Of Bears and Penguins

Looking for Eileen
Last night I found myself awake at 3:00 a.m. I resisted the urge to blog mindlessly and instead turned on the radio.

KRLD News 1080.

I tuned into the some show called, "All Across Texas," or something like that. The host presented trivia questions, and then people called in to answer them, and present other trivia questions in what amounted to a rather dreary cycle of prattle.

The most intriguing person was a gal named Eileen. She was clearly an older woman, probably in her 60's or early 70's and the sense that she just wanted someone to listen to her was almost tangible. She kept the host on the line, deftly avoiding several moves on his part to get on with his show. She talked about how her father was a civilian survivor of Pearl Harbor, how her family had lived in San Diego during WWII -- how you had to keep dark sheets over the windows during a blackout. She talked about how a teacher she had brought a turbine engine to school for the kids to take apart.
She shared that a 12 year old kiddo had recently told her that H.O.M.E.S. was an easy way to remember all of the Great Lakes.

Her voice crackled with age. It quavered at times, it shook, not with depression or a sense of desperation, just a sense of several years gone by. She laughed quickly and easily, she had opinions on several different subjects.
And the host didn't seem to realize that he had a pretty interesting woman on the line. He pandered to her, his responses peppered with, "Well, all right," and "I'll be." His voice growing shorter and quicker. I could imagine his finger hovering anxiously over buttons that would move the show forward.

Eileen said good-night, and we moved on to callers in Farmer's Branch, and Euless, and Lubbock. None quite so interesting, or at ease as Eileen sounded. The host continued to fumble, and be generally uninteresting. Just as with Eileen, he failed to engage any of the subsequent callers in a conversation.

The host had a chance. A chance to talk to the kind of people who call a radio program in early morning hours to answer questions like, who played the wolfman in the classic movie, "The Wolfman?" (It's Lon Chaney Jr., in case you were wondering, and yes, I knew this before the lounge singer from Lubbock called in with the answer.) The host missed a chance to engage these people in a dialogue, to find out what made them tick, what made them unique. To find out what experiences they had, or wanted, or dreamed about.

Eileen wouldn't have. She would've talked to Don in Euless and the Paul in Farmer's Branch as though they were sitting on her front porch. On her front porch, over a cup of coffee, they would have talked and listened and laughed with one another. Eileen wouldn't have rushed on to the next caller, and the next inane bit of trivia.
Eileen knew it wasn’t about the trivia or the answers. It was about people who at 3:00 in the morning, on a warm Texas night, found themselves listening to an AM radio station out of Dallas.

Eileen realized that the urge to be known and heard is a fundamental aspect of humanity. It’s in our nature, the desire to connect with one another. To find other people who have grieved, and reveled, and wept, and lived. Somehow connecting with others reminds us that life really does happen. That life really isn’t some fantastic dream that will rush away and leave us questioning our existence.

It’s rather reassuring, at 3:00 in the morning, when it is dark and quiet and still., and you are unsure of where reality ends and fantasy begins to hear someone like Eileen. Talking and laughing. Simply being.