Greetings,
I know I already posted the article that I we will discuss tomorrow as a part of my "choose your own assignment." I did, though, want to show you all another point of inspiration for me this week. I think this is an excellent piece of narrative writing and the author takes some great fictional liberties in places not typically reserved for sports writers. I thought it was significant to post this article because after reading it I made up a statistic in my mind that no one has ever lead the masters for 4 days and won. I found out from a friend, though, that this is not the case and I realized that this article internalized the feelings I felt everytime I watched a young player break down on the final 18 holes at Augusta after leading the previous three rounds. I grew up watching the Masters every year with my dad and this article brought me back to the emotion of a player unraveling under pressure before my eyes after a single fowl up. But most of all I think that the article does so by showing, not telling - a piece of the narrative process I am still working on.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Choose Your Own Assignment
Hi Everyone,
I found this essay in Brevity. I like it because I believe it says a lot with very little. Enjoy.
Duplex
For a moment, I wanted to call him back. I wanted to know who he was. Who he wanted on the other end. What would happen when the voice on the voicemail was gone? Would he be gone? If I deleted the message, switched off the phone, would the man on the other end cease to exist?
He said: “This—I wish I knew the right things to say, but I don’t. I miss you, Samantha. I still love you and I need to see you. Please.”
The click of the line going dead, of the message ending, rattled in my head, like everything else had been scooped out. I folded the cell phone and placed it on the desk. Things that were supposed to be permanent felt inconstant. The children outside laughed and called out words in Spanish that I could not understand. I opened a blank document and hoped writing would be a distraction. The screen was white and I felt sick. Downstairs, at the back door, Charlie scratched to go outside. The tabby meowed. They carried on in this way, teasing one another.
I found this essay in Brevity. I like it because I believe it says a lot with very little. Enjoy.
Duplex
By Danny Goodman 
The person on my voicemail was a man. His voice was high, higher than most men’s voices I’d heard before, and he spoke slowly, as if reading off of cue cards. I didn’t know when the call came in. My cell phone never rang. Rather, in that late morning, the phone vibrated, informing me of an awaiting message. A voicemail.
He started: “Hello? I think this is your number. I hope it is.”
I was in the kitchen, looking out over my small garden. The weather in Park Slope had turned cold, with the temperature dropping thirty degrees overnight. It was an unusually bitter autumn. Charlie, my black Labrador, played in the snowy backyard, barking at a neighborhood tabby. My wife, Samantha, was at work, and I had grown accustomed to having the house to myself during the day. In the evenings I worked as an editor, and I imagined Samantha, too, valued the undisturbed time. I pressed the phone against my ear.
He said: “I’ve been wanting to call.”
A crash came from outside. I opened the backdoor to find earth and terracotta spread from fence to door. Charlie stared up at me, tail wagging and mouth open. He looked like he was smiling. His thin legs trembled in the snow. I turned and pointed into the house; I made my stern face. Charlie ran past, nails clicking against the hardwood floor. I shut the door and began the voicemail again. The second sentence struck me this time—whose number did he think this was? The greeting lacked my voice, telling callers in a robotic, female voice that they had reached this number and to please leave a message. The caller, it seemed, thought the number was correct.
He said: “I’m not really sure what to say, though. It’s been a long time. I hope you’re well.”
The man didn’t say his name. This meant, I assumed, that the intended recipient of the message should recognize his high, almost shrill voice. A pause came, and I heard clanking in the background, repetitive and echoey, like the ping of a baseball against an aluminum bat. I didn’t know what this meant. I imagined a college baseball player, tall and sinewy, sneaking away from batting practice long enough to call. Twelve seconds of ambient sound filled the line.
He said: “You should call me sometime. My number hasn’t changed.”
Our small Brooklyn house was a duplex. I walked upstairs, phone still pressed to my ear, to begin my day; my desk was there, mostly due to the unspoiled light that poured in through the large bedroom windows. I spent mornings and afternoons writing and storyboarding and staring out those windows at the South Slope. The neighborhood was middle class and largely Hispanic, a stark contrast to those living in the multi-million-dollar brownstones just a few blocks north. The buildings and residents hadn’t changed in years, leaving the area one of the few pockets of the city, at the time, to remain. I sat down and turned on my computer. The neighbor’s children, Edgar and Lola, played hide-and-seek on 21st Street. I liked that little had changed over the years.
For a moment, I wanted to call him back. I wanted to know who he was. Who he wanted on the other end. What would happen when the voice on the voicemail was gone? Would he be gone? If I deleted the message, switched off the phone, would the man on the other end cease to exist?
He said: “This—I wish I knew the right things to say, but I don’t. I miss you, Samantha. I still love you and I need to see you. Please.”
The click of the line going dead, of the message ending, rattled in my head, like everything else had been scooped out. I folded the cell phone and placed it on the desk. Things that were supposed to be permanent felt inconstant. The children outside laughed and called out words in Spanish that I could not understand. I opened a blank document and hoped writing would be a distraction. The screen was white and I felt sick. Downstairs, at the back door, Charlie scratched to go outside. The tabby meowed. They carried on in this way, teasing one another.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
I was raised in a unique place. My hometown of El Paso, Texas is a city that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border and bottlenecks in between the Franklin Mountains and the Juarez Mountains. This is a land marked by dichotomies. Throughout my teens the most stark of these dichotomies came in the fact that El Paso was one of the top five safest cities with a population over 500,00 in the country, while across the Rio Grande (which, that far south, is so dry most of the year it’s hardly accurate to call it Rio much less Grande) Juarez was frequently referred to as the most dangerous city in the world outside of war zones.
When this stigma first started becoming commonplace, Juarez showed few signs of being the most dangerous city in the world to those who didn’t know what they were looking for. My own family made the five-minute trip from our home into Juarez fairly frequently. In high school the recreational aspects of Juarez became more appealing and I began to venture across the river on my own. Wandering the dim-lit taverns of ‘the strip’ and drinking among the same bars as the likes of Hemmingway and the Grateful Dead gave me a sense of independence I carry to this day.
Still though, as I began to learn more and more about differences between populations in classes like Geography and World History, and words like ‘third-world country’ started becoming active pieces of my vocabulary – I was still no closer to understanding what about Juarez made it ‘third-world’ as apposed to the ‘developed world’ that lay a stone’s-throw away in El Paso. It was not until later in my high-school career that the harsh realities of just how different El Paso and Juarez are would catch up with me.
My junior year of high school brought about the opportunity to visit Juarez in a different capacity than I was used to. Members of several student groups had fundraised enough to allow for 25 students to participate in ‘Casas por Cristo’ – a non-profit organization based in Juarez that builds small, two-room homes for families in need living in the shanty-towns, called Anapara, at the outskirts of town. My mother’s demand that I start volunteering still fresh in my mind, I signed up reluctantly.
The next day, a five minute drive from school and few short feet into Juarez our van made a sharp turn onto dirt roads that made our journey more like a ride on a bronco in the rodeo than a twelve-passenger van. Twenty minutes later we arrived at an empty lot in between two houses composed almost entirely of wood scraps and cardboard. Looking around I found myself lost despite the fact that my neighborhood was in clear sight on the horizon to the north.
Over the next three days my classmates and I poured concrete, built a house-frame, installed pluming, put up dry-wall, insulated, and even had time to decorate the new house of the seven-person (and soon to be eight-person) Gonzalez family. I watched in amazement as a young couple raising three children, a nephew, and a younger sister arrived on a foggy morning, tears streaming down their faces, to see their new home.
My fears that what we had built would certainly be inadequate for such a big family were washed away as I received heart-felt hugs accompanied by sobs of gratitude from each and every member of the family. These sentiments were reinforced as our trip-leader, Juan, revealed the application of the family to the ‘Casas por Cristo’ program, which included a snapshot of their previous, tiny, one-room house, scrapped together with found objects.
It was a different person riding back towards the comforts of the ‘developed world’ in my body that afternoon. I nearly chuckled in disbelief as I thought about the fact that as a child, on my way to school, I had driven a mere 100 yards from the site where we built the Gonzalez’ home. Despite my proximity to the desolate living conditions of Anapara on a dailiy basis it took the kind of experiences that ‘casas por cristo’ offered me to change the way I thought about the differences between El Paso and Juarez.
The disparities between these two cities suddenly hit me square in face, and there was no place to hide. I became uniquely aware of the ridiculous fact that two-million plus dollar homes stood a mere half of a mile from the Gonzalez’. This new knowledge changed my trajectory in life. I could no longer ignore my privilege. This change was subtle at first, a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that let me know: athletics, friends, and grades weren’t enough anymore. I ignored this voice inside my head at first, continuing my plans to swim in college and focus on myself rather than others. I chose Kalamazoo College accordingly, the small up-and-coming division-three swimming program and when I arrived at school proceeded to focus on swimming above all priorities in my life.
As I looked around at the opportunities available to me, though, I was not satisfied with the physical challenge that swimming provided me. I wanted to be challenged emotionally, intellectually, and most of all, in a way that used my position of privilege to benefit others. Last spring, my former teammates placed forth at nationals – the best finish the men’s swimming program has ever seen – without me. I looked on, content with my decision to quit the team.
What kept me content were the memories of my experience four years ago. The tears of the Gonzalez family, the tight squeezes of the children who had running water for the first time in the life, and the smiling faces of the neighborhood children who we played soccer with at lunchtime all continue to eternalize the strength of the grave discrepancies in wealth and opportunity that mark this country and this world. Those memories will never leave me and neither will my desire to level the playing field and to expose those discrepancies to anyone who will listen.
When this stigma first started becoming commonplace, Juarez showed few signs of being the most dangerous city in the world to those who didn’t know what they were looking for. My own family made the five-minute trip from our home into Juarez fairly frequently. In high school the recreational aspects of Juarez became more appealing and I began to venture across the river on my own. Wandering the dim-lit taverns of ‘the strip’ and drinking among the same bars as the likes of Hemmingway and the Grateful Dead gave me a sense of independence I carry to this day.
Still though, as I began to learn more and more about differences between populations in classes like Geography and World History, and words like ‘third-world country’ started becoming active pieces of my vocabulary – I was still no closer to understanding what about Juarez made it ‘third-world’ as apposed to the ‘developed world’ that lay a stone’s-throw away in El Paso. It was not until later in my high-school career that the harsh realities of just how different El Paso and Juarez are would catch up with me.
My junior year of high school brought about the opportunity to visit Juarez in a different capacity than I was used to. Members of several student groups had fundraised enough to allow for 25 students to participate in ‘Casas por Cristo’ – a non-profit organization based in Juarez that builds small, two-room homes for families in need living in the shanty-towns, called Anapara, at the outskirts of town. My mother’s demand that I start volunteering still fresh in my mind, I signed up reluctantly.
The next day, a five minute drive from school and few short feet into Juarez our van made a sharp turn onto dirt roads that made our journey more like a ride on a bronco in the rodeo than a twelve-passenger van. Twenty minutes later we arrived at an empty lot in between two houses composed almost entirely of wood scraps and cardboard. Looking around I found myself lost despite the fact that my neighborhood was in clear sight on the horizon to the north.
Over the next three days my classmates and I poured concrete, built a house-frame, installed pluming, put up dry-wall, insulated, and even had time to decorate the new house of the seven-person (and soon to be eight-person) Gonzalez family. I watched in amazement as a young couple raising three children, a nephew, and a younger sister arrived on a foggy morning, tears streaming down their faces, to see their new home.
My fears that what we had built would certainly be inadequate for such a big family were washed away as I received heart-felt hugs accompanied by sobs of gratitude from each and every member of the family. These sentiments were reinforced as our trip-leader, Juan, revealed the application of the family to the ‘Casas por Cristo’ program, which included a snapshot of their previous, tiny, one-room house, scrapped together with found objects.
It was a different person riding back towards the comforts of the ‘developed world’ in my body that afternoon. I nearly chuckled in disbelief as I thought about the fact that as a child, on my way to school, I had driven a mere 100 yards from the site where we built the Gonzalez’ home. Despite my proximity to the desolate living conditions of Anapara on a dailiy basis it took the kind of experiences that ‘casas por cristo’ offered me to change the way I thought about the differences between El Paso and Juarez.
The disparities between these two cities suddenly hit me square in face, and there was no place to hide. I became uniquely aware of the ridiculous fact that two-million plus dollar homes stood a mere half of a mile from the Gonzalez’. This new knowledge changed my trajectory in life. I could no longer ignore my privilege. This change was subtle at first, a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that let me know: athletics, friends, and grades weren’t enough anymore. I ignored this voice inside my head at first, continuing my plans to swim in college and focus on myself rather than others. I chose Kalamazoo College accordingly, the small up-and-coming division-three swimming program and when I arrived at school proceeded to focus on swimming above all priorities in my life.
As I looked around at the opportunities available to me, though, I was not satisfied with the physical challenge that swimming provided me. I wanted to be challenged emotionally, intellectually, and most of all, in a way that used my position of privilege to benefit others. Last spring, my former teammates placed forth at nationals – the best finish the men’s swimming program has ever seen – without me. I looked on, content with my decision to quit the team.
What kept me content were the memories of my experience four years ago. The tears of the Gonzalez family, the tight squeezes of the children who had running water for the first time in the life, and the smiling faces of the neighborhood children who we played soccer with at lunchtime all continue to eternalize the strength of the grave discrepancies in wealth and opportunity that mark this country and this world. Those memories will never leave me and neither will my desire to level the playing field and to expose those discrepancies to anyone who will listen.
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