Ang Calls Customer Service: Some Context

I’m grateful to Gen for publishing her outtake clip of me telling the story of Ang’s customer service call. Gen did her usual editing masterwork, making me sound coherent and fluent. It’s a good story, and I’m a bit proud of the way I was able to capture it. Of course, I have some edits I would make. I would want to relay more of the one-sided discussion. If only I could remember! It was the music scene that got me. They were in different cities (I think the rep was in Texas?)—but there were some common music happenings between the cities, or ones soon to take place. To hear Angelo talk, it seemed this was his most casual, oldest friend—someone he had spoken with yesterday, and thus could just pick up with where they left off about the plans and to-do list.

But I get ahead of myself: I’ve been fearing the task of trying to capture that tone of voice. There’s an essence there I want to share; it’s so important right now to get it right. I know I will get it right for the “club”—the “no explanation needed” group, those who had firsthand experience with Ang, and with the phenomenon I’m trying to capture. They will recall such moments, and say, “yeah, yeah”—and probably with a tear, like the one I’m shedding now.

Let me approach it from another angle: Angelo could be exuberant. As Terry described him, he was bullish—a bull in the china shop. In the documentary, my favorite characterization of his exuberance comes, appropriately, from James. His words, his exasperation, his matter-of-fact narration, with commentary, of Angelo on the fast-break bricking it off the backboard creates such a vivid image of the out-of-control energy that was Angelo and his approach to life. Angelo’s ebullient smile, his off-key singing, his driving, his general bursting-at-the-seams entry into wherever—were widely known—to intimates and casual acquaintances alike. But there was another side, another disposition, that those who loved him and spent time with him would see on occasion.

It manifested itself in a very subdued and serious voice. It was a reasoning, an analysis, a what? a soulfulness? It was, quite simply, a presentation of ideas in the most gentle, “out-of-time” manner, in a voice that was beyond striving and argumentation.

I heard this voice, actually, the last time he spoke to all of us on the phone from Thailand. It was a very long call, on speaker, with the whole family. That call was one of those gifts we got from Ang in the last few weeks of his life. My general approach to phone calls from Thailand could be summed up in one word: expeditiousness. I didn’t want to take up his time … didn’t want to have the call reach the point where he felt awkward to cut it off. So I was always cutting it off. But this time was different—and God bless Loretta, she never had scruples about the call getting too long. So we talked at length—and somewhere—15 minutes or so into the call, there it came—the voice I am trying to convey here and now. He began talking—in response to some questions I had asked him about the educational system in Thailand. He spoke in a manner that was tinged with regret and resignation. There was a problem: kids were being left behind, in a way that both recognized and ignored the need; the system wasn’t working, and apparently there was little initiative to address the problem or even to acknowledge the problem existed. He didn’t speak with zeal or indignation—just a kind of wise sadness about it all—an acceptance that such was the lot of the educator/educated in Thailand, and an acceptance to work around the limitations, towards doing whatever good could be done in such circumstances.

I say all this simply to try to convey a demeanor of peace, understanding, concern, love, easiness, resignation, and acceptance that was present in his voice in his observations about teaching in Thailand. In his calmer discussions—about politics—and even sports—I had also heard those qualities. And I reference all such moments to say I heard that same tone, mirabile dictu, while he was on the phone with the AT&T customer service rep!

It was in the long middle of the conversation—after the transaction part (very early on) had been completed. Ang would speak in phrases, quietly, and then with long pauses, as undoubtedly the person at the other end was talking. I am so grateful to Gen for bringing back this story—but as I hear myself tell my story, I notice immediately that my voice and tense way of talking are so completely the opposite of the quality I am trying to relay about Angelo’s voice that day.

Till this moment, my memory of Angelo’s tone was a completely private memory, a cherished moment I didn’t even know I had in my store. But now I have it as a distinct entity, a treasure I could share with others—or at least those for whom “no explanation is needed.” And there are many such people, thank God, who loved Angelo as much as we do here.

It’s so ephemeral—those moments of peaceful talk with a stranger/friend in Texas, those 25 years of being and acting. But God has his way of radiating into our lives, and I think of Angelo’s quiet voice as those times when God would touch his exuberance, and channel it into His own kinds of expression.

That customer service story is great for the lessons of “lightening up” I spoke about in the clip—but for me it’s far greater for the sound of God’s touch coming to me through a voice I hear now, and marvel at, and love with all my heart, though in memory.

The Delicate Balance

Much of what Charles Dickens wrote deserves to be quoted here, but all I’ll offer for now is a snippet from David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber’s reflection/advice to David on economic matters:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

See also:

This NPR Story, “A Tale Of Two Economies,” from Morning Edition, November 4, 2008.

Just Puns



Untitled Document

Just a neat collection of puns. My favorite is Number 12:

There was a man who entered a local paper’s pun contest. He sent in ten different
puns, in the hope at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun
in ten did.

A pun on the word "pun." Can anything higher, or more worthy, be
achieved by the language using animal?

http://bertc.com/puns.htm

Be sure also to look at Bert Christensen’s page of H. L. Mencken quotes:

http://bertc.com/mencken.htm


S.O.S. Times Two: Wry Reflections on/in Ethan Frome

This is a novel of cold and reflections of the cold. There is the surface and the sub-surface, “inner needs” and “outer situation” (8), the desolate landscape of the soul and the desolate landscape of winter, and and each doubles the other. Chill is heaped on chill, in an endless winter, the same as all other winters, all inexorable, silent, and deadening.

Perhaps the most succinct analysis of Ethan Frome’s fate comes from the novel’s garrulous coachmen, Harmon Gow, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters” (2-3). To no little extent, the villain of this tale is the landscape and its influences, its bitterness, the “hypnotizing effect of [its] routine” (3)—the inexorable will of winter to penetrate and reproduce itself in all it touches.

The lives of the Frome household are grimly doubled outside the house, in the “shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow” (26). The novel ends with Mrs. Hale’s comment, “I don’t see there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard” (99), an insight that reverberates quietly and insistently throughout the novel. Ethan himself resonates with it, as he looks at the gravestones with full realization of their reflective power. In their silence, they speak to him, and he to them, about the possibility of change:

Ethan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. “We never got away—how should you?” seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: “I shall just go on living here till I join them.” (26)

Ethan’s “living” was a mode of intensifying withdrawal and silence. His early hope of escape at school failed him, and he was propelled into his desolate spiral of being. By nature, Ethan is “grave and inarticulate,” even before the misfortunes of experience and landscape produced their doubles in him. But there are pointings toward other possibilities in the brief, fleeting vision of Ethan at school:

There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse. At Worcester, though he had the name of keeping to himself and not being much of a hand at good time, he had secretly gloried in being clapped on the back and hailed as “Old Ethe” or “Old Stiff”; and the cessation of such familiarities had increased the chill of his return to Starkfield.

There the silence had deepened about him year by year. (37)

One might say, with sardonic whimsy, that the doubling theme of Ethan Frome points to some moralistic exploration of the ill effects of the “double-cross” of infidelity. But this is not a novel to condemn the love that grows in this barren environment. The tender romance of Ethan and Mattie is delicate to excruciating extremes. The two kiss, and there are satisfactions there, but most of this romance is left to the ethereal realm of possibility (and impossibility):

. . . all their intercourse [pun intended?] had been made up of such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the wintry woods . . . .
(84)

But there are no butterflies in winter, certainly not in a Starkfield winter. Even so, the doubling theme re-doubles back to something positive in the context of Mattie and Ethan’s love. The height—or depth—of their love is conveyed in terms of reflecting back—echoing—lover-to-lover and lover-within-lover:

She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will. (16-17)

One of the more chilling echoes (in this most wintry novel) occurs the night of Ethan and Mattie’s “date,” they’re one night together. Ethan’s anticipation for the evening can only but mildly match the reader’s, and Wharton’s description of Ethan’s approach to Mattie is tantalizing for its delays and complications. The narration here is at once archetypal (the “expectant lover,” who must court ritualistically, must practice restraint, and must follow proprieties despite the motives calling for intense and sudden action), suspenseful (is Mattie there?), passionate (Ethan, locked out, “rattled the handle violently”), and, most of all, eerily foreshadowing of the most poignant and ultimate doubling of the story, the doubling of Zeena’s soul into Mattie:

He reached the kitchen-porch and turned the door-handle; but the door did not yield to his touch.

Startled at finding it locked he rattled the handle violently; then he reflected that Mattie was alone and that it was natural she should barricade herself at nightfall. He stood in the darkness expecting to hear her step. It did not come, and after vainly straining his ears he called out in a voice that shook with joy: “Hello, Matt!”

Silence answered; but in a minute or two he caught a sound on the stairs and saw a line of light about the door-frame, as he had seen it the night before. So strange was the precision with which the incidents of the previous evening were repeating themselves that he half expected, when he heard the key turn, to see his wife before him on the threshold; but the door opened, and Mattie faced him. (43)

After dinner, another doubling occurrence caused Ethan to confuse Mattie and Zeena:

Zeena’s empty rocking-chair stood facing him. Mattie rose [. . .] and seated herself in it. As her young brown head detached itself against the patch-work cushion that habitually framed his wife’s gaunt countenance, Ethan had a momentary shock. It was almost as if the other face, the face of the superseded woman, had obliterated that of the intruder. (48)

One might easily list other instances of the doubling theme: Ethan’s laughter “echoes” Mattie’s laughter; the naming of Zeena causes “repercussions of sound” that cause Mattie to wait “to give the echo time to drop” (51), a momentary blush arises in Mattie “like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart” (51).

In all, the doubling brings Zeena and Mattie together, in a way not fully consummated until the novel’s end when we discover Mattie has become Zeena in the most awful intensification of the dull “smash up” of Ethan Frome’s life.

Before that, Wharton’s narrator characterizes Zeena, at her ugliest moment when she sends Mattie away, as the incarnation of, the reflection of, the doubling of all the misfortune, failure, and silent death of Ethan’s life: “All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way” (65). The ultimate doubling of this incarnation is Ethan Frome’s fate—horrible enough under any circumstances, but unthinkable in its zero-sum effect of negating all the possibility, light, charm, warmth, and freedom that Mattie had presented to Ethan.