View from the North 40: Connect-the-dots picture

Remember the old connect-the-dots pictures from grade school? Sometimes life-things — like connect-the-dots — don't look like much until you make the connections that form something more meaningful.

1 • For me, the worst part about writing articles for the newspaper is calling people. I’m not good with any of that initial approach stuff. And the worst of the worst is getting an answering machine. I generally hang up on answering machines and take a little time to ponder what I want to say, let my brain calm a bit, maybe pray to some Buddhist god of sanity that the person becomes available to answer soon.

When I’ve had a chance to think about what I want to say, I call back and leave a message that generally comes out like this: “Hi, this is, um, Pam with theeeee, uh, Havre Daily News, and I’m calling to talk a few questions a—, uh, ask with you — errgh. I mean, ask a … (sigh) talk with you a bit about your upcoming prodect, uh, project. If you can could call me back, I’d appreciate it. … Um, thanks. … Bye.” And five seconds later I call again and leave this: “You can reach me at the office at 265-6795. … Oh, this is Pam from the Havre Daily. Burke. Pam Burke. Um, thanks.”

Brilliant.

I left a message like that Tuesday.

2 • I fell off my front-door steps Tuesday night. Bruised my backside. (Hang in there, the big picture will come clear soon.)

In a hurry, I stepped wrong, slipped of the step’s edge and fell, but managed somehow to do so in a way that launched my body, in an almost horizontal plane, both up and forward. It’s a peculiar talent of mine to multiply the awkwardness of any slip-up, both literal and figurative.

With cat-like reflexes, I immediately started spinning myself through the fall to land on my hands and knees rather than my back. However, with couch-potato-like agility, I made it about one-third of the way through the spin before my right gluteus took the maximus force of my landing against the corner of the bottom step. And then the rest of me floated to the ground like a bag of bricks.

Yup, it left a mark. Or two.

3 • That first two to three minutes of actually talking to people, strangers, is the second worst of the worst. I bumble through trying to explain what I’m calling for, then ask permission to record the interview because I take notes at the speed of the average second-grader who just graduated to the standard No. 2 pencil from those fat ones underdeveloped motor-skills more easily grasp. I invariably launch into the interview with these two words: “So” and “um.”

I know this. I record it. Every time.

Sometimes it’s a long, drawn-out “Sooooo, uuummm.” Sometimes it sounds pained, like I’m dragging thoughts out of my brain backward, kicking and screaming. Sometimes it’s a crisp, business-like “So, um, what I’m calling about is … .” But “So, um,” we begin each interview.

What is the big picture then?

I called and left a message asking to talk to a Havre man, Scooter Linton, about his daughter, Sheradia, who is fighting the good fight against an aggressive cancer. Oh, yeah, you know it. With an interview this important, I really mangled the message in proportion.

As I was bustling about, keeping my mind off the bungled message and the future embarrassment of my interview skills, I slipped on the step, bruising my behind, and other places, along with wrenching several other body parts.

Before I could even shake off the pains, my interviewee called back, so I pulled up to my desk, sat down on my bruise, leaned back on the aches and started the questions with a very pained “Soo, uuhhm … .”

For the first few minutes the stray thought that I wouldn’t be able to sit at my desk long enough to write this up and make deadline the next morning kept wandering through my brain. However, as I sat there listening to this dad talk about his daughter, who is going through six months of chemotherapy, and about how the family had decided to think of this experience as a blessing to learn more about life and each other, something started to come clear for me.

Then I read on the 14-year-old girl’s blog that — on the day she found out she had cancer, and the family would be uprooted and separated by 13 hours of driving, so she could start a grueling cancer treatment — one of the things she did to get ready was donate her hair to Locks for Love and write these words to the universe: “Cancer-shmancer! Whatever!”

At that point I shut my pie hole, put a cork back in my whine bottle and my backside on an ice pack, and suffered through.

The big picture was not about me.

(I don't always make that connection at [email protected], then go to sheradiasepicjourney.blogspot.com and say, “Hey, how goes it in Seattle?”)