this world of journalists who never had a class in pronunciation. Reminds me of the oldtime comedians Bob and Ray, who talked about attending DICK-see-uhn school. Sometimes their diction was Dickensian. They also described what it was like to go up in an uh-LIV-uh-ter, and they once interviewed a man who wrestled uh-LIGG-uh-ters for a living.
My spirits take an up-elevator ride and my fear of alligators is abated whenever I listen to old Bob and Ray recordings. Makes me forget for a moment that there are only three or four of us left who know things about words that communicate easily and without speedbumps.