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What I do for a living — shocking anyone pays me for this — is listen. There is occasional typing, but that’s the easy part.
A woman left me a voicemail the other day that began friendly enough but ended with the most heartfelt sobs. Poor soul. She’d been struck by a car while walking across the parking lot of a grocery store. It sounded quite dramatic, leaving her flipped up and hanging on the hood.
She was hurt, not badly, but was more wounded by the reaction of the motorist.
The driver seemed more concerned about herself (immediately calling her husband, who soon arrived) and thereupon a blame game began about whether the woman was walking in the “wrong” place, if such a thing is possible in a parking lot.
Because it was private property, the police, apparently, took forever to come and, start to finish, it just sounded like a miserable experience. So she decided to write a poem, which she proceeded to read to me, all 1,006 words, with the odd tear thrown in. You can read it here.
It is entitled Do You Have Any Molasses, as the whole point of the trip was to buy molasses to make gingerbread cookies, to be lovingly shared with family over Christmas. To make matters more bittersweet, the store was fresh out of stock.
How to help this limping poet? Maybe listening was enough. Maybe that’s the most valuable thing a newspaper can do. Just listen. Be there in the struggle.
In other words, the best columns, maybe, never get written. They get lived. Someone’s 700 words will never do justice to the morality trials that we daily suffer. Our lives are full of news: they just rarely make it.
The same week, a woman called to tell me about a problem she was having with her elderly mother, who was in poor health and battling dementia.
The caller was absolutely beside herself with frustration, crying so hard I thought she was having a breakdown. (Help? I peck at a keyboard, not wear a cape.)
Her siblings are scattered around the world and Mom had been living with her, but not coping well, until she had to be hospitalized. The daughter was trying to work and go to school, but her mother needed constant attention and could only nervously be left alone.
In her telling, the hospital was badgering her to take Mom home. The daughter was alone, utterly overwhelmed, and drowning in these feelings of guilt and duty, not to mention financially strapped. (It is not an easy thing to say out loud, is it? “I just can’t care for my own mother.”)
It isn’t breaking “news” in the usual sense. So many have been in her shoes and possibly the hospital was doing all it could. And, really, what to do for her but listen, let her unburden, hope the social workers are alive to the dilemma?
I flip through my date book. It reads like Frasier Crane’s call log. Man acquitted of murdering his wife, fighting to regain custody of his kids. Single dad trying to raise $80K for his disabled son. Sister of a one-time astronaut who feels cheated of her mother’s estate. Mom who suspects racial bias from a school principal. Man convinced a doctor gave him a terrible infection during a hospital procedure. Man on hunger strike against NCC intransigence.
None of these made the paper, for lots of reasons. Some days, they’re news, some days, just lives. And sometimes, even, we’re here to save people from themselves: putting your intimate problems down on paper and ink, plus the damnable Internet, is not always the wisest course.
Maybe that’s an alternate definition of what we do here: intersect with people at their worst moments, whether they’ve survived a terrible ordeal or accident, or being hauled off to jail, or being victimized by some brutish bureaucracy — and attempt to figure out why news coverage is deserved or helpful, or unavoidable.
It is the question I usually ask: Is there a public policy that can improved, an eye opened, a worthwhile connection made, by telling this story? Is it “about” something, in other words.
Reassuring, too, in this day and age to know people still think the newspaper is a force for good. So call any time. If nothing else, we’ll listen, absolutely.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
A woman left me a voicemail the other day that began friendly enough but ended with the most heartfelt sobs. Poor soul. She’d been struck by a car while walking across the parking lot of a grocery store. It sounded quite dramatic, leaving her flipped up and hanging on the hood.
She was hurt, not badly, but was more wounded by the reaction of the motorist.
The driver seemed more concerned about herself (immediately calling her husband, who soon arrived) and thereupon a blame game began about whether the woman was walking in the “wrong” place, if such a thing is possible in a parking lot.
Because it was private property, the police, apparently, took forever to come and, start to finish, it just sounded like a miserable experience. So she decided to write a poem, which she proceeded to read to me, all 1,006 words, with the odd tear thrown in. You can read it here.
It is entitled Do You Have Any Molasses, as the whole point of the trip was to buy molasses to make gingerbread cookies, to be lovingly shared with family over Christmas. To make matters more bittersweet, the store was fresh out of stock.
How to help this limping poet? Maybe listening was enough. Maybe that’s the most valuable thing a newspaper can do. Just listen. Be there in the struggle.
In other words, the best columns, maybe, never get written. They get lived. Someone’s 700 words will never do justice to the morality trials that we daily suffer. Our lives are full of news: they just rarely make it.
The same week, a woman called to tell me about a problem she was having with her elderly mother, who was in poor health and battling dementia.
The caller was absolutely beside herself with frustration, crying so hard I thought she was having a breakdown. (Help? I peck at a keyboard, not wear a cape.)
Her siblings are scattered around the world and Mom had been living with her, but not coping well, until she had to be hospitalized. The daughter was trying to work and go to school, but her mother needed constant attention and could only nervously be left alone.
In her telling, the hospital was badgering her to take Mom home. The daughter was alone, utterly overwhelmed, and drowning in these feelings of guilt and duty, not to mention financially strapped. (It is not an easy thing to say out loud, is it? “I just can’t care for my own mother.”)
It isn’t breaking “news” in the usual sense. So many have been in her shoes and possibly the hospital was doing all it could. And, really, what to do for her but listen, let her unburden, hope the social workers are alive to the dilemma?
I flip through my date book. It reads like Frasier Crane’s call log. Man acquitted of murdering his wife, fighting to regain custody of his kids. Single dad trying to raise $80K for his disabled son. Sister of a one-time astronaut who feels cheated of her mother’s estate. Mom who suspects racial bias from a school principal. Man convinced a doctor gave him a terrible infection during a hospital procedure. Man on hunger strike against NCC intransigence.
None of these made the paper, for lots of reasons. Some days, they’re news, some days, just lives. And sometimes, even, we’re here to save people from themselves: putting your intimate problems down on paper and ink, plus the damnable Internet, is not always the wisest course.
Maybe that’s an alternate definition of what we do here: intersect with people at their worst moments, whether they’ve survived a terrible ordeal or accident, or being hauled off to jail, or being victimized by some brutish bureaucracy — and attempt to figure out why news coverage is deserved or helpful, or unavoidable.
It is the question I usually ask: Is there a public policy that can improved, an eye opened, a worthwhile connection made, by telling this story? Is it “about” something, in other words.
Reassuring, too, in this day and age to know people still think the newspaper is a force for good. So call any time. If nothing else, we’ll listen, absolutely.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
