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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, June 12, 2000 Volume II Number 24
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FOCUS - Re-writing History
You’ve have heard about the prime time television faire of the fifties and early sixties. You’ve probably seen the re-runs.
According to the gurus of pop culture, those old programs were blatant over-simplifications of family life. They were contrived. They were one-dimensional. They were based on the assumption that all of life’s challenges could be resolved in a thirty-minute time frame. The laugh tracks were canned. They were antiseptic and sterile and classic textbook examples about how post-WWII society emulated the fine art of denial – the avoidance of “real issues.”
You’ve been told that shows like
“Father Knows Best,” “Leave it to Beaver,” “Ozzie and Harriet,”
“The
Donna Reed Show” and even “The Dick Van Dyke Show” were hopeless attempts
to portray the happy American nuclear family that never was and never will be.
The stay-at-home mom. The
provider dad. The perky siblings.
The neat living room. Biscuits
in the oven. Crisp, ironed shirts
and blouses. Dad in white collar
and cinched up tie. Mom in an
apron. “Honey, I’m home,” dad would announce, and the whole
family came running.
Not until bold, courageous producers broke the mold and introduced groundbreaking “reality” shows like “The Brady Bunch” (suggesting that blended families existed, too) was the old stereotype broken. Today, we have “reality” sit-coms. Anything goes.
I didn’t just hear about those old fifties shows, I watched ‘em. Probably too many of them.
And now, three or four decades later, after all the extreme television experiments, which plunged a national audience to the depths of depravity, the pendulum swings back. Look around you. Many long for the benefits of a wholesome nuclear family. But it seems so illusive.
Sure, we’ve got to modernize the concept from the fifties version of the American family. Dads should be more involved with the kids. Moms are not passive participants, blindly following dad’s lead. The pressures of a high-tech, fast paced world won’t go away.
But there’s clearly a longing for home and family – where mom is Mom and dad is Dad. Long term. Grandmas and grandpas are there… available and accessible. Brothers and sisters who care about each other’s well being. Home – a place to find acceptance and encouragement and love. A place of refuge in the rough and tumble of a competitive world.
It isn’t really a return the world of Ozzie and Harriet. (How DID that man earn a paycheck?) But it’s for real.
My kids took me to a new movie.
They called it a “must see.” And when it was done, I realized that there is a whole new generation who long to create real families… but the challenge is enormous.
There is much to overcome.
* * * * * * * * * *
John Sullivan is the son of a fireman.
Maybe it’s because his dad was killed while fighting a fire that he decides to become a cop. But our story begins as John’s wife Samantha walks out of the police officer’s life. It’s an intense, stormy scene. She has had enough. He’s too distant. Too angry. She can’t understand him. She’s tried. And tried again. He doesn’t understand her – not even close. She doesn’t want to leave. She loves him. But now she must go. Self-respect demands it. It’s too late for the trying. That’s been done. No more, she says.
And she walks out.
He says, “fine.” And throws his hands in the air.
“Whatever.” Like it doesn’t matter.
He picks up a bottle of whiskey. Sits at the window in the dark. He swallows hard, then drinks some more. Then more. He stares into the darkness.
In the night sky, a mysterious light appears. A streak of light… no, a wisp of a cloud. All the colors of the rainbow against the velvet black of night. Wavy. Eerie.
He tries to focus. Must be the whiskey, he thinks.
What’s wrong with me? How could I have let her go? Why did she leave? Where is my life going? You see, it did matter.
It’s a solar storm – massive nuclear explosions reach out into space from the surface of the sun. It’s the aurora borealis, commonly known as the Northern Lights. In the night sky, it creates shifting patches and dancing columns of light, in various hues. John’s drink is an attempt to anesthetize the pain with serious a quantity of alcohol. He sees fuzzy through a mental fog. For John, the light is a sign.
The solar phenomenon affects the earth’s magnetic fields and disturbs radio waves. The aurora is known to distort or interrupt radio, television and telegraph transmissions.
And for John, unaware of the cause, strangely, it connects him with his past.
He lives in the same house where he grew up. He sorts through a collection of old stuff. There are memories of a dad he only knew as a youngster. The tragic accident on the job happened when he was in second grade. He’s old enough to remember his dad’s voice. His laughter. Playing catch. The ball game at the stadium. Taking the training wheels off the bike, and taking his first solo run on two wheels. He remembered how much his dad loved his mom.
Then he was gone.
Since that terrible day, John grew up with a hole in his heart. Other guys had their dads. But not John. John’s dad, Frank Sullivan the firefighter vanished, gone forever.
That was the pain he tried to numb with each potent swig, warm all the way down. That was the anger that finally drove Samantha away.
In the memory box, along with photos and newspaper clippings, there is an old dusty Heathkit. A home built radio. The antenna on the roof has never been taken down. John’s dad Frank was a licensed ham radio operator, and the vacuum tubes remained in place. John plugs it in… and unlike the instant-on of transistors and integrated circuits, there is a warm-up phase. Soon, you hear the familiar squelch and scratch of the radio.
To buy into the next part of the story, you’ve got to suspend logic for a little while. You’ve got to let go of common sense. You’ve got to let story telling do its thing. Hold on tight, and go with it… and later we’ll sort through detail.
The Northern Lights cast eerie shadows in the night. A voice comes through the crackling static of the old radio. “Who’s there? Anybody there?”
John hits the mike switch, “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Who are you? Identify yourself.” The voice at the other end is impatient – already the respondent has violated the simple codes of conduct for radio hams. “Are you a licensed operator?”
“No. Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it matters.”
“Well… who are YOU?” John asks, always the cop, hesitant to reveal his identity.
As the conversation goes back and forth, John Sullivan discovers that he has made contact with Frank Sullivan.
It’s too bazaar.
Can’t be. Then the
testing starts. And the
confirmation. The World Champion
1969
New York Mets prove the point. John
Sullivan, in October 1999, is speaking to his father, Frank Sullivan, who is
living and breathing and for him, it is October of 1969.
For over twenty-five years John longed for his father. To speak to him. Laugh with him. Hear his voice. And there he was, unmistakably, at the other end of the ham radio.
* * * * * * *
In our more pensive moments, we are prone to ponder the “what ifs.”
What if I could speak to the person who is gone from my life? What would I say? What would I ask? What would I want to know?
What if I could do it over again? What if the clock could be turned back, and I could make that decision knowing what I know now? How would my life be different? Where would I be?
What if I could relive the day of that crazy accident? If I had just made a different turn? Paid more attention to the road? Left a few minutes earlier? A few minutes later?
How might things change?
* * * * * * * * *
As the conversation intensifies, John realizes that he is speaking to his father on the very day of the accident that took his life. And it occurs to him, maybe if I can warn him, he might avoid the crushing explosion that killed him.
So John tells Frank. He’s a detective. An investigator. He had reams of information detailing the events that led to his father’s death. He knew the building. The progress of the fire. The firefighters’ strategy for controlling the flames. He knew the mistakes. The timing. John knew how his dad might have been rescued, and his loss prevented. John had rehearsed the whole episode a thousand times.
“Dad… listen to me… and listen good. Tonight you’ll be called out… the whole department will roll to a building on fire….” John explained who, what and where. And how his dad must not enter at a certain place at a certain time… no matter what.
Frank didn’t believe him.
Until that night when the alarm sounded and the trucks rolled and sirens screamed.
Later after the fire, Frank called his son John on the ham. He was still alive.
And thirty years of history changed. All of John’s memories. The photographs in the box. The headlines from the newspapers. In an instant.
Changed forever.
History got a rewrite.
* * * * * * *
Storytelling is fantasy. Dreams come true. Bad people suffer their just rewards. Wishing wells give up their wishes, make them public, and then make them happen. At the end, we applaud.
* * * * * * *
Rescuing his father is only the beginning of the popular new movie, “FREQUENCY”. Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) and John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) launch a journey of rediscovery and peril with their re-acquaintance over the radio waves.
But the ultimate purpose of the journey is to repair the damage of thirty years. To rebuild a family lost to tragedy. And in the end, what remains is not wealth, or fame, or power. It’s family.
And John learns himself – how to be a dad. How to love a woman. How to make a home.
Nope, it’s not “Father Knows Best.” But it’s family.
* * * * * * *
Can history be rewritten?
You are a leader. You know the answer. No. It cannot be rewritten. We’re stuck. We can wish all we want, we can complain, and wonder, and think about what if. We can numb the pain, we can stare at the stars, we can look for the Northern Lights and tune into ham radios.
But the past is the past. It’s non-negotiable. History is history.
Think about it.
History cannot be rewritten. But every day, history is written.
As a leader, today, on this Monday morning, you are writing history. The decisions you make, the commitments you make, the relationships you build… they will set the course of your life for years to come.
Tomorrow, five years from now, ten years, twenty years from now, you will look back and remember today.
Put your choices in the context of your personal history. Imagine where you want your relationships to be ten years from now. Act accordingly. Build toward that bright future you really want.
And a whole lot of future regrets will disappear.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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