Someone Is Trying to Tell Me Something

I have written before about my experiences with movies on planes and the not so subtle messages they seem to send to parents who travel for work. So, today as I left my family to fly to the west coast (again) for work I thought someone was trying to protect me when it became apparent that the headsets in our row didn't work so we would not be able to listen and therefore watch the in-flight movie. Just as well, I was deep into reading Spooner by Pete Dexter. But then I started running into passages like these:

Spooner delivered the town's morning newspapers, beginning two hours before school and in the winter it was often still dark when he finished. Once in a while a garage door would open as he walked past, and he would stop and watch as the car slowly emerged, the wife behind the wheel . . . driving the breadwinner off to the train station. Most everybody worked in Chicago, twenty-odd miles to the northeast. The husbands . . . stared poker-faced out the car windows as their wives backed out of the driveway, expressions deadened into some joyless exhaustion . . . as if the world had been drained of taste and color and even the notion of escape.

Out on the [baseball] field, a boy with an enormous head was laying a fresh chalk line . . .Calmer [the father] thought it wouldn't be such a bad thing to lay chalk lines. He was catching himself at this all the time lately, picturing himself trading jobs, usually for some kind of work that would be finished for the day when it was finished for the day, that would leave him time to rest and read. Other jobs, other lives. It was strange how often it came up.

Perhaps I will try the movie on the way back.

The Way a Speech Should Be Delivered

I swore that tonight I would get a post up about Arcade Fire I was working on (a rainy day had me back at it) and ultimately, I will. But today I watched this speech by Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mineworkers of America. He was addressing the New York State United Teachers, which happens to be the state affiliate of the union I work for--that would be the American Federation of Teachers for any rare, random stranger who ends up on this blog. Now I don't blog a lot about work stuff here--perhaps I should--but this speech deserves a listen.

What is amazing about this speech to me is Roberts' ability to take the recent mine tragedies and treat them with amazing respect, making the miners' stories and lives as personal as you can and bringing them straight to you in everyday terms so you understand who these men were. But he does more than that. He takes on the sadness of the experience and turns it into an impassioned called to action but without the misusing the memories of the miners or their families.

I could go into all the rhetorical reasons this speech moved me, but ultimately I just wanted to add to the possibility that others would see this speech as I wish more people in this country got to hear this narrative, delivered this way. So here you go--and please, watch both parts and then pass it on.