Truth and the Doc

Truth and the Doc

February 16, 2019

I was asked recently if everything is all right, because I’ve been absent from blog land.  I doubt anyone has been marking the days since my last offering on their Big Ships of the Navy calendar, but the mood has struck.  And yes, everything is more than all right, thank you very much.

In the late night and early morning I watched two documentaries.  I am an addict of true stories delivered by Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and the like. Lately I’ve been on a steady diet of crime shows, but the kids are gone this weekend and I get spooked hoping I don’t wind up on “Forensic Files” with posthumous testimonials from friends who embellish the truth about me to tell the tale. You know, “she was the kind of girl who just lit up the room!” Yeah, right. And I will admit that I did watch “The Ted Bundy Tapes” in the car in the dark in a sketchier we-could-be-filming-“The-First-48”-part-of-town while waiting for Drew to get out of indoor baseball practice a week or two ago, but I digress.

The first doc was the story of two columnists.  The second was the story of a neighbor.  The tales couldn’t be more different, the men more different.  But in the wee light on this icy morning, under a pile of covers, I found myself confronted with impactful lives divergent but true.

Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hammill were voices of New York and beyond in a time when writing was in print, newsmen worked the streets, and columns cut a swath undiluted.  The 24-hour news cycle had not yet emerged to drown quality with quantity, and the art of the written word was ingested with regularity in subways and on city streets.  The styles of Breslin and Hammill were different, but they saw things. Through their lens readers saw them, as well. Agree or don’t agree with what shone through the glass. So be it.

Fred Rogers was a staple of my brief time as a child, before Dallas and Days of our Lives and all other manner of distractions swooped in when they perhaps should have waited a bit or never swooped at all.  This was a kind man who saw children as valid. He spoke to them with dignity.  It is a big world, he observed.  He was a guide. He believed that one of the greatest mistakes we make when we grow up is that we expect children to be grown up; and we forget what it is like to be small in this big world. 

Believe it or not, a common thread runs through the lives of these three fellas, and don’t think for a second it was a fluke that I viewed these documentaries in close succession.  It may be in 2019 in the middle of the night, it may have been in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s while riding the subway or by watching the trolley scoot through the neighborhood, but they had truths to tell.

Of course, so does forensic evidence, I suppose.  Hmmm…where is the remote?