Archive for September, 2010

As my friends know well, I’m a passionate person. Fortunately, though, I have a wide practical streak that helps me hold my passions in check and keeps me from cutting off my nose to spite my face. That practicality is a gift from both parents, but it usually speaks to me in the voice of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, quoting a favorite line from the film The Wrath of Khan: “You must learn to govern your passions; they will be your undoing.“

As a reporter for the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein occasionally let passion get the best of him, too. According to author Stephen Bates in his book If No News, Send Rumors, Bernstein dreamed of being the paper’s full-time rock critic. And executive editor Ben Bradlee promised him the job … before giving it to someone else.

Furious, Bernstein decided to quit the job he’d held since 1966. But his inner Spock must have had a word because he didn’t just storm out the door. Instead he quietly applied for Hunter S. Thompson’s recently vacated postion as political writer for Rolling Stone.

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My nine-year-old nephew just finished his first season as a top hitter on a baseball all-star team. When he started as a little T-baller a few years ago, I suppose his coach warned him not to sling the bat behind him after a hit. Good advice—but unnecessary. He and his younger sister know well what can happen when a bat spins out of the hitter’s hands.

So many times they’ve heard the tale of my one and only baseball hit. It was a game of cousins and friends in Alabama, and I took my place at the plate: the sorriest hitter on the team. As the ball came toward me, I all but shut my eyes, swung the bat in its general direction, and HOLY COW! I connected. The ball went bouncing toward the pitcher and I took off! First base … I could hear yelling … second base … third base. Only then did I notice there weren’t any basemen. Everyone was huddled over something on the ground at home plate.

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In the 15^th Century, English and European sea captains made their fortunes by traveling to the Far East and returning with valuable silks and spices. But it was an arduous journey, around the southern tip of Africa, up to China and Japan, then down and back again. Believing the earth was a small orb, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus thought he could sail straight across the Atlantic, around the globe, and arrive at Asia in record time.

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It’s said that during his lifetime, singer Frank Sinatra raised more than a billion dollars for charity. He was known for giving benefit concerts to help a variety of worthy causes, once remarking that he was “an overprivileged adult who ought to help underprivileged children.”

Some of his most popular performances were the private ones he gave for friends and acquaintances who’d been admitted to the hospital. The more serious the illness, the more diligent he was about dropping by and singing a tune to make the patients—and anyone else who could hear—feel a little better.

Few of us are blessed with Sinatra’s extraordinary vocal stylings, but he set a good example of the best way to help people who need to be comforted: Give of whatever talents you have.

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And a little mail can be a dangerous thing.

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Silver skin shining like moon glow, it would have seemed more in place skimming the fast curves of Monaco than crawling the streets of my small American town. The driver saw me staring and noticeably puffed up. We don’t get many Porsches around here, and he was enjoying what he perceived as my vehicle-envy.

I was thinking: DEATH CAR.

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From King David’s ancient psalms lamenting his conflict with son Absalom to artist Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece mural commemorating the 1930s bombing of the Basque town Guernica, human creativity has been inspired by real-life tragedy.

What sets apart portrait painter Samuel Morse isn’t that his life influenced his art, but that the inspiration wasn’t expressed in charcoals, oils, or watercolors but in the invention of a new language.

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