Paging through a paperback from Brian Andreas makes me giggle like a comic book loving kid. I still believe there’s no such thing as comedy; it’s an adjective that best describes the human reaction that takes place when sitting in the center of something you relate with.
Even in the worst of conditions we find space to laugh during unexpected Friday morning meetings, someone changing a lightbulb 18 feet off the ground and the way they stretch their body on a six foot metal ladder rips the chord from your parachute of memories and what about the sight of two orange breasted Robins rubbing around in the dirt like two year old kids after a later summer morning rain.
The things that make us laugh rarely include NBC, CBS and the latest edition of People Magazine.
Brian Andreas writes: He wrote secret notes to people he hadn’t met yet. Some of them aren’t even born but we live in a strange neighborhood and they’ll need help figuring things out and I won’t be around to explain it to them.
Unless you’re a writer, a jotter down of thought thinker, a secret poet, a visionary whose pictures are unreleased…the chances of grasping a happy thought from Brian’s chicken scratch is way off the map. Wrong...
Writers can’t explain why they fork out enormous amounts of chump change on pens and other writing instruments, they just know, if I don’t do it…there’s gonna be an implosion.
Now find someone who feels the same way. Gulp! Ever been to a writers circle? Bigger egos than radio people and yet the microphones they elect to use stand a one in one million chance of reaching an audience. So we come up with brilliant excuses like, “I’m not writing for the present…my words are for those who’ll be born three generations from today.”
I can’t imagine my daughters daughters daughters daughter deciding one rainy Sunday afternoon to reach into a weather proofed box tossed into a dusty corner at Storage Is Us…and pulling out nibblets of what I once penned. In 2065 the IPad and Droid will have gone the way of the Walkman Radio. I can’t fathom what a sheet of paper will mean to them except, “I hate him for killing so many trees because he needed a place to think!”
Lean over and tell that person at work that you love the way they make you laugh.
How tough will that be? The problem with the world rests in the single most important rule you set out to enforce fresh from first grade, “I wasn’t asked to be part of this family…from this day forward I’ll surround myself with people only I like.” I love that attitude! That’s a team leader who wants only the best in success. NOT!
Coworkers are rarely given enough credit for what they bring to your everyday. Who cares if 99.3% of the time they send your patience button into overdrive. The other 7/100th of a second belongs to that unanticipated split second where they utter a mumble and for some stinking reason you laugh so hard you pee your pants.
Take two minutes and swim the route of chapters already written and sink a thought into the side of the ship carrying a mental picture of a friend, coworker or parent that said something so simple and so right that you find just as much funny in its bone today as you did that day.
My brother Teddy was sternly told to keep his eyes open for our runaway dog Cocoa…while the five kids in Mom’s car feared the worst young Teddy believed if he took his index fingers and thumbs and used them as tools to seriously open his eyes wider than wide can be than he’d be gifted with a full shot of the world. What made it a forever picture of a past I never want to change, the meathead found the dog.
When Brian released; He wrote secret notes to people he hadn’t met yet.
Truth is…we all write secret notes but it’s not always to people but rather a future we’d like to one day meet. I call them picture postcards from the heart. They don’t require an eighty six cent stamp and the mail carrier will never bend it, break it or set it next to a package that smells like onions and burnt burgers.
Brian continues, “But we live in a strange neighborhood and they’ll need help figuring things out and I won’t be around to explain it to them.”
All too many times I hear people tell me their personal stories of how a dream or passing thought felt as if their parents were standing next to them. While the body mourns to feel the gentle kiss on the cheek or an always forgiving ear to hear your trials and challenges… Lean over and tell that person who decided one day while standing next to a calm lake or somewhere in the back yard watching it rain sunshine that you love the way they make you laugh…several years after they’ve passed.
Secret notes to people they hadn’t met yet….The adult you.
Arroecollins@clearchannel.com
No comments:
Post a Comment