Words By Whittall

Shane had that peculiar expression again. He managed to make is eyes grow wider while, at the same, time knitting his brows closer together. Something bothered him. “What’s up, little man?”   “Daddy, what’s heaven? Reverend Lorne says that Grampa is looking ‘down on me’ from heaven – as if its above the sky.   But at school we are learning about planets. Mrs. Parke says what’s above the sky is outer space.” I wiped my hands on my jeans. The dishes were half done, but they’d keep. My seven-year-old son was upset, and I would do everything I could to make it right. “C’mon, let’s sit down,” I said, giving myself more time to think. How to approach this subject?   Shane was a whiz at math. I’d tackle this geometrically. We nestled on the couch, Shane in my lap. His expression had morphed from confusion to expectancy. This child thought I had all the answers. I prayed he would keep on thinking that until we were both old and gray. “See that toy car over there?”

Stories are like clay.   They can be manipulated and shaped, presented from one perspective then moulded to another.   I was once a radio journalist, telling the same stories over and over, every half hour for hours on end.   The trick was to tell the news a different way each time, so that listeners would think something ‘new’ and had happened, even if it had not. Revising and editing, every time I left the booth, I took each story in my fist, crushed it into a ball and started over.   “Three children killed in house fire; two survive.”   “Two children survive housefire that killed three siblings.”   “Fire chief says smoke detectors would have saved three children …” And, so on and so on, so there’d be a “fresh” story for the top of the hour.   In my second career as a government speechwriter, I found myself working with clay again.   I would create a verbal sculpture and then, over and over, other civil servants would suggest a tweak here, nuance there, moulding it t