Members of the local Lion’s Club were in the fellowship hall, putting long-stemmed red roses into vases for a fund-raiser.  My dad knew every person there — and remembered their middle names even though he hadn’t seen any of them in more than 30 years. We were inside the church less than a minute when Jay, the very first friend I ever had, walked in. His mother and mine were the best of  friends. We were babies together. We carpooled to kindergarten and went to vacation Bible school and ran around under the street lights after dark, chasing our younger sisters. The last time I saw him was at our high school graduation dinner in that very same fellowship hall. Late afternoon sunlight was coming through the windows then too.

His mother, like mine, is gone; his father, too.  We caught up on news of friends that neither of us has seen in years and laughed about his dog, Uncle, who infamously ate the very expensive blueprints for the new high school track.  We walked through the pretty  little church, to the sanctuary and the altar where we stood together as 14-year-olds to be confirmed, to the Sunday school wing where the picture of Jesus leading the lambs still hangs outside the women’s restroom.

His mother’s painting of Old Testament scenes hangs on a wall in the fellowship hall and is better even than I remembered it. Below it now also hangs another painting by his mother, scenes from the New Testament, that he and his sister discovered in a closet after she died.

Forty miles seems like such a short distance to let so many years pass without a visit. But after we moved away, I kept going–to college, to jobs, to cities in far-flung states.  Standing in the late afternoon sunlight, in that dear fellowship hall where we had so many church suppers, it was as though hardly any time had passed at all. And all the people I knew and loved then were still there. My grandparents and their friends, my parents, my sister and our friends. So many people now gone from this world were still alive in that room. I could see them, hear their voices, smell the fried chicken and know just how fast I had to move to snatch a handful of cookies from the table and beat feet outside before the grownups started their after-supper meeting and I was forced to sit and listen. It was as close to time travel as I think I’ll ever get.

Later, we met some of our very best friends for dinner.  Jane is 80 and works every day as the junior high school librarian.  Ethel is 89 and drives fearlessly and well to Lubbock, 40 miles a way. They and their young husbands attended my parents’ wedding; our families have been close ever since. Both are as beautiful as can be and just as funny and wise as ever. We laughed and reminisced and a day that could have been so sad wasn’t sad after all.

Nora came from a family that was honorable and church-going. Her grandfather was the first county judge; her father a rancher and pillar of the Methodist Church. Tom and Nora were my grandparents and I never heard peep one about any kind of drama in their lives.

I didn’t expect to find much in the letters, but letters kept for 90 years deserve to be read, and so I set about going through them. The brown paper smelled of dust and old lace, of  of my grandparent’s farmhouse.

Mostly the letters were short and ordinary. A few were sad. A neighbor’s little boy was run over by a truck and killed. He’d been buried in the church cemetery the next day. The news was delivered without inflection, two sentences between paragraphs about new lambs and losing the wash to the wind.

The letter dated Dec. 12, 1921, was thicker than the rest. It ran on for seven pages. Corda wrote to Nora and Tom  about the weather and letters received from other family members, of the Sunday sermon and finally, of someone named Ben, who had made a public confession. He was, she said, turning his life over to the Lord.

“Brother Tom, you wrote just like some of the folk think about Ben. But I don’t exactly agree. Really, I believe that Ben has given his life to God.”

My grandfather could always smell a rat.  So, I figured, whoever this Ben character was, Tom had his number.

Ben, it happens, was married to Nora’s sister, Viola. And come to think of it, I had heard a story about Ben. Shortly after Ben and Viola were married, Viola’s parents had given them a bag of turnips. Food was hard to come by and turnips would keep the belly full. Ben and Viola were hardly down the lane when the parents, still waving good-bye, saw Ben toss the turnips out of the wagon. This was the official family explanation of why the marriage didn’t work out and more than half a century later, when told the tale as a child, I got the point. Don’t throw away a gift in front of the giver, even if it is a bag of dirty turnips.

As it happens, there was more to Ben’s bad behavior than turnip tossing.

Corda, the optimist, continued, “It is possible that he is doing this to get Viola back, but I still can’t believe it to be true. But I don’t think Viola will come back soon.”

The folks, Corda wrote, had heard from Viola in a “round about way.”  Corda said she didn’t know where Viola was.

“Nora, your papa will not let Ben come near here. I don’t think Ben knows where Viola is.”

Still professing her faith that Ben’s conversion was true, Corda let drop a bombshell.

“He threatened her life, was the beginning of their trouble. Shut her out of the house and beat the kids and ever so much like that. Now she told (another brother) this. She warned them to be armed for he was dangerous.

“I don’t believe she intends to come back to him. Well, I must run to work.”

I can just imagine my grandmother taking in that piece of news.

She warned them to be armed for he was dangerous.

Her sister is a battered wife. Her brothers are arming themselves against Viola’s husband for he is dangerous. Chatty Corda may not have known where Viola was (for good reason), but you can bet Viola’s brothers and papa did.

Reading the letters, I felt like I’d dropped down inside Fried Green Tomatoes.

My grandparents were already old when I was born. The great-aunts and great-uncles were even older and no more to me than shadowy gray figures who smelled of lavender water and Old Spice. But reading these letters, they suddenly all came alive. Their urgency, their concern and yes, their fear is plain on the pages. I feel like a voyeur, which I guess that I am. But my grandmother saved these letters for a reason. She wanted someone to read them.  And learn something about the family, about matters that were too painful, too shameful to discuss at the time, and yes, about overcoming hard times.

The ’20s were a terrible time to be a young woman trying to leave an abusive husband. Viola had two little kids and a reputation to protect. But, as it turns out, she also had grit. And those brothers. And that papa. I’m not sure what exactly happened to Ben.  But eventually, Viola started a new life without him. And those little kids whose daddy beat them? They grew up to be happy successful people. The youngest are still alive at 89 and 95 years old.

Part of me wishes I could time travel back to 1921 and tell Viola that she and her babies would be OK. But of course, that would spoil everything. She came into her own and became the woman she would be by going forward without knowing what was coming next.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of brown. Just as my brain was going, “Hey, was that a bird?” I realized I had done something awful.

Sure enough, on the ground below the window box in the tangle of tossed branches, there was the most beautiful, most perfect, most intricate bird’s nest I have ever seen. The little brown bird had woven the core of the nest with pine needles, dozens of them linked and overlapping. She’d packed leaves and twigs around the outside.  Inside the nest– and this was the most touching part — she had lined the sweet round cup with Buddy’s hair, hundreds and hundreds of individual strains twisted one by one into the pine needles. (And to think I’d fussed at Larry for leaving the brushed-out clumps of dog hair to blow around the yard.) The hair wasn’t merely stuffed into the cavity but knitted until the center was thoroughly upholstered.  It must have taken her days.

Thankfully, the nest was empty. (I may be a home-wrecker, but at least I’m not a murderer.)

The little rusty-brown bird sat on a branch of the hydrangea near the porch, watching me, a single strand of dog hair still in her beak. She was a rose-breasted grosbeak, which made me feel worse. No knock on sparrows, but we don’t get a lot of rose-breasted grosbeaks.

Yep, it was my fault. If I’d removed the pine branches sooner, the window box wouldn’t have tempted her. If I had looked into the window box, I’d have seen the nest. Careless human!

I debated putting the nest back, but I figured she wouldn’t return to it after I’d touched it. And without the pine branches, her babies would be exposed and vulnerable to grackles.

Later, when I told Larry how badly I felt, he just shrugged. “Stuff (only he didn’t say stuff) happens to birds all the time. They’re used to it.”

There’s a life lesson here. (Duh.)  Would that I could be more like the grosbeak.  I saw her in the pear tree this morning. She is, as Larry predicted, fast on her way to finishing another nest–beyond the reach of careless humans.

Last night, William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg shared the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.” And there was a lot of shouting and cheering in our house. The 14-minute film is the very first released production of Moonbot, their animation studio in Shreveport, La., which makes the Oscar all the more impressive.

I had no idea that Bill Joyce was up for an Academy Award, so I was shocked when the presenter called his name. But I can’t say that I’m surprised that Bill now holds an Oscar.

We all knew he was a genius, way back there at the Daily Campus. Bill’s drawings started showing up in the student newspaper at Southern Methodist University about the same time I started writing for the paper. We got to be friends. And I’m here to tell you, if ever anyone is coming at you with a key lime pie, you’ll want Bill to have your back. He can throw a mean dinner roll.  But that’s another story. Bill always was a great guy and from what I saw up there on stage last night, he still is.

He is also one of America’s truly great talents, which I’m glad the Academy had the good sense to recognize.

Within a few years of SMU, Bill was writing and illustrating children’s books. The press this morning is calling him the “acclaimed children’s author.” Some of his books were made into animated series for TV, notably Rolie Polie Olie and George Shrinks, which he produced. If you’ve had children in the last two decades, you know his witty, wonderful work. He’s contributed to A Bug’s Life, Toy Story and Robots and won a Daytime Emmy Award.

I bought his books, watched the PBS animated series with my daughter and followed his success from afar. But as my daughter grew up and we got farther away from Dinosaur Bob, I lost track of Bill.

I hadn’t seen Bill since graduation. In my mind, he’s still 21 years old. (as am I)  And so I had to look twice at the man in a hat and big black glasses to recognize the kid I knew. But when he opened his mouth, there was no doubt.

“Look,” he drawled, “we’re just these two swamp rats from Louisiana.”

And then he kind of went a little crazy up on the stage. Vintage, Bill, for sure.

So here’s to brilliant swamp rats. Congratulations, Bill and Brandon!

Brandon Oldenburg (left) and William Joyce do the Oscar dance.

Someone loved enough to buy the roses and someone else loved little enough to throw them away.

I spent the remainder of my run thinking about the roses and what I do could with them.

Writers are the worst sort of scavengers. Overheard conversations,  light on wet leaves, a witty remark, a flash of color,  burned toast, roses in the gutter, we collect them all. Sometimes we use the bits to invent a life or reinvent our own. Sometimes we don’t.  But like the hoarders we are, we always keep the fragments and the wisps and the shadows, just in case. You never know when you’re going to need something.

Long ago, as a new reporter, I was sent to scour the classified advertisements for feature story ideas on a slow Sunday afternoon. Right away I found the  story of my dreams.   A chinchilla ranch was going out of business. Cute crepuscular rodents. Fickle fashion trends. Who could pass up that?

I’d forgotten about the chinchilla ranch until today when I saw the roses in the gutter. Funny how things connect. There was another classified advertisement that Sunday. The assistant city editor, a 30-something woman working through a divorce, nixed it with a frown. No story in that one, she said, and I was off to the chinchilla ranch with a photographer.

But there was a story in the other classified ad and one that makes me wonder still.

Six words. Wedding gown for sale, never worn.

Roses in the gutter. Wedding gown in the classifieds. Little bits of other people’s lives. They didn’t belong to me, but I’ve kept them just the same.

Now that we are all on the straight and narrow, writing tight has an entirely different meaning and it isn’t half the fun. Keep it short, sister. Attention spans aren’t what they used to be.

Brevity is the soul of wit, we know. But it doesn’t come easy.

I banged out a 1,000-word article in an hour and a half the other day (reporting and research time not included.) It took me five hours to whittle the piece down to the requested 350 words.  I am not proud of this, nor is my wallet happy about it.  But if Cicero had trouble writing tight, who am I to complain? (Cicero gets the original citation for that much misquoted quip, “I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time.”)

While I was cutting that 1,000-word buffet of brilliant prose down to a fun-size snack, it occurred to me that there was a post in my pain.  I know I do not suffer alone. So, here for all you long-winded writers, are the editing tricks that I use whenever the words runneth over.  Let’s call them,  ”Debbie’s Rules for Writing Tight without Bourbon.”

1. Location, location, location.

Get to the good stuff quick. The lead matters more than ever if you’re chopping the heck out of substance lower in the article. Admit it. You started reading this post because of the story about drunken journalists. If I’d started with “here are a few pointers for writing tighter copy,”  you wouldn’t have gotten past the first five words. That said, your lead does need to be on point.

2. Edit with a cold eye.

Write as much as you want. Then set it aside, overnight if possible.  None of the words will be quite so precious or indispensable in the morning.

3. Go for the low-hanging fruit.

Ax the clichés  (such as low-hanging fruit). Slice long, windy titles. This can be tricky if you’re writing for a client who insists that long, windy titles be used on all references, but if you’re wily, you can find ways to shorten. Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive of the New World Order William Smith Jones becomes Bill Jones, boss of everything. (saves about 9 words) Whack the adjectives and prepositional phrases. “The girls with the blue ribbons in their hair” becomes the “ribbon-headed girls.” OK, I’m just kidding about that one. But seriously 69.7% of adjectives are worthless. Ditto for 35.3% of prepositional phrases.

4. Don’t let ‘em talk so much.

Easy pickings here. Most quotes are at least twice as long as they ought to be. Sure, that person you just interviewed for an hour and a half is going to be disappointed to see his soul-baring conversation reduced to three words, but unless Mr. X is extremely articulate, famous, or both, paraphrase and save the quotation marks for words that deserve them.

5. Serve lean meat and vegetables.

Your story needs facts to survive just as the body needs good nutrition. When space is tight, make a list of your essential facts, allowing yourself one word for each fact.  So cleansing.

6. Use maximum wattage.

Each word must shine. Replace weak words with strong ones, vague words with vivid, ambiguous with precise. When beat poet Allen Ginsberg was revising HOWL for Carl Solomon, he changed yearning to burning in the line, ”angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection.” Consider how much more powerful  burning is than the wimpy yearning.  (I learned about Ginsberg’s yearning-burning swap recently from Robert Davis Ph.D., an absolutely wonderful Wittenberg University professor who has been teaching a literature series at Westminster Presbyterian Church. If you can make this Sunday’s lecture on Annie Dillard, I highly recommend it.)

7. Kill your babies.

If you love a sentence so much that you can’t part with it, you probably should. And if that advice sounds like infanticide, it is, but hey, only the tightest survive.

P.S. I made up the percentages. In truth, 100% of adjectives are non-essential personnel, but I do like a few of them on occasion.

There is so much I want to say about her and about this past year. But first, there is a story that bears telling.

A year ago, I was trying to get home to my mother.  And like every other person flying through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport on Feb. 4, 2011, I was stranded.  Fog. Ice. Cancelled flights. The ticket agent was unmoved by my tears. Sorry, she said. Tomorrow, first one out. Best I can do. Next.

I tried to rent a car to drive to Lubbock. No cars. And even if there had been cars, driving was a non-starter. Dallas was one big skating rink and Interstate-20 was closed west of Weatherford.

I knew my mother, the intrepid travel agent, explorer of seven continents, wouldn’t let a little thing like a closed airport stop her if the roles were reversed and I was the one in a hospice bed. She’d get a flight if she had to steal a plane.  So I kept trying. Gate agent after gate agent after gate agent. Sorry. No. Sorry. No. Sorry. Wish I could, but no. You again? NO! I finally found an agent who put me on standby for a late afternoon flight that had not yet been cancelled but probably would be. No 14 on the standby list. Don’t count on it, she said, and stalked away.

There was no heat in the terminal. The shops were closed. The place was deserted. Hours passed. I prayed.

Several gates away from where I sat, a man in a heavy coat came out of the jet way and started tapping at a computer keyboard. He looked like a baggage handler or one of the guys who work on the tarmac. Fresh meat. An airline employee I hadn’t already pestered. I hustled over there.

He was rough and gruff, bearded with grease around his fingernails. He looked too old and bent to be slinging bags around.  He didn’t even glance up from the keyboard when I asked about the flight.

“What’s your name?”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Says here you have a medical emergency.” He looked me over. “You don’t look sick. What’s the emergency?”

My mother is dying. I’m on standby.

He tapped some more.

“You’re not on standby,” he said.

What? No!

“You’re in 15 C.”

He handed me a ticket. “Pretty sure she’s gonna go, but if she doesn’t, there’s a flight to Amarillo. Go to the Amarillo gate and tell ‘em Hank sent you and they’ll get you on.” He had the kindest face and the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. If God ever takes a human face, this was it.

Hank wasn’t a gate agent. I’m not even sure his name was Hank or that he worked for the airline. I couldn’t find him later when I tried.

But I am sure of one thing. He was my angel. And he worked a miracle.

The sun came out. The plane took off. And I was on it.

I had the night with my mother. We talked. The next morning, my father and I were holding her hands when she let out three little breaths and was gone. I miss her so much.

But because of one man’s compassion, I didn’t miss her last few hours.

Thank you, Hank. Whoever you are, wherever you are, thank you.

Power of the Pen works like this. Students get a prompt and 40 minutes to tell a story. Today’s seventh graders wrote stories that had something to do with hooked, daydreaming in class and a dog’s reaction to snow.  The winners wrote of a championship fisherman who hooked a tire, a teacher who might or might not be a spy and of cold. crunch. crunch. white stuff. (Sorry, but I don’t remember the eighth-grade prompts.) (digression, -5 points)

I have to admit I felt the faintest twinges of envy (honesty, +5 points) and a whole lot of admiration as I listened to the judges talk about the winning essays. These kids are good! (stating the obvious, -10 points)

I hadn’t heard of the Power of the Pen before my daughter signed up this year. But boy, do I like it. In this age of iPhone and iPad and whatnot, it’s great to see boys and girls scribbling their hearts out, long hand, on paper with nothing but their imaginations to guide them. (main idea, + 15 points)  Kind of restores your faith in the future of the written word. (sentence fragment, -15 points)

So here is a big thank you to all the teachers who coached these budding writers (another cliche! -5 points) and helped them find their voices, (overused, -5 points) and spent their entire Saturday judging dozens of papers. Special thanks to our Oakwood coaches, Honors English teacher Susanne King, who didn’t let a horrendous car accident keep her from working with the students, and retired English teacher John Holland, who volunteers his time and would have gotten us to Valley View High School without a tour of West Dayton if only I had followed him like I was supposed to. (Good egg award goes to Ann, who was a judge and a good sport about the West Dayton side trip.)

I apologize if what I’m about to say next sounds like bragging, but it’s major points off for omitting essential facts. Who won, is, of course, an essential fact. So with all modesty (false modesty, -15 points) I have to tell you that our Oakwood kids took home both the first-place seventh-grade team trophy and the first-place eighth-grade team trophy. Five of our girls, Katie, Claire, Ally, Abby and Elaina, also placed individually.  (Happy dance, +50 points)

Write on, kids, write on!

Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” had 180 million hits on YouTube in 2011.  Catchy lyrics.  ”7am waking up in the morning. gotta be fresh. gotta go downstairs. gotta have my bowl. gotta have my cereal….”

The Annoying Orange has had 97.7 million plays during its lifetime.  Retread knock knock jokes told by animated fruit.  Orange: “Hey apple, hey apple, hey apple, hey apple.” Apple: “What?” Orange: “Orange you glad I didn’t say ‘apple’?”

Other 2011 most-viewed YouTube videos include the Ultimate Dog Tease, a grainy home movie with 78 million views, the Talking Babies with 56 million and the Nyan cartoon cat (3:36 of punishing sameness) with 55 million hits.

And then there is the YouTube video of Congessman Gabrielle Giffords announcing her resignation this week: 810,724 views so far.  Eight hundred thousand hits in four days is definitely respectable, but in You Tube land that’s hardly viral.

Gabrielle Giffords is an American hero if ever there was one.  Her ongoing recovery from a devastating gunshot wound to the head has been nothing short of miraculous.  Selflessly resigning from Congress for the good of her constituents, she just raised the bar for anyone ever elected to public office.

When Giffords tendered her resignation before the U.S. House of Representatives, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called her “the brightest star among us.” House Speaker John Boehner burst into tears–as did many, many of her colleagues who stood to applaud her. In that moment, Republicans and Democrats were united.

Now in the movies, this is where the team pulls together to win one for the injured quarterback, where the battered and bloodied soldiers fight against impossible odds to defeat the enemy for their fallen comrades, where the townsfolk rally around George Bailey to repay his generosity — where people set aside their petty agendas and work together for the good of others. We love it in the movies. But can we do it in real life?

“I know on the issues I fought for we can change things for the better,” Gabrielle Giffords says, speaking slowly but clearly. “We can do so much more by working together.”

We can do so much more by working together. 

Is it naive to think that Gabby’s colleagues could take her words to heart, that they could sit down, roll up their sleeves, set aside partisan politics and resolve the thorny problems that plague our country? Could they actually work together to solve our debt crisis or shore up Social Security?  Have we become so cynical that we don’t even expect them to try?

Have our minds been so completely numbed by the Annoying Orange that we don’t care?

As Larry points out, children, teenagers and young adults are driving the hits for YouTube mega stars. They are not likely to seek out and circulate a video of a congresswoman announcing her resignation. But this video is exactly what our future decision-makers should watch.

The damage is still apparent, but it is stunning to see how far Gabrielle Giffords has come since that awful day a year ago when the first online news reports announced her death. What we see is a once very beautiful woman who is beautiful still, a once very articulate woman who though she speaks haltingly is articulate still, a kind and generous and wise woman who chooses her words carefully. When words are so hard won, they are not to be wasted.

We can do so much more by working together.  

Now there is a message that deserves to go viral. Imagine the influence of Gabrielle Giffords’s message on 180 million young people.

Watch her YouTube video, watch it with your children and talk about what it means to be a hero:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAetv47b-Eg&feature=player_embedded

Not all reinvention is a good thing. In fact, it can be a very bad thing.  For some years now, newspapers across the country have been tossing seasoned reporters, photographers and editors overboard like so much unwanted ballast. As a result, these same news organizations haven’t had enough people to do the actual work. Coverage has suffered. Badly. If you read a local newspaper, you have probably noticed this yourself and you don’t need me to argue the point.

Now, to improve coverage and appeal to the public, some newspapers — in fact a lot of newspapers, as well as TV and radio stations– are turning to “citizen journalists.” The quote marks are intentional because the name is essentially made up and meaningless. According to the generally accepted definition, “citizen journalists” are all people with semi-working brains and cell phones with built-in cameras. Internet connections and basic typing skills are helpful but not required. “Citizen journalists” generally work for fame and glory, though sometimes they get paid $25 for a picture. They snap pictures with their cell phones at public (or private) events and email them into the newspaper. Tweeting is encouraged.  Facts are optional. Fact-checking is not required because “citizen journalists” are only expected to tell it like they see it — whether it is a four-car pile-up on the expressway or the GOP Presidential primary (which some also might see as a four-car pile-up). We used to call these “citizen journalists” eye witnesses or even sources. But we didn’t count on them to do our jobs for us.

For newspaper publishers, “citizen journalists” are a great deal — free coverage, no health care costs and increased readership from the people who are now buying subscriptions to see their names and photographs in print or online.  For the rest of us, not so much.

Peter Funt, who writes at www.CandidCamera.com, takes on the trend of using “citizen journalists” in a brilliant  op-ed piece published this week in the Wall Street Journal.   If you haven’t read it, please do.

If you’re an online subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, you can read Peter Funt’s column here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204257504577151241294892410.html