Let Me Tell You About Gayle King

It all started when CBS This Morning did their re-do and became more serious news, and my husband and I started watching it every day while eating breakfast. There were the three anchors: Charlie, Norah, and the third one (but really the first one if I’m being honest): Gayle King. Sure, I had seen her before on Oprah once or twice, but she wasn’t really on my radar until I started my days with her, Gayle King and I drinking coffee and talking about the news together. Well, okay, sort of. I mean, it felt that way.

Gayle King is funny, personable, down-to-earth. She always says the thing I am thinking. For example, if there is a guy on the news who has had a terrible parachuting accident and barely survived but then in the interview says of course he wants to go parachuting again, Gayle King might say something like, “Maybe he ought to rethink that.” She makes comments like, “I don’t know: She didn’t look so happy to me” and “I wonder what his mom would say about that.” 

Exactly! I always think.

And somewhere along the line, as the years passed and Gayle King and I would talk about the news every morning together (I mean, kind of), and then when one day in 2016 I was back in my hometown for a visit and I looked across the street, and there, THERE was Gayle King, surrounded by a camera crew, walking along the street with Dave Chappelle (he lives in my hometown), doing an interview, I wanted to shout, “I LOVE YOU, GAYLE KING!” which is the moment I realized I did.

And no, I did not shout that.

Some of you have heard that story already. But here’s what you don’t know: Back in January, I sent Gayle King a letter detailing how much I admired her. I wrote: “I love that you are smart and funny . . . that you don’t shy away from asking tough questions, and that you like who you are, exactly as you are (a hard thing for many women to accomplish) . . . I want to thank you for being a role model to me and many.” I sent that letter with a copy of my latest book, 52 Things I Wish I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17, because it took guts for me to publish this book, and Gayle King is the Queen of Bravery, aka Guts. 

And guess what. GUESS WHAT? She wrote me back. Well, okay, sort of. I got this, the photo you see in this blog.

“Wish I had your book at 17!!!” it says.

I think the subtext is: she and I are best friends now. Right? I mean, it’s obvious, right?

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My Cell Phone and I Need to Start Seeing Other People

My mother doesn’t have a cell phone. Okay, that’s not true: she technically has a smart phone, but she never turns it on. I used to urge her to use it more, to become better at texting and using the internet on it, or even just making calls, but she never puts time into it. Whenever any of the rest of our family is on their phone—searching for a word’s definition, checking the weather, reading up on the news, figuring out where in the world we saw that actor before—she says, “I just don’t understand why people are so interested in their phones.”

I do understand, but I wish I didn’t.

Lately, I have stopped urging her to use her phone. It’s not that I’ve given up on her—she’s sharp enough to learn it if she wants to. It’s that I am grappling with my own phone use. About a year ago, I uninstalled the Twitter and Facebook apps, although I still sometimes check Facebook on my phone via the internet. Failure #1. I stopped all sound alerts so that when a text or email comes, I don’t get a bing and check my phone to read it, but still I find myself constantly looking at my phone. Failure #2. I have some sort of screen time information source on my phone that a few months ago I somehow turned on (it must have popped up and asked if I wanted to use it, like so many other things that pop up). It measures my daily phone usage and sends me a total at the end of every week. I average two hours a day on my phone. TWO HOURS. Failure #3.

This number frightened me enough that I tried to cut back on that amount of time, but some weeks the average has gone up to over two hours a day. What number failure am I on now? Four? I should stop counting.

Don’t get me wrong: there are things I love about my phone. It keeps me better connected to my family because I can call more easily when out on a walk or traveling. I like that I can text someone when I have a quick question versus making a call. But my phone scares me a little, and this is why: my brain and its focus have been changing the last few years. I am way more prone to interrupt a train of thought or conversation or task to look at my phone, feeling a need to check it. Why? What am I checking for? Do I think I’m going to get some text that is so urgent I need to interrupt what I’m doing? Is Gayle King really going to text me?

Last Sunday I did not turn on my phone at all. I could feel myself wanting to, sensing that pull to check texts and whatever else, but I refused. It felt strange all day to not have it on, and what bothered me most was that it felt strange when in fact ten years ago I barely looked at my phone and twenty years ago I did not have one. I have decided to try and do this—keep it off—as much as possible, especially on weekends. I want to get used to life without the constant pull to let myself get distracted.

In the meantime, I think I’ll sit down and talk with my mom on the back porch and look out at the garden transforming into summer and not think about taking a picture with my phone and posting it on Instagram and not check my texts for one from Gayle King. She can call my home line if she really wants to reach me, which I am absolutely sure she will.

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Photo by Juja Han from Unsplash.com

My Voice Is Small, and I Dare to Speak

I’ve been thinking a lot about endings in stories and poems. As a writer, I often get stuck just before the ending because it has to be just right. You can have a not-so-great beginning and win over a reader by the end; but if you wow the reader at the start and then write a disappointing ending, the reader’s experience is ruined. They feel gypped! They wasted their time!

For me, poems should end with what I call “a lift.” This is not in any poetry textbook—it’s my own term for it. I want poems to take a slight turn at the end, to surprise me, even in a small and subtle way, to not end where I expect them to. 

This poem does that in its quiet way.

This gem is by my sister, Romy Lanier Cawood. Anyone who has read my early blogs (or who knows me) is familiar with the story of how, when Romy and I were little, our father (a writer) gave us blank “books” to write in made out of little pieces of paper stapled together. Thus, we became “authors” at a very early age—authors of stick figures and misspelled sentences, at first, but we both grew up writing stories and poems.

Here is her poem:

“Prayer”

I send this prayer to you, Mighty Heaven,
to you and all your angels, leaning in sorrow over this Earth.

This Earth, for which I dare to speak, small that I am, and
to tell you that in spite of the
opal rain you cast upon us
and the innocence you plant in our souls,
Mighty Heaven, I do not know what other stardust you
keep.

Without bitterness, but with great hope, I ask
for your mercy,
and mercy again.
Without bitterness, without care for the upset of some
reasoned justice, perfect and calm,
I ask for your mercy, more perhaps than
you had foreseen to bestow, as the
thunder of your music arrives a faint
echo in our dream.

Mighty Heaven, my voice is small, and I dare to speak
for this Earth
to ask you
to lean farther
to hear it.

Copyright © 2019, Romy Lanier Cawood, printed here with permission

Thank you, Romy, for allowing me to share this beauty as the last and fifth poem for my National Poetry Month celebration. You can learn more about Romy here. A big thank you to Robert McCready for partnering with me again this year. You can listen to Robert recite Romy’s poem here.

And thank you to all my readers, especially those who do not love poetry, for riding on this journey with me. My hope is that you found something you loved along the way.

In May, I’ll return to your regularly scheduled program. . .

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Photo of the sky by Wil Stewart from Unsplash.com.