The Narrators of Our Lives

I'll keep it short today, because I am in the middle of a week-long trip. It has taken me from New Orleans to Ohio. That's where I currently am. Tomorrow, Tarrah Garis and I head off to Atlanta before ending up in Alabama to visit our friends at CDLLife.  I was working on a longer piece about adolescence, science-fiction, westerns, and trucking. But I realize that business will have to wait for another week. In the meantime, I thought I would tell you what I'm doing this evening, and then tie that into the topic for this upcoming Sunday. 

I'm in Columbus for the introduction of the nominees for the Transition Trucking: Driving for Excellence award. For those of you not already familiar with the program, it honors veterans who have made the transition from military service into the trucking industry. A project of FASTPORT, Kenworth, and Hiring Our Heroes, its grand prize is a Kenworth T-680 truck. Essentially, the award jump starts the winner's career. 

Tonight's event will be at the National Veterans Memorial and Museum, and it is an opportunity for all the nominees and their loved ones to meet, mix, and mingle. Tomorrow we'll head over to Kenworth's Chillicothe factory, do a broadcast, get a tour, and find out which of the nominees will be named finalists. Those three or four folks will move on to Washington, DC, for a chance to win that Kenworth at the Chamber of Commerce.

FASTPORT President Brad Bentley does a terrific job as an emcee at the Wednesday dinner. He introduces the attendees to the nominees. Taking care to give them equal time, Brad presents the veterans as their best selves, focuses on what is unique about them, and shows their common thread by highlighting their commitment to service. By the time he is done, each of them will feel honored.

For many of the nominees, Brad will become one of the narrators of their lives. Like a distant train whistle summoning us to the past. It's a voice that either marked a crucial moment in our timeline or provided the ongoing story of the world as it happened around us. If we hear those voices again, we are instantly back in time. Those times.

Those narrators will be the topic of conversation this Sunday on The Weekend 34.

Brad falls into the first category. He underscores a moment. He joins the celebrant of the wedding, the eulogist at the funeral, the comedian at the successful first date, the waiter at the crucial business dinner, and a host of others who lent their voice to let us know an inflection point had been reached. For tonight's nominees, Brad's voice will always remind them of an evening others chose to acknowledge and truly honor their service.

The second of these narrators speaks to the bigger picture. They make sense of who we once were and who we have become. Our relationships with those voices can be either genuinely connected or parasocial in nature. 

In the real world, those voices are easy to recall. In the glow of baseball on television, a grandfather delivers life wisdom from his favorite chair. From his pulpit, the pastor exhorts us toward salvation before sending us off to try to be better in the coming week. The gossip mongering friend keeps us tied to home with reports of the goings-on around the neighborhood, while our favorite teacher inspires us to think bigger and escape the confines of what is expected of us. Each one explains who we are in that moment simultaneously attempting to guide us towards particular destinations. Accumulate enough of those voices, and we have something like options. Choices of who we might become.

The other narrators of the big picture spoke to us through the technology of our day. More often than not, we were given the big picture through the small picture. For any childhood between 1950 and 2000, a list of the television voices alone can give a great deal of insight into the world from which that person came.  

What follows is an aural landscape of my freshman year. I do not have to tell you the year. You can place the time through the names.

I discovered my music through the introductions of Mark Goodman, JJ Jackson, Martha Quinn, and Casey Kasem. Reisor Bowden had me begging my father to take me to the Downtown Municipal Auditorium for Mid South Wrestling. And my love of movies was amplified by Dennis Cunnimgham's number system and the "thumbs up, thumbs down" of Siskel and Ebert. 

Through the week, Carson followed by Letterman put me to bed while reminding me I liked to stay up late. Hitchcock and Serling on PBS kept me up Sunday night, letting me know I liked to be scared. 

My comic relief was provided by the syndicated Tarzan cry of Carol Burnette, and when I was sick, Bob Barker kept the price right when my temperature was wrong.

And Pat Summerall of CBS was the Zeus of my sports world. I don't think Mark Bavaro becomes Mark Bavaro without the intonation of Summerall.

With his thunderbolt of a voice, Summerall was part of a pantheon that included Al Michaels, Keith Jackson, Frank Broyles, Bob Costas, and, of course, Summerall's running mate, the great John Madden.

Is it just me, or did Summerall and Madden deserve a cop buddy movie of their own? Boom!

I also realized too late that Pat was telling me to only say what was absolutely necessary. 

When Summerall stopped and Mike Wallace started, I knew it meant 60 Minutes and the end of the weekend. Ticktickticktickticktick.

There are local and national voices of news I have not mentioned, but they often intoned their greetings and sign offs while I was playing sports, chasing girls, or, on rare occasions, doing homework. I only knew those voices as trackers of storms, witnesses of national trauma, and harbingers of heartbreak. Those voices would not settle into my life until I had left for college.

And while it is a burst of music not a narrator, the CBS radio news stinger demands inclusion. Hearing it immediately puts me in my father's car after getting picked up from practice.

I realize as I write this that I am honored to work with one of my time's most beloved narrators.

He wasn't one of my narrators. We existed in the same time but not the same world. But Dave Nemo was there for my mom's brother Kevin. Every weekend in the Seventies, he made the long, late-night drive from Lafayette back to New Orleans. It was The Road Gang that kept him company.

Many years later, Kevin met my wife, and she told him who her dad was. He looked deeply moved. He asked her to thank Dave for keeping him between the lines and alive.

My Uncle Kevin is deeply important to me and continues to bring joy to my life to this very day. It is possible that he avoided tragedy on the highway, because one of the narrators of his life kept him alert with a simple formula of friendship, jokes, and music.

Sometimes the narrators of the lives of others are telling a story that leads to us.

For that reason alone, I would love to hear yours.