John Joyce

He had funny stories and a gruff voice.  Apparently he drank a lot and played cards loudly with the other adults long into the night. He made meatballs you’d want to stab your thigh with a fork over. When the cancer finally caught up with him I was about 14 years old.

By the time he passed away I’d known for a few years that Joseph Reilly wasn’t really my grandfather. He’d been “Grandpa” my whole life. He just wasn’t my mother’s father. I never met that man. That my mother would remember neither did she.

John Childs died when my mother was just six months old.  He’d survived WWII, my grandmother’s gripes, living in New York in the post-depression era. He didn’t survive the car crash though that would change more than just my mother’s last name more a short nine years later. It changed the dynamic of our family forever.  My grandmother would remarry and both my mother and her older brother’s last names were changed from Childs to Reilly. Two more siblings soon arrived.
To me my real grandfather was the reason I had a funny middle name and not much more. I had no concept of who he was. It wasn’t until my mother was cleaning out some things from the years of gathered clutter in my grand parents home that I felt the connection to my namesake.
“John, come here. Look at this. Oh my God, I can’t believe this.”
“What did I do,” I sheepishly asked.

My mother had uncovered a WWII-era faded-green canvas bag containing some belongings and a photograph of her father. He was adorned in his United States Marines dress uniform, his hair perfectly quaffed and his posture perfectly erect. He looked young. He looked large and strapping. He looked like the quintessential WWII enlistee and what’s more, he looked exactly like me. We shared the same nose, arched eyebrows and natural part in our hair. We had the same build and smooth complexion and clear skin, symmetrical features. Dress me up in the same period garb and take a photo with an old fashioned camera and I’d challenge you to distinguish between the two. You couldn’t.
I had never really embraced my middle name before seeing my grandfather’s proud image. I’d heard no stories about him and could never have known what sort of man he’d been. From that day forward though, and increasingly since, I’ve fostered a sense of pride in my heritage and name that I never felt before, not even in my own last name which I’d been granted by my fathers father who’d also passed long before my birth and I’d never get to know either. There was something about seeing that photograph, that image emblazoned in my brain, that man that could have as easily been my twin rather than my grandfather. Somehow all the tradition and history I’d been denied without the benefit of oration or transcript was delivered to me visually, viscerally.
Until I have children of my own to whom I will pass on both of my family names I will have to do my best to honor them myself. I thought about my many perceived connections to the man I’d never known.
The new Major League Baseball season opens Wednesday.  Saturday I made sure I was prepared.  According to tradition I purchased a brand new New York Yankee’s fitted cap, New Era 59Fifty of course.  The Yankees have a lot of traditions; their fans have many, many more. Old timers like Billy Crystal probably have the same caps they wore as kids. Some fans have caps of all different colors and designs to match with their outfits. My hats get retired after each season, sent to the back deck of my Grand Marquis facing out of the rear window to antagonize any circumstantial Red Sox fan unfortunate enough to be both from Boston and to have ended up behind me at the stoplight.

I remember when a new Yankee cap would run you only $15.  I’d seen the price clime steadily: $25, $30, and $35. This weekend I paid $45 and I did so happily. An ex-girlfriend had shown me a place where you could purchase a cap and have sewn into it a nickname or a phrase of your choosing as long as it wasn’t trademarked or obscene or otherwise prohibited. I thought about it last year but wasn’t sure what to get written across the back of my new Yankee. This year I was certain, down right positive. I rushed out of the store and emerged into the sunlight of the mall parking lot. I tore the new ball cap from the bag that struggled to wrap around it begrudgingly. The receipt flapped in the wind and fled the struggle like an unwilling witness to a mugging. I stared at the new Yankee cap, but not at the logo I’d adored as a kid, not marveling at the history or the championships or the bragging rights. This time I stared at the back of the cap, right above the MLB logo where, stenciled in white, News Editing font 0.5-inch letters it proudly boasted:

“Childs”.

John Joyce

Another great epiphany came to me as I was standing outside the office, smoking a cigarette. Very often I find inspiration there. When I sit down to write my masterfully crafted work of genius that I had just concocted, however, I suddenly draw a blank. I begin to write about myself exactly as I’m doing now. My “id” and my “ego” clash at water’s surface. I become immersed in the self rather than the story, and this is dangerous territory.

In my media law class we just watched a film called “Shattered Glass” about a young journalist, a rising star, who was ultimately found to have cooked his stories. In more than half of his articles he fabricated all or part of the content, including fake sources, manufactured quotes and conjured companies. The writer attributed false information to names he made up, “According to Joe Schmoe, managing partner of Shmoe, Schmuck and Shmendrick…” for example.

I thought about how many times I’ve written an article for publication and felt that it was a little flat. If I had just one more bit of information, one more juicy fact, one more credible source, I would have been more satisfied with the strength of the piece. I know I have never gone so far as to concoct a story that was pure fiction. I know I’ve done my best as an editor to fact check my writers’ works and insist that their efforts be honest and of the highest ethics.

Still there was a twinge of fear in the pit of my stomach. The sensation was more than just the coffee hitting my unfed gut; it was true fear. For as hard as I have worked and all that I have accomplished, the professional world looms larger than life directly in the path I am steering this vessel I call my life. I am going to have to work harder, be better and check more diligently into everything I write or edit from this point forward. Natural progression, sure, but the panic I feel stems from the unknown. What if I make a mistake or a miscalculation?

We’ve all felt fear before. When I was a kid I climbed a tree taller than I supposed it would be and was afraid to climb down. Not too long ago, I approached a pretty girl and said or did the wrong thing and that awkward silence fell over me. That might have been a blessing though because if it had gone well and I had asked her out and she’d accepted, I would have had to confront the fact that I am unemployed and my car will soon be inaccessible and a whole host of other, “how do I pull this off?” type of panic would have hit. In this process of extolling my own misguided fears, though, I realized that my mother was right all those years ago when she told me that my problem was that I thought myself unique. I always found that offensive because aren’t we all unique? Where she meant that I considered my misfortunes or stresses or foibles to be traumatic and individual to me, she was saying that these feelings and thoughts are universal. Just as my inflated sense of abilities too was not unique, we all fancy ourselves the best at some things and the worst at others, heroes to some and victims of others.

That’s the answer. That was the source of the panic that sunk in during the climax of the film. I will be graduating soon and stepping into a professional newsroom somewhere in this land of opportunity and will attempt to set myself apart from and slightly elevated over the competition. That challenge is naturally foreboding to a degree. But I should not fear falsifying a story or making up a quote or not fact checking something I find questionable in another writer’s story or even my own. I know that I have too much integrity to allow that to happen. If something like that ever did arise, it would be purely unintentional, and I would own up to and correct it on my own. Just like climbing that tree, there is a danger inherent in trying to accomplish one’s dream. Failure is a possibility but also possible, and a potential source of fear is success. Neither should be an obstacle or limitation to my efforts.

It was hard to get out of that tree I climbed as kid, but not too long after I am certain I climbed another one, maybe a hundred more. It was difficult to take that perceived rejection when my game fell flat with that girl, but it might not the next time. I failed with women before and not too long after I climbed another one, maybe a hundred more. Okay, maybe not a hundred. The point is that even though I don’t have money or a job, I will soon obtain one and then the other. I will climb the ladder of my chosen profession as if it were a neighborhood tree, a tree this time I hope will not just be taller but also hold more branches and fruit and wildlife and foliage and beauty than I could have supposed when I first approached it. The job will come, the money will come and, as Smokey and the Miracles sang so long ago, “them women come and the women gonna go”. I will be afraid of failing. I will be afraid of succeeding. I will be afraid of a great many things at various points in my life but never will I fear losing my integrity or sacrificing my principles and will certainly not give up on my dreams or myself because the coffee and the fear mix inside my stomach. I’ll pop an antacid or two, buckle down and get back to work.

“Thank you for calling Schmoe, Schmuck and Schmendrick. This is John, may I help you?”

John Joyce

I am not an archbishop. I am not an elected official or a person that aspires to become one. I am not a pro-athlete, an entertainer or a superstar that serves, admittedly or otherwise, as a role model to millions of impressionable youths.

I am not the moral compass for our society or someone that assumes such a role. I am like you; I am just a citizen. I don’t presume to be able to tell others what to think. I only encourage that they should.

Rush Limbaugh can go on the air and, for three days, berate and demean a young girl, a law school student, who testified in a congressional hearing, for women’s need to have access to contraception. She did so on behalf of women everywhere who would otherwise remain voiceless, women who need these pills and products not just for the prevention of pregnancy and disease but for health concerns and other benefits these products provide. He can call her a “slut” and a “prostitute”. He can say that she is asking taxpayers to pay for her birth control because she is “having more sex than she can afford to pay for” on her own. He can tell her that if she wants us to fund her sexual activities then she must post videos of her encounter on the Internet “so we can watch”. He can tell her these things because he is well-funded, politically entrenched and because he speaks to millions of ultra-conservative racially and gender-biased political participants and others. He has the right to do so and can only be censored when millions protest and sponsors pull their advertising from his program. They have. He has the right to do so and can only be punished if he is sued for and found guilty of slander. He likely will not.

Presidential-hopeful Rick Santorum can go on television and say that Obama wanting every American to be able to obtain some form of higher education makes the president a “snob”. He can say that college is a place where young adults are “indoctrinated by liberal professors”.  Candidates such as Santorum can claim to support education and want the best for our children and then use his religious beliefs and moral ideaology to deny them the right to think for themselves without fear of public persecution and potential litigation.

Newt Gingrich can say that Spanish is the “language of the ghetto” and that women shouldn’t serve in the military because if they have “ to be in a ditch for a month they could get an infection,” referring to their menstrual cycles. He can say that inner city school children should have to work in their schools as custodians to learn work ethic and the value of a job, that this will keep them off welfare, something the “food stamp president [Obama]” isn’t teaching them.

I won’t bore you with arguments of liberals or democrats who have been persecuted for their public missteps or indiscretions.  They’ve gotten away with their share, too. You have the right to agree with these statements some might classify as racist, sexist, ignorant, calloused, hateful, ridiculous or unjust. You have the right to protest at the funerals of fallen service men and women, against abortion or gay marriage or whatever controversial issues. You even have the right to burn the Qu’ran, the American Flag, Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.

What I am asking is, should you? Should you elect officials who want to ban behavior of one group when you would almost certainly take up arms against one who tried to do the same to you? Should you afford your listening time and purchasing power to radio and television hosts, and their corporate sponsors, who attack, insult and ridicule your fellow citizens for taking part in the political process and performing their civic duty when the most you contribute to society are CO2 emissions and a fracturing of the English language? Should you encourage hate speech or acts of desecration against another faith’s religious scripture or your own countries flag when, forget burning the Bible, you’d start a bar brawl if someone insulted Ronald Reagan one too many times?

Who are we to assemble by the thousands at rallies and town halls across the nation and criticize one another with epithets and placards containing calls to violence against people who’s opinions are a little bit different than ours? How dare we say take away their rights but leave ours alone, because, even though we are all Americans and might serve in uniform together or be active in the same communities or schools or that we all pay our taxes, we value some choices rather than others, or that some things are left to choice at all?

I’ll tell you who we are; we are Americans. We do have rights that allow for many of these things to occur without fear of punishment or persecution. We do have the power to assemble [peaceably] and to petition government for a redress of grievances. But to quote a dozen superhero comics and films, “with great power comes great responsibility”. While aspiring collectively to be fair and just and civil to one another may prove too great a feat for us to accomplish, why don’t we at least give it a shot individually? Think before you speak, reflect a moment before you judge, and count the number of soldiers who have died and sacrificed so much in life for your rights before you think to strip someone else of theirs.

One of my favorite movies as a kid was “The Muppets Take Manhattan”. The immigrant father and small business (diner) owner that brought the frogs and bears and chickens and things back together for Kermit’s Broadway play taught children a great lesson in diversity with his funny accent and wise words: “Peoples is peoples”.

Think about it.

John Joyce

If you don’t have anything nice to say…tweet it!

Whitney Houston passed away last week, and almost immediately the tribute posts started flowing in one after another. Simultaneously, it seemed so were the tweets and Facebook posts complaining about the outpouring of emotions and “excessive” coverage of the tragedy.

The New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots in the Superbowl, again! The very next day Gisele Bundchen, supermodel and wife of New England quarterback Tom Brady, took to the wireless-waves blasting her hubby’s teammates for their inability to hang on to the passes thrown their way.

Opinions are like Facebook pages, everybody has one… or a Twitter account… or a Tumblr, etc.

People are commonly incensed that what they consider to be trivial events garner more attention than they would deem appropriate, whereas issues they feel strongly about are not afforded the same.

Actual FB posts:

“Why do we not show as much emotion or support when our troops are killed as we do when singers pass away?”

“Why doesn’t the governor order the flags to half-staff for our servicemen and women but he does for Whitney Houston?”

Apparently, the unnamed governor from the unidentified state does lower the flag for returned troops who have made the ultimate sacrifice, according to one Facebook retort.

It’s Black History Month, and many of my friends have spent the better part of their social-networking efforts to the edification of the otherwise uninformed masses about the accomplishments and contributions of our African-American brethren throughout this nation’s history.

Valentine’s Day just passed, and our handheld devices were chiming all day replete with tweets, posts and texts espousing people’s love for one another or complaints about the Hallmark holiday likely submitted by the singles of the web world sounding-off in cynical fashion.

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, and President’s Day just passed, both with little fan fare. Six more weeks of winter, even with temperatures more mild than last year, was unwelcome news, and with Obama still looking more secure than any of the Republican candidates to occupy the Oval Office post-November, President’s Day doesn’t have as broad an appeal as before. Conservatives are a spiteful bunch!

In between holidays and tragedies, social-networks are generally bland and mildly entertaining at best. People comment on their day, post questionable photos, and play songs nobody else wants to hear. I’m notorious for the latter!

Other than supposedly inspiring the Arab Spring, contributing to the Occupy Wall Street movement, and helping to coordinate those insidious flash mobs, social media has proven relatively harmless.

Too often, however, we see cases of online bullying, racially or sexually based inappropriateness, and even some religious or anti-religious impositions. Politically charged rhetoric and unwanted ads also turn us off after we’ve signed on. Social responsibilities have steadily eroded as rights have been litigated into and out of law over the past decade or two; the pace of this weathering has only hastened with technology.

Much of the content is mundane, and the extremes are generally that, isolated acts of an extreme or radical nature.

Say what you like, but don’t always expect others to like what you say.  Don’t get me wrong, I supported the First Amendment in uniform and continue to in print. It’s how I made my living then and how I intend to after graduation. But I am a sentimentalist at heart and believe strongly that, well short of censorship, we should at least go back to thinking before we speak…or tweet.

John Joyce

There’s been a lot of talk going on lately about there being too much talking going on. But who is saying anything worth listening to? Politicians are sound-byting each other to death, the pre-Superbowl coverage was fraught with analysts over-analyzing one another’s analysis, and the Mob Wives are threatening to cut the Basketball Wives and the Housewives of whatever city they are in this week.

Now more than ever, we all need someone we can talk to. In between the mocking and bullying that passes these days for social networking and the texting so many of us are doing while driving, no wonder nobody wants to hear anyone talk to them in person.

There’s the rub, though. No one is truly communicating anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want her talking while I’m watching SportsCenter or the game, or even the post-game for that matter. But men if we don’t listen to our women once in a while, we won’t have anyone to shush while Sir Charles is making fun of Kenny and Shaq!

Besides that, they don’t want us to solve their problems anyway. Trust me. She just wants you to listen while she tells you every detail of her day including who said what to whom with the full names, titles and proximity in which they each where to her when it happened, whatever happened. Who cares?! She’s going to tell you again anyway and force you to listen when her sister calls and recounts the entire…(sigh).

You have to admit, though, it can be pretty aggravating when they turn mute toward us. All of a sudden, we feel a mixture of guilt and helplessness and an eagerness to please. Sooner or later, all talk ceases, the passion follows and the hollowness is all that’s left when the door slams and locks behind her.

Ok, so we’re not all single. Maybe the early spring-like weather has warmed my sentiments a bit. But a comedy of errors can quickly turn to tragedy when a person feels consistently misunderstood. I have friends who are dealing with some issues now that range in severity from loneliness to the loss of loved ones. The economy is bogged down, and the contempt for the institution of the government is at an all-time high. The political rhetoric that passes for discourse in the current election cycle has turned us all a touch more cynical. And we still have to trudge to work, navigate our income-to-debt ratios, and find the means and the time to eat food that won’t cut our life spans short by 20 years.

Is there hope? Can we maintain civility long enough to find our way back to positivity? Not to advocate faith in an imposing sense of grandiosity, but we need a little more compassion in our conversation. So full of pomp and circumstance are the most mundane modern behaviors that a simple discussion of relevance or substance is scoffed at as a waist of time. If we touched one another a fraction of the amount of time we spend tapping the keys of technology in our attempts at self-expression, we might find the world a more comfortable and welcoming place to inhabit.

People who talk too much are usually either crying out for attention or telling you something you might be resistant to hearing. Either way it might serve us well to listen more and talk less. I did so recently and was blessed with a gift I had no idea I was in need of. It cost her nothing and took no time, but I was instantly grateful. I didn’t even ask for it. I was just sitting there, and she gave me two laughs and a smile.

John Joyce

A series of elephant speakers are converging on a college-campus for a fracas! They will be smashing their faces together in death-gripped grimaces of disgust and contempt for one-another’s behemoth egos and pompous attitudes. A circus blew through town last week, maybe that’s when they escaped. Snuck out the back of a trailer and climbed into tour buses headed for a grand old party (also known as a “donkey-bash”) on the property of a public university! I wonder who they’re going to get to clean that?

This epidemic of rampant tusk-wielding, trunk trumpeting has already impacted thousands of pedestrians in Iowa, New Hampshire and as near-by as South Carolina.  Pseudo-journalists from every major media network had hoped at least a few of them would get stuck in the mud in the swampy sections of the Carolinian wetlands. Two or three carcasses have already been deposited in the wake of these grey-skinned, stampeding animals.

This just in, a wolf has been tasked with shepherding these bulls in musk into some sense of civility once they are congregated at the school, now identified as the University of North Florida. Lazzara Performance Hall. Fine Arts Center. A media blitz will ensue as soon as the spectacle of the dusty floor-scrapping trunk scuffling begins, exactly 8p.m. Speculators estimate it will take two hours before any one of them might be killed off, wounded past the point of continuing, or they get so bored donkey-kicking the competition that they’ll simple bugger off and reconvene somewhere as far south as Tampa after grazing for a day or two. I wish the wolf luck after the last two charged with his task, Juan and John, were roughed up.

The largest of them, dubbed “Newt” in the infinite wisdom of modern oxy-moronic entertainment-news peddlers, is apparently the pack leader and has been showing a blatant disregard for women, children and darker-skinned persons that can only be assumed he is confusing for an inferior species. He’s wreaked most of his havoc in the poorer sections of town allowing his would-be wranglers to take somewhat of a laissez-faire approach to corralling him and his pack of stump stompers.

Battling “Newt” for dominance of the herd is the smaller yet greedier rogue they’ve named “Mitt”. This far more treacherous and stone-faced gargantuan seems more docile, but elephant hunters across the country warn he’s already destroyed factories and office parks in numerous cities and towns most of us have never even heard of. One public disservice announcement whose makers, oddly enough not thought to have coordinated with “Newt”, says that “Mitt” even ravaged his own quarters once and was forced to find bigger accommodations. Curse the circus that taught these animals to drive and make television commercials!

Rounding out the pack is the runt more affectionately called “Paul”, who’s shown moments of toughness but, along with being the daintier of the beasts, is also the oldest. Elephants are famous for their wisdom, but the headstrong “Newt” and the plundering “Mitt” consistently disregard the elder “Paul”.  It’s a wonder he’s kept up his share of the rampage this long, although pictures of him and sound-bytes of his muted trumpet calls are wildly popular with the savage surveillance squads of the Internet safari-land.

The remaining thunder foot was thought to have fallen behind the pack, but new information shows he has caused the most damage in Iowa where the pachyderm-driven pandemonium began. His name is “Santorum”, and do not dare underestimate this sweater-vest costumed circus ring escapee.