Facts Speak for Themselves
By Fred Owens
I was building facts at the newspaper this week. They have to be plumb and square and true. If you build your facts strong, they will last a long time. They won't move. You can walk away, come back years later, and those same facts will be there, like diamonds or granite.
I built a lot of facts this week at the newspaper. Some were off kilter or out of focus -- I had to throw them back into the sea of information. Information, data, the world is awash with it, meaningless, worthless, formless. But facts! Facts are worth something. They mean something. They are sturdy and reliable. You can build with facts. You can get paid for making facts. It's good work.
I wrote this in 2005 when I had my last newspaper job at the Wilson County News in Floresville, Texas. "You can get paid got making facts," I wrote. Well, you could get paid for that in 2005, but that kind of work is pretty scarce now. Nobody agrees what a facts is nowadays. It's your word against mine. You have Trump and his fake news tirades, yet he is the most complicated unabashed liar in world history. Or you can look to the left, to the academic world and discover a consistent message against objectivity. "It doesn't feel true to me. It all depends on the context."
Facts are disappearing. Words mean whatever you want them to mean. It's too scary.
The next story is by Bill Skubi, a friend of mine who lives in Coupeville, Washington. The story was originally published in the Puget Sound Mail in 1989 if you remember that obscure, quirky newspaper that I once published. The Puget Sound Mail promised “News of Lasting Value” and we kept that promise because this story about a man and his dog is not aged or dated.
Spending Time With Your Dog
By Bill Skubi
The frantic pace of modern life was catching up with me. I was taking a good hard look at the strange kind of person I had let myself become. This began a few weeks ago when Jan told me there was something wrong with Jackson’s ear. I was hearing what she said, but to my utter horror I realized that I didn’t care. Jackson is a lumbering old Yellow Lab. He has been my dog almost eleven years, slightly longer than I have been married to Jan. Just the week before I had caught myself actually trying to give him away to a friend who had moved his family into the country.
The excuse I gave myself was that Jackson was no longer happy living with us, since Jan insisted he be tied. The truth was that he was not happy because I had become too pre-occupied to spend any time with him. He was just this big, sad, obligatory maintenance retriever at the end of his tether. And so was I. That reminded me that it was I who had consciously fled the academic world fifteen years ago. At that point I realized that twenty years of schooling had trained me to read and write obscure sentences about “contingencies and non-linear variables.” At that rate I knew I would probably never live long enough to figure out what I wanted to say, and if I did figure that out, nobody would want to read it.
The writer in me wanted to git back home, do some plain talkin’, leave the footnotes, spend some evenings rocking on the front porch with a big ol’ hound-dog curled up at my feet. And I did it too, but the years brought marriage, a mortgage, and a child, along with career changes, and I let a whole new set of pressures come between me and my humanity. Or to put it another way, part of me woke up and was shocked to be sharing a body with someone who would offer to give away his dog. I really didn’t like the person I had become. I know I am basically an incurably selfish person. I attend church and take my marriage vows seriously knowing they are twin anchors on a spirit I know can be dangerously free, but I had forgotten that Jackson, too, was utterly dedicated to protecting me, and I owed him the same.
So I went to see what was ailing Jack’s ear. It was pretty sore all right, he was awful dirty and so was his house. I gave him a bath, and he was so proud to ride in my new truck and he didn’t even care he was going to the veterinarian. The vet had to keep him awhile to remove foxtail grass seeds from his ears. I went home, cleaned out his house and built him a new run in a place where he would have a good view of things. He was still a little wobbly on his hind legs from the medication when I brought him home. I showed him around his new digs and told him we would have to spend more time together. Then I noticed he was shaking uncontrollably. At first I could not tell whether he was sick or reacting to the medication. Then I got down to where I could stroke him and discovered he was shaking from pure joy.
Philosophers and theologians will forever debate the highest possible achievement of man on Earth, and I would submit to them that being the object of such perfect love might be right up there.
Anyway, I bought a blanket at the thrift store for Jack to lie on in the truck. I can still be too busy to take him along, but we do have an understanding. And my young son asks a question that I remember asking, “Do dogs go to heaven when they die?” His mother isn’t sure how to answer. As for me, there have been times in my life when I have doubted whether or not heaven really exists, but I have never doubted that dogs would be there if it did.
My Favorite Movies, with a list compiled from memory and not nearly complete
The Vikings
The Grapes of Wrath
Viva Zapata
From Here to Eternity
North by Northwest
Hunt for Red October
Grand Hotel
High Noon
The Verdict
Casablanca
The Graduate
Broadway Danny Rose
Hannah and Her Sisters
Manhattan
The Godfather
Casino
A Bronx Tale
Dog Day Afternoon
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Terms of Endearment
The Quiet Man
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Wild Bunch
On the Waterfront
The Philadelphia Story
My Cousin Vinny
Ferris Buehler's Day Off
Lawrence of Arabia
Citizen Kane
Gone with the Wind
The Wizard of Oz
Moonstruck
Do the Right Thing
Dr. Zhivago
The Shawshank Redemption
Field of Dreams
Clueless
Singing in the Rain
Marty
Notting Hill
Bridget Jones' Diary
Chinatown
That's all for this week,
see ya,
Fred
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