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Dad would say I’m, “chewing my cabbage twice.” But I’ve had enough folks question my intent, meaning, sanity and writing process that I’m going to back up a couple of weeks...
I wrote a rather harmless (and fairly mundane) story about how all of baseball has gone to the “Designated Hitter” rule. To a baseball purist, it was a sad moment for the game….and I said so.
None of the perplexed readers openly objected to the content, the issue for them was the title. “What kind of heading for a baseball story is ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls?’” was the way the polite ones phrased it.
“You goofball,” polite was never Aunt Ruby Nell’s long suit, “baseball doesn’t have anything to do with the title of an Ernest Hemingway novel”
An older couple stopped me and asked if it was some kind of metaphor...or maybe, a hyperbole. “I hope you’re not equating your work with Hemingway” is the way one email put it.
Seeing as how I might have crossed the line with this particular title—I quickly placed the blame on my third grade history class. Miss Belle was forever having us to read one of those Landmark books on some historical giant and write a two page report on it.
Naturally, we had to stand up and read our essay. Pam Collins would clear her throat and say, “The title of my story is ‘George Washington’” and then she would launch into her first paragraph, “This is the story of George Washington. George Washington was born on February 22, 1732. When George Washington was a little boy...”
Listen, I didn’t know my elbow from a hot rock in 1955, but I knew there were too many Georges in this story already. I also didn’t know words like redundant and superfluous at that tender age, but I was sure feeling them!
And then Kenny Butler rose and reported on David Crockett, David Crockett, David Crockett.
There has to be a better way! A more inventive way to introduce what you are about to say. You don’t need to reveal the whole thought in the title and then repeat it sixteen more times before you sit down. Of course, it didn’t really matter to me, if I could just graduate from the third grade, I was absolutely never going to write another essay, story, paper, thesis…..as long as I lived!
I certainly wasn’t ever going to read anything beyond the sports pages. Then titles like “Bad Day at Black Rock”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Gone with the Wind” caught my eye.