OT: Voices: a ramble

Kismet

Kismet

Joined
Jan 30, 2002
Messages
7,269
Voices.

I'll miss Peter Jenning's voice. I can still hear it now, but it will fade. His image will stay with me longer, but the unique voice will disappear.

Other voices I miss range the gamut from newscasters, movie actors, old friends, some family members, to many others. Hans Conreid had a great voice; so did Edward Everett Horton (think Rocky and Bullwinkle.)

I often wonder about generations past, before electronic media, photography, or recordings of voice. How much of our past we can keep in memory these days, how much beyond our own experiences we can be aware of, how much of the past has been discovered and theorised about by scientists. Are we unique in the cultural development of humanity?

My friend Doug, who died last year, had a distinctive voice; sometimes I can recall it, but less often these days. Joe Peshel, a kid I went to high school and part of college with, had a great voice. He went on to be a Jesuit, and spent most of his life in Appalachia, helping folks regain their properties' mineral rights from the Corporations which had swooped down and bought them out. He did some work on restoring water quality and topsoil, as well. He died a few years ago, but I can still hear his voice sometimes. Funny guy. Nice man.

Chuck Petrie died last month. A good man. Funny. Great voice.

The voices die out for some reason. The words, sometimes the inflections, often the meanings, stay with me...but the sounds...they must need to be refreshed. Or, maybe it is just me--my recollection deficiency. I don't remember how foods taste, but I've had friends who could recall nuances of gravies from decades past. (Granted, fat friends, but friends nevertheless.)

Women I've dated, two I loved, were remarkable folks, but their voices are gone now. I can catch glimpses of their faces in my mind from time-to-time, but the tone and timbre of those very special voices are gone.

I don't remember my Father's voice. I can picture him. I can remember him pulling slivers out of my fingers when I was little and climbing everything, falling, and climbing again, slivers ignored. I remember him promising me it wouldn't hurt--and somehow it didn't. He died when I was seventeen. I had lots of questions for him when I was thirty. I can remember his laugh. Great laugh. His brother and sister (my aunt and uncle) had great booming laughs too. When the three of them would get together, old stories would be told and the giggles, gaffaws, and gasping-for-breath bellows of laughter would ring out in the room. We didn't see them often, but it was great. Sometimes I'd get to go along for the Christmas season visit he made to them. I don't remember anything but the laughter and the sight of them enjoying each other. Even now, I smile.

I can remember my daughters' voices, but then, we talk a couple of times a month. Can they remember my voice, I wonder? How long will that last after I go? What memories will they have of me, and which of those will they tell others of? What do we leave?

I've thought that my daughters are half me and half their mother. My grandchildren are one-fourth me. I dilute quickly. Learned behaviors are part of who a person is, of course. So my kids will always have a large part of me in them, some genetic, but more learned, I think. But...how much of that continues? How much should?

We live in a world rife with cultural animosities from generations previous. The hate gets passed on, why not the laughter?

I am continually amazed that all the knowledge, whimsy, thought, passion, friendships, loves, experiences, etc., leaves in that nano-second transition of life to death. Some folks seem so great. SO great. How can it be that the incredible compilation of knowledge, wisdom, insight so remarkably special to these individuals is suddenly gone? It is. But it is not right.

There are so many voices I'd like to be able to hear.



Be well and safe.
 
After my father's passing, I found a tape of a conversation he'd recorded. It felt good to hear his voice again. I can't remember if I lost it or threw it out, but I wish I still had it to listen to now and then.
 
One famous voice belongs to the late Fred Facey, longtime NBC announcer. His voiceover intro is still used for the Today Show, more than two years after his death:

"From NBC News . . . this is TODAY . . . with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer . . . LIVE from Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza."

I had the pleasure of meeting Fred and getting to know him. He was 72 when he passed with lung cancer, and had a radio and TV announcing career that lasted decades, and was an NBC announcer since the mid-60s.

facey



The longest-working announcer title currently goes to Don Pardo, who still introduces Saturday Night Live every week from 8H at 30 Rock in Midtown. He's in his mid/late 80s IIRC.

Noah
 
Kis...the voices don't go away...they will be there again for you some day. I am 100% certain of this.

.
 
Great post, Kis, as always.
It is in my opinion that we are just squeaking creaking trees swaying in our forest. Like all trees we have our day where the swaying and the creaking and the squeaking get to be too much, and we must fall as that is the way of things. Sometimes with a loud booming crash that actually takes out other trees around with us. Sometimes with an eerie silence where only the swoosh of our leaves brushing our neighbors can be heard. I'm very sure the melodic sounds of our creeking and unique way that the wind passes through our individual branches is a great comfort to the creatures that dwell around us. I'm sure it gives them a sense of home. However, we are so much more than the sum of our sounds. We are plants of action. We hold the topsoil our whole lives so that others may grow. We support an entire ecosystem by giving shelter and food. We take the brunt of the storm and wind. And when the day comes that our creaking and squeaking stops and we finally fall for our final sleep on the forest floor...we still give. We open up light for a new tree to grow. We become a landmark to lost and frazzled hikers. And eventually, we nurture those around us. They partake in something that took decades to build and seconds to die and fall but decades more to truly appreciate and absorb. It is the way of the trees. It is the way of man.
As a society we have forgotten the voices of 100,000,000 men that were heroes, villians, saints, brilliant, tyrants, and the best d@mn dads to ever walk the earth. Some of them were all of those at the same time. That is a real shame. The good news is that we heard what they said. We have to carry that with us. We have to share what we have learned. History is kind of like the media today. If it wasn't heroic or earth shattering it takes the back page. How many of you have heard of Samuel J. Cottner of Mulebend, Mississippi who in 1927 fashioned what local townsfolk deemed to be the BEST peanutbutter and jelly sandwhich EVER created in the history of the sandwhich? No? Me either, but he might have lived and he might have done it. We'll never know...but i bet he had a great voice.

Jake
 
The mind is the greatest recording device. It records and plays back sights, sounds, smells, tastes. Nothing else can do that. More importantly, emotions themselves... associated with those we may never see again.

Memory beats any photo or tape yet devised. The good times, the bad times. Memories I wish I could erase. Some good ones I hope are in my last thoughts.

Just watched a home video, clowning around for a new camera. Everyone comments, "Do I really sound like that?" Why do we have trouble recognizing ourselves? Does the camera really add 10 pounds?

It's said when you are dying, you're life flashes before your eyes. In some cases I can affirm this is so. My mom went into a long coma before dying in a hospice. We stayed by her side those days and that long last night. It was apparent to all of us she was reliving memories of her life. Smiling, frowning, laughing, talking at times. Happy memories, sad ones; all of them it seemed.

What a gift she was given, to review the movie that was her life.

Finally the sun set, as it must.



Ad Astra
 
Nasty said:
Kis...the voices don't go away...they will be there again for you some day. I am 100% certain of this.

.
Click to expand...


Nasty's right. The voices don't go away. :)

It's just that we can't hear them................for awhile. :D :D :D


Kis, what a wonderful ramble! If I could, I'd add some well deserved rep points to your already enviable collection.
 
my Grandpa's voice. Deep, rich and mellow. Not like mine at all. I used to like to listen to him tell the stories that went along with the photos of his travels in Europe. He was a gifted storyteller.

He died a year before I met Heather and got married. But I was able to hear his voice at my wedding. My Grandma had found an old 78 he cut back in the 40s(50s?) with Charlie Mingus. And that was our first dance. I wish I had warned my Aunt, though. I don't think she was ready to hear his voice out of the blue.

Charlie Mingus :cool: Somewhere Gram has a picture of him with Lena Horn, too. Go figure.

Frank
 
I remember the voices. But the overall impact of their personalities fades- those friends and family who have passed on. I can visualize them well for months to years, but they fade.

I hope Nasty is right.



munk
 
I love voices! I love accents. One of my favorites here at work is our Dr. Gomez, who has been here many a year but is from Columbia. His voice is very musical. When we used to set near each other and talk all the time my superviser of the time (20 yrs ago) called us Cheech and Chong. :p

One interesting thing I have noticed over time, is that with the diminishing of discrimination and the advent of integration that the accent I kind of associate with black folks is changing. I remember the old skit by George Carlin about growing up as an Irish kid with black folks and that the Irish kids started "talking black". However I was recently watching an interview of a black athelete from Southern WV and he has the total Logan(a county) twang.

WV itself has a number of accents. The extreme south is a very twangy. Central WV almost has an amish type accent. Western WV has a drawn out OH accent. Northern is closer to a PA accent with a little twang and the eastern panhandle has a combination of the generic suburbia, mixed with twang and nouhthern virgina.

I hope we always have regional accents because it is like old time fiddle tunes that vary from location to location. They are the same tune but due to the isolation of appalachia in the early days they changed as they passed from musician to musician and then that particular version was spread by the local fiddler that everybody learned from. Usually at old time concerts musicians will say for instance "this is Melvin Wine's Cold Frosty Morning" very cool.

My buddy Lynne just died last week of breast cancer and she was a total hippie that lived out in the woods in a bus, and was a follower of Maharaj- Ji back in the 60's and 70's, but she had this wonderful English accent very proper I will always hear in my mind. " Jem YOU ahnimal lauhver YOU" she used to say when I made over my kitties :thumbup:
 
I Hope Nasty Is Right.


I'm a perfect example of the old underground comic, putting Jesus back into our modern life. (No, I'm not the lead) The people were ho- hum. "Jesus, you say?" One ghetto urchin asks him, "Sheet, if Jesus came back everyone knows he'd be BLACK."

Jesus joins the academic community. ( i still have that comic) There he is, wearing a robe, listening to the elite professers drink, debate, cheat on their wives, and in general disgrace themselves, but take no particular interest in Jesus. IN the entire series of the comic, that was people's reaction, sort of, "Well, yeah, but can you do anything about my car payments?"

I've had voices from the past come into my brain- in that still quiet center, and aide me. I've had clarovoyant dreams about the future and friends and family. I"ve had dead people talk to me in those dreams, and what they said was true or came true.

I've been in trouble and had wisdom beyond my kin from the Great Heart save my sorry butt.
I've been led out of doors on mysterious quests, listening to subtle childhood nuances and found wonderful events and insights. i've listened to 'things' in the wilderness and found other 'things'.
I've had visions. I've seen the Light.

And yet, though I rely upon this slip stream inside me, a vital part of who I am, (I mean come on- if you had my bad memory you wouldn't rely on that, would you?) I won't say there is an afterlife.

What channel is it on? My TV brain wants to know. There's a Tarro Card depicting the Fool, about to step over a cliff. I don't remember if he's smiling or smelling a flower or what, like the old Zen Master, but he seems blithely unaware of consequences in this world and TRUSTS in some great reality to sustain him. That's me. (That's also the finding of every card reading I've ever had, all 4 or 5 of them. That and DEATH DEATH DEATH)

I was hiking once on a Moon run with a friend. Back in those days I was drunk all the time and would hike by the light of the Moon.
MY pal was talking about God. I snickered.

"I know you don't believe in God, in the Son, in the Holy Ghost," he told me, But I can feel the Holy Ghost around you right now, and as a matter of fact, I feel His Presence around you more than any other person I've ever met."

That put a damper in my smugness. I felt something too. I just didn't know what it was. Always have felt it.
Probably because I've been in trouble.

So, I know there is a Great Heart. I know Life is a wonderful mystery, but whether you and I go on as talking heads, I just don't know.

Like the Fool, it's out of my hands.



munk
 
There've been a few times that I've had conversations with people long gone. Is it something from beyond, or merely my subconscious finding a conveniant vehicle to communicate with my waking mind?

Either way, the conversations were always interesting.

It was a while ago, though. I don't sleep anywhere nearly that soundly anymore and I seldom remember my dreams now. If they're still talking, I haven't been hearing them.

So goes the joke about the voices in one's head: "You know that they're not real and I know that they're not real but they have some damned good ideas sometimes."
 
Hey Munk,

Speaking of all this. If you get a chance and an inclination, go rent the movie "Dogma" it's kind of right along the line of your last post. :o
 
I sent this post to my kids. Here are their responses:


(The younger one)
I will be able to hear the sound...

Of my mother and father arguing over whose turn it was to take me to the emergency room
Of my sister telling on me for hitting her
Of my mother and sister fighting as my sister enters her teenage years
Of my father's lectures when we got caught doing something wrong ("trust" lecture)
Of the edge in my father's voice as he threatens to pull the car over
Of my name at a ceremony, being greeted by a friend or by my nephews as they rush forward for a hug
Of the world gasping over terrorism
Of my tears as I lose a love, a friend, a partner in crime
Of my sister's children fighting in the back seat until I threaten to pull the car over
Of my parents telling me that they love me
Of the announcement that another great creative mind has been lost, silent and perhaps due to neglect.

Take heart...for ever sound we lose, we gain another.


(The elder one)
Your daughters are cursed hearing your voice
every time an ambulance goes by,
every time a child does something wrong remembering the knowledge that a court won't convict (I frequently announced that "No court in the country would convict me if I murdelized you right now!"),
every time a safety issue comes up,
every time an irish melody is played,
the list goes on and on and on.
And I can tell you first hand it's quite obnoxious!

I won't forget the laughter.






Not bad kids.



Be well and safe.
 
Kis,

Great post man. Oddly enough, I was thinking along the same lines over the past week or so. I've been hearing Walosi's voice in my own words every now and then. It is strange, I'll just say something and have a flashback... that was something that dad said to me at one time or another.

It has just been a little under a year since he got sick. But he is still with me.

Later,

Alan
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top