Letter from a reader

The letter might as well have been postmarked not Little Rock but the Land of Futile Complaint, and if I could make out the barely legible scrawl, the writer began by assuring me that he read the paper every day—whew! at least somebody still does—and that he had only one gripe. In reading the obituaries, he had noticed we didn’t always mention the cause of death.

The reasons are as many as the causes of death themselves. But this is still the South, after all, and so we retain a modicum of respect for people’s privacy, as does the law itself. The offense is called invasion of privacy.

The writer’s complaint brings to mind a noted physicist who once commented on a colleague’s paper: This isn’t right, it’s not even wrong. It’s also irrelevant, immaterial, and generally less than serious. The writer might as well have asked why our football coverage never mentioned home runs or RBIs.

After all, what should our full-coverage obits say instead? “Hugo O. Snively, 58, died of a gunshot wound after being hit by a jealous husband.” Really, now. There’s no need to go into such detail.

There are so many better questions to raise, even at the risk of staying relevant, even being philosophical, beginning with: Why did the subject of the obit choose to live? Happily, our better obituaries do just that. What were his interests, causes, good deeds, special talents? What made a Parker Westbrook, the state’s almost official historian and unofficial grammarian? Or an Orval Faubus, in his overweening ambition, so successful in casting Arkansas into outer darkness, that is, evil, during his nigh-endless tenure as governor and political kingmaker?

Yet there is also something welcome, wholesome, and more respectable than the neatly written “respectable” letters—these days they’re more likely to be emails—that an editor receives. It’s evidence that strong opinion still exists, and that folks still express it in the local paper. There is not one politically or socially correct sentiment in the entire text.

Curiosity is the health of of life. The local paper still teems with it. This letter is very much alive, whatever its style or lack of it.

As a valued correspondent of mine in Pine Bluff with a few mental problems once wrote me: “It gets boring, not having peace of mind all the time.” Figure out that kind of logic, and something encouraging about the human condition surfaces.

Give me an illiterate scrawl full of lively curiosity, even bad temper, rather than empty formality, any time. God must indeed love a sinner, He made so many of us. Also fools, which doesn’t mean we should suffer them gladly.

So two cheers for illiteracy. Let’s stamp it out, but not completely. Any more than we would like to live in a world without Mark Twain’s dialect stories, or the broken, phonetic English I would get in letters from my immigrant mother, so full of love and regularly enclosing a $20 bill that came in handy during my threadbare student days at grim Columbia University. Now that woman knew how to write a letter! And so does my valued correspondent here in Arkansas. Almost sincerely, Paul Greenberg