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Saturday, September 27, 2014

What do you call this sort of thing?

Imagine this…. and maybe it has happened to you too…
You hear about an open mike night happening at a local venue. A bookstore in my case. The flyer on the grocery store window says, “Poetry, writing, stories, music… Open Mike night. Come share yourself with new friends.”
So if you’re like me, you think, “Wow! I’ve been to that store, I like the place, I could read some of my stuff there.” And you get home and dig through your computer files and journals and printouts and emails to find just the right thing to share. And you think about it all day and think what to wear and what to bring and who you might meet.
And you go and when it’s your turn, you walk up to the mike, tap it a few times to make sure it’s on, squint into the lights, and start to read.
At first you’re voice catches and you’re a little stuttery, but then you get going. Your throat relaxes and your heartbeat evens out and you find your groove. You pour your heart and soul and guts out, and afterwards you’re pretty excited about it. Some more writers read what they’ve been working on and some of it is better than yours and some so-so, but it’s the whole atmosphere and concept that excites you. Here you are among people who appreciate creative writing.
And then a bunch of people one at a time get up in front and play guitars and sing songs. Some originals. Most of them covers.
The next day you check out the facebook page for the event to find…
Videos of the guitar playing people.
Not a word about the writers.
This can’t be right. So you look around a while more like maybe you missed where it was.
But there’s nothing.
This happened to me back in the fall of 2012.
So.. flash forward. Over the past summer (2013), my dad died. We, the family, arranged to have a memorial service at a local funeral home. A few weeks before the service, some family members asked if any of us had any stories about my dad that we could share during the service, since all they had so far was a preacher friend of my brother’s who volunteered to talk.
So I wrote a story. I wrote about something that happened when we were kids and that showed what an amazingly talented person my father was. I told people things that they didn’t know about him because these were things only we as his kids experienced.
The day of the memorial I had my story written out and was revising it off and on leading up to me getting up front.  When the minister friend who was up front finished his prayer/blessing/eulogy sort of speech, he said, “Does anyone else have anything they would like to share?” I got up and went to the front.
I wasn’t nervous at all. And people were amazed that I didn’t break down crying while I read about an incident where my dad showed not only what an amazingly talented person he was, but also how, at a moment when he should have completely lost his temper and murdered us, he stayed calm and just shrugged off the thing we did as, “This is what boys do.”
And the writing… it wasn’t about me. It wasn’t me trying to say, “Look at me, I’m a writer.” It was me sharing my father with them. A man who is no longer here but whom I’m bringing memories of him that they’d never known.
The story showed my dad’s compassion and humanity, and I added some humor and put it all in a kid’s perspective. I took them back in time 45 years and put them right there with me and my brother as we completely destroyed something my dad built when he was a teenager, and then how he rebuilt the thing… from memory… and how he kept control and resisted destroying us.
People loved it. Some cried. Some clapped.
Then… my sister in law got up front with her guitar and played, “Amazing Grace.” A song everyone’s heard a thousand times, and though it’s a great song with great meaning, she didn’t write it. It said nothing about my dad.
And the next day, on facebook, what’s there?
A video of her singing and playing guitar.
No video… No picture… Not even a single word about the story showing my dad as only one of his children could have seen him. Not a word about his awesome talents and inventiveness and patience and often magical ability to fix anything no matter how broken it was.
Just a stupid song that out of context shows nothing about my dad and who he was and what he did. Just the guitar player. That’s what gets remembered. That’s what gets immortalized forever for the world to see.
Damn.