Write Good. Speak Bad.

I had a letter in the New York Times a couple of weeks back. Three people who read what I wrote did some sleuthing, got my number and each called to give me thanks, to express how what I put on the page had touched them. It was very gratifying. And my conversations with every one of them were uniformly less than satisfying. 

I am not what I write. That is a much smarter version of me than the one who butchered these calls, trying to find something clever, anything meaningful, to impart but failing from first to last. Two of those on the receiving end of my pearls of something far removed from wisdom ended up giving me the "I've taken up enough of your time" line so they could gracefully remove themselves from the bumbling, stumbling, fumbling, mumbling that must have damaged their ears and reduced their image of me from implanted in the heavens to "who the hell was the ghost writer for that guy."

For you see I write good, speak bad. The smarter version of me exists on the page, often able to put my thoughts in a semi coherent pattern, unencumbered by the person who wanders through life as but an endless string of virtually unintelligible words. I bore myself almost every time something wanders out of my mouth. I am head shakingly unimpressive.

I wish I knew how to capture the person who could cause total strangers to rise up and applaud. That individual resides in a universe this person does not inhabit. That one is clear and most often precise. This one is most definitely, most definitively, not. At all.

And so these three very kind strangers, who took valuable time out of their day, discovered the Wizard of Oz was just a little man making loud noises. Trying to hide the less than fearsome fiction existing behind the curtain.

I think next time this happens, if it happens, I will just say they have the wrong person. Because the truth is, they do.