Here’s some Friday philosophy from Free Fall, where we get a prompt and then write like mad.
By “mad” I mean I “wrote my way in” past a stegosaurus.
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Writer prompt- a photograph of bronco named Born Fearless
So there I was, camping with my stegosaurus. Such a fearless fellow, no sabertooth wolves were going to bother us, no sir. I popped the tab on my insta-coffee and I pondered another space and time…
I was a baby boomer, born in the 1950s, raised on black and white TV, back in the good old days when we used terms like “circle the wagons” and “hostile territory” and “douse the fire!”
Our heroes were our fathers and uncles, and we aspired to crew cuts like they had… Before the war, and after the war, folks used a dab of Brylcream, but when you are in the dust of broken Belgian towns, or the heat of Guadalcanal, then a short trim is best.
Jimmy Stewart was in the war, flew a bomber, stayed in the reserves afterwards. One day, postwar, on the set, he froze on the stairs. He whispered to an actress, “What’s the point?” and she helped him to bravely keep going in stupid frivolous peacetime.
James Colburn got a purple heart on Saipan.
One of my favourite actors of our youth, back in the days when suburbs still had vacant lots and copses, was John Wayne. Here was a fearless man, even in the shows where he received an Oscar. In a way, as an actor, he was brave, because he turned down any chance to be Hamlet or a character actor. He knew what the public needed, and that’s what he sacrificed his career to being.
The 1950’s was when the movies on TV started showing the point of view of the enemy. Our former enemies, now that we were at peace. It was a time when cops and robbers would bravely exchange gun fire… but then I guess the veterans moved into position to write scripts, because in the colour shows of my youth the brave cops would only fire a bit, then their nerve would fail and they would duck back under cover. Not a lack of bravery, but an abundance of realism, for just so did the bronze age heroes act in Homer’s epic. Hollywood forgot for a while, that’s all.
Everybody’s uncle was in the war. Very few were officers. And reality meant that a movie often had a scene where a James Coburn sergeant would say something that a Hemingway character never would: “Everybody’s afraid, kid, everybody.”
I grew up in the 1950s when we wondered if battlefield bravery was needed any more, in this time of bombers and missiles and atom bombs. “Pushbutton warfare” they called it. John Wayne had no place anymore. What, then, was a real man?
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Prompt- necessity of hope
I have a coach, a stupid American. Me, biased? I’m not the only one. People pass him in the street and call, “Wanker!” That’s because he doesn’t win games. Dam, we love our team but…
The coach does do something right. You know how those Yankees, when we were crying the blues during the Great Depression, refused to look longingly at the past? Or how after the war, when we were cursing the rubble, they kept having a Marshal Plan and developing their industry?
Well, Coach Lasso is like them. He keeps being optimistic about our team, even when our best and only striker gets transferred to Manchester United. Lasso keeps being optimistic… and… he has a point. I think optimism is a necessity. A new Mexican player says, “Football is life” and I ask you, how can you move forward in life unless you have a glimmer of hope?
To be totally like Eeyore is to be totally stuck, like some stupid victim. I ask you: Does Eeyore ever start a project to build a house? Play Pooh sticks? No!
So I must grudgingly admit that our Yankee coach has a point. I don’t have to like it, but football is life, ya? If I get out of bed in the morning, it’s because I have hope. Not like in the stupid time between football seasons when I lie in bed like a teenager, like an Eeyore pondering the gloom. Nope, during the season, even on weekends, I get up because I have to go exercise or something. Or walk down the street with folks calling to me, “Go Richmond!” Better than “Wanker!”
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Sean Crawford
In Edmonton’s old Strathcona district,
the annual art walk is on,
July
2026
Computer note: My spellcheck won’t recognize Eeyore, but my ROM dictionary has Eeyorish, meaning “pessimistic or gloomy.”
Fiction note: Canadian James Gardner had an alien do a brief cameo who was very much like Eeyore. So I checked the acknowledgments: Gardner thanked A.A. Milne.
…no wonder Stephen King says if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader.
