Tag Archives: Tavis

Dear New Graduates, Be ‘Stonecatchers’

by Woody

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

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With graduation season upon us, I would like to share with the Classes of 2025 an excerpt from my novel “The Butterfly Tree.”

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“Where’re we going, Grandpa?”

“It’s a surprise,” Tavis told his nine-old twin grandsons riding in the backseat.

“Give us a hint,” Moswen pleaded.

“What’re we gonna do when we get there?” Lemuel joined in.

“Catch stones,” Tavis said, sunshine in his voice. “You’re gonna be Stonecatchers.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Lem said warily.

“And fun!” Mos animatedly added.

Tavis glanced in the rearview mirror at the boys; their smiles contagiously jumped to his lips.

“Grandpa, are you a Stonecatcher?”

“I try to be,” Tavis said.

“Do you catch the stones with a baseball mitt?”

“We didn’t bring our mitts.”

“You won’t need your baseball gloves,” Tavis assured.

“Who throws the stones?”

“Do they throw ’em hard?”

“Are the rocks big?”

The questions came like pitches in an automated batting cage with too little time between for answers.

“Time out, time out!” Tavis interrupted. “Listen up and I’ll tell you all about the mysteries of being a Stonecatcher.”

Mos and Lem leaned forward against the restraint of seatbelts, eager to hear a magical tale.

“Stonecatchers don’t actually catch stones,” their grandpa began. “Well, I suppose a long, long time ago they did and that’s where the name comes from. When someone hurled a stone at a person who was unable to defend him or herself, the Stonecatcher jumped in and caught the flying rock.

“But nowadays a Stonecatcher is someone who helps another person who is defenseless or in need – like protecting them from a bully, or buying a homeless person a meal, or donating blood to save someone who’s ill. You can think of a Stonecatcher as a Good Samaritan.

“Lem – Mos – you boys come from a long proud heritage of Stonecatchers.”

“We do?” they said in stereo.

“Oh, yes,” Tavis resumed. “Your many greats-great-grandfather, Dr. Lemuel Jamison, was a Stonecatcher who adopted identical twins when they lost their mother and father. He had actually saved the twins’ lives when they were born and thus they were named Jamis and Lemuel – your namesake, Lem – in his honor.

“Those twins’ real father, Tamás – that’s where your middle name comes from, Mos – was a Stonecatcher by helping your five-times-great-grandfather, Sawney Jordan, escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad. Sawney, in turn, was a fearless Stonecatcher because he swam into bullet fire trying to rescue Tamás who had been shot.

“Yes, the Jamisons and Jordans have been filled with Stonecatchers. Your Grandpa Flynn was a Stonecatcher for America in the Vietnam War. And Grandma Love was a Stonecatcher for your daddy when he was young and lost and needed a roof over his head – and, most of all, needed some love.

“I’m definitely proud of the Stonecatchers your parents are. They’re always helping others in big ways and little ways – sometimes it’s the small acts that turn out to be the biggest ones.

“For example, it’s hard to imagine a simple Hello, how’re you doing today? being important. But to someone who’s having a bad day, that small gesture can mean the world.

“I read a story about a boy who was planning to run away from home because he had no friends. That very day at school, during lunch, a classmate saw him sitting off by himself and went over and ate with him. They had a nice conversation and the dejected boy changed his mind because he no longer felt so lonesome. You see, being a Stonecatcher doesn’t always require bravery – sometimes kindness is all that’s needed.

“Mos – Lem – I expect you boys to be Stonecatchers. I want you to go sit with the person who’s all alone. I want you to cheer for the teammate who rarely gets off the bench. I want you to stand up to the bully who picks on others.

“And right now, I want you to help me paint the kitchen for a lovely elderly lady. Her name is Jewell. That’s how we’ll be Stonecatchers today.”

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Dear newly minted graduates, as you venture out into the world and pursue your dreams, please be Stonecatchers along the way.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Column: Smiley’s “Death of a King”

by Woody | 1 Comment

‘Death of a King’ is Lively, Relevant Today

Pursuant of my goal of reading 50 books annually, I just finished “Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year” by Tavis Smiley that will be released Tuesday (Sept. 9) but which I got my hands on early.MLK

It is not only the most remarkable of the 33 books I have read to date in 2014, it ranks among the best I have read in many years. It is so riveting and enlightening I read it twice in one week.

In truth, I feel I have “read” it three times because I had the great privilege of initially listening to an audio-book version, if you will, during a two-hour lunch with Smiley at a Caribbean café. It was like hearing a one-on-one lecture about Abraham Lincoln from Doris Kearns Goodwin, or David McCullough discussing the year 1776 over beers.

Smiley is a similar scholar of note on King. As he writes in the Introduction: “During the most difficult period of my childhood, a time when I had fallen into deep despair, (King’s) spirit entered my soul and excited my imagination. I recognized the rhythms of his rhetorical passion as more than hypnotic: I knew they were righteous. As a result of their disturbing truths, I became a lifelong student of his work as a minister, advocate, and writer. His call to radical democracy through redemptive love resonated with me on a profound level.”

In “Death of a King,” Smiley profoundly chronicles from April 4, 1967, when King delivers an impassioned speech opposing the Vietnam War, to his assassination on April 4, 1968. The tumult of these final 365 days is truly remarkable.

But what I found most remarkable is that 46 years later this story is eerily relevant with police shootings of African-American men, peaceful demonstrations and riots; poverty, racial inequalities in the justice system, and militarism dominating the headlines.

Here, in King’s own words from “Death of a King,” are some examples that ring loudly still:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

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“You can’t blame nonviolent demonstrators who are demonstrating for their constitutional rights when violence erupts.”

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“In the final analysis a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear – it has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro has worsened over the last twenty years, that the promises of justice and equality have not been met, and that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

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“We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together.”

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“I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.”

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“True compassion is not flipping a coin to a beggar. It comes to seeing that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

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“The lives, the incomes, the well-being of poor people everywhere in America are plundered by our economic system.”

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“We must all learn to live together as brothers in this country or we’re going to perish together as fools.”

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“We may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. I have not lost hope …”

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Tavis Smiley

Tavis Smiley

Smiley concluded our lunch the same way he does “Death of a King,” sharing the goose-bump-inducing eulogy King delivered in 1965 for Reverend James Joseph Reeb, a white man who joined the Civil Rights Movement and was then murdered because of it.

King’s words would prove prescient of his own death, as he asked about Reeb’s murder: “When we move from WHO to WHAT, the blame is wide and the responsibility grows.”

It is an evocation that remains relevant in American life today.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”