Hearing: Part Two with Brooks

Watching a basketball game the other evening on ESPN I actually heard an NBA announcer named Mike Breen say of the Indiana Pacers, the losing team, “They can hang their heads high.”

A more felicitous piece of inanity could never have been consciously coined, and the image of heads being hung high in a tree somewhere on the outskirts of Indianapolis was too delicious not to preserve for posterity. I pictured a whole team of Indiana Pacers, and perhaps even the head coach and team doctor, hanging with their heads high, proud, defiant, losers to the Boston Celtics of 4 straight games, their season ended.

I guess it’s time now for Mike Breen to water the big apple, not the apple tree, whatever that means since it means almost nothing other than apple trees never hang their heads high.

Hearing is hard work, and listening is even harder. Too often a whole brigade of cliches come up to our front steps, knock on our front doors and would have us believe they’re consoling us when we’ve lost a loved one with the words, “our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of ______, ___________, and_____________.” Really, isn’t it possible that something original might be said instead and that the old saying, our thoughts and prayers, is merely both the same side of a tired, sentimental old coin that’s neither heads or tails.

Language should at least try to soar, both toward the endless heights and the bottomless depths. Something very interesting could actually happen if thoughts and prayers were to congregate—the thought thinking like a prayer and the prayer praying like a thought.

God, I’d love to hear that!