An Example of Diction

We were walking the dogs, all four, one pure bred and three rescues. It was a quiet summer afternoon in Sonoma where the sun is warming, healing, gently caressing.  The dogs could walk on the sidewalk without singeing their paws. The neighborhood  bordered a winding creek which flowed into a pond, and this morning a gentle breeze flows the contours. 

We were walking past one of the houses when I heard an ungodly screeching and desperate scratching, or an ungodly scratching and desperate screeching. Like jagged scrapes of acrylic fingernails across an endless blackboard. We stopped to look toward the house that was the source of the sound. It was coming from one of the vents along the cement perimeter foundation, behind a screen covering the vent. The flash of blue caused me to hand the leashes of the two dog I was walking to Val. “I’m checking that out.” “Oh, God!” she replied.

Somehow a large blue jay had become trapped under the house and couldn’t find its way out. I looked at the front door and the driveway. Main door closed behind the screen door. No car in the drive way. I kneeled in front of the screen imprisoning the blue jay. It continued scratching at the screen and squawking. The screen was secured by a bolt in each of the four corners. I pulled on one of the bolts; it didn’t move. I placed the fingers and thumb of each hand against the screen, pressing my flesh in and pulled outward. The screen gave a little. What compels us to trespass and commit a small act of vandalism? I set my heart and weight into the next effort and the screen suddenly popped out, causing me to tumble backwards.

I watched from the ground. A scroungy bird bounded out, lurched about erratically, seemingly dazed by the daylight. God knows how long it had been trapped under the house. I jumped up and burst out in spontaneous song:  “Born free/As free as the wind blows/As free as the grass grows/Born free to follow your heart.” The jay recovered with a couple coordinated hops, then took flight across the street following the creek and disappeared toward the pond as Val looked down and quickly marched the four dogs past the house. I was able to replace the screen and bolts, so it looked like nothing had happened, and so another errant blue jay could escape perhaps without needing human assistance.

Toastmasters, I had been racking my brains from my own experience of what MERCY is for a speech. I had heard the expression “an act of mercy,” and the phrase got me thinking what it really meant. That story was the best I could come up with. Not every concept has to have a noble example.  I asked Val if she had a better one. She is my unofficial Toastmaster Mentor and is my Marital Intelligence of which there is no artificiality. “Sure,” she said, “one night as you lay sleeping, and I thought about a time when you were cruel to me, I resisted the impulse to plunge a dagger into your heart.” There you have it—I’d wanted to be Vincent the Merciful, instead Val cast me as merciless.   

I have known Val to have extended herself for others.  The most dramatic, tragic was the many weeks she drove to Mill Valley from Sonoma to be with a friend from her youth who had terminal cancer. She often spent the night. The last days never leaving her side. That was as close to a clear-cut case of mercy as I have known. 

With others we can sympathize and even empathize (feel their pain). Mercy calls for action. Thought and feeling are part of our human functions—like working, using your iphone, going to weddings, eating, celebrations of life.  Human kindness is a thought or feeling that requires an extraordinary act. 

By definition, the person who receives mercy has to be in distress, with no way he knows how to avoid or escape his fate. No way to avoid or escape. According to definition, the act of Mercy does not have to be deserved by the receiver. And the giver does it freely; it isn’t an obligatory act. Mercy is about as existential as you can get. No reward beyond doing the act itself. No credit. No honorable mention.

In all examples, the merciful one gives up time, even finds extra time and energy to turn the compassion into an action.  This is crazy when you think about it: when you make extra time, when you find extra energy, that is really a miracle. There is only a certain amount of time, only a fixed amount of energy, right? And you’ve made more. Making extra time, finding extra energy for another person, or bird--you are in the Mercy zone.

I challenge you to take a word or phrase that is important to you to see how it has been real in your life and share it with us as a speech. I mean you can start with a simple word like The Delicious and go up to a word of resounding depth, like Intimacy should you dare. You are Toastmasters, part of that means mastering the craft of choosing the right word. “Make it so.”