But when Morgan Freeman says it, the words somehow minister.

by Jim Herrington

Really loved the lede to this Morgan Freeman profile.

This Earth That Holds Me Fast Will Find Me Breath by Tom Chiarella
Esquire, July 2012

"We halved the property on a footpath hypotenuse apparent only to him, gazed at his pond and his band of horses from the white, white rails of the fence line, visited his parents' grave site, peered at the house they once lived in, surveyed the trees he'd planted to soak up the drainage, walked the berm he created from earth he himself moved, regarded his ever-growing inventory of farm equipment (he with some consternation), then ambled back through the uncharged cool of his house out to his patio to settle side by side in lounge chairs on nylon cushions air-dried in the noon heat of a spring day in Mississippi. It was there that Morgan Freeman said, "Well, everyone lives somewhere." Not a particularly meaningful line, not by itself. Everyone lives somewhere. If you repeat it out loud—you, that is, just say it right here and now before you read forward—it will sound glib. Everyone lives somewhere. Displaced from this venue, the spread of Morgan Freeman's bucolic estate outside the tiny hamlet of Charleston, Mississippi, the vast tumble of his house with its seven gabled roofs, the words will likely sound arrogant, fatalistic, callow. But when Morgan Freeman says it, the words somehow minister. In his voice, in the familiar tone of a thousand voice-overs, it becomes a kind of punctuation. Everyone lives somewhere. Not to say that he meant for it to be anything very deep. He's not that manipulative. He was just saying. So, Morgan Freeman, uttering an unrehearsed breath line of regret and realization. You can hear him. This happenstance Zen, a plaintive caesura. He can't help it if everything he says sounds like a pregnant pause waiting to happen. He's saying only what's on his mind—that he's never really left, that he can't do as much as he used to, that it's comforting to have a home that lasts. He just doesn't want to utter these fat little muffins of truth. Morgan Freeman is far too grumpy for truisms. And that's probably why I can't hear the next thing he says at all; he must be explaining himself when his voice drops out. He never really stops talking, but sometimes his voice just vanishes."

"There was a time when you couldn't get me out of there."

The Silent Season of a Hero by Gay Talese

So excited to tackle this book. The only story from this collection I've read is "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Really liked this one about a few days in the life of Joe DiMaggio, who 25 years after the peak of his career became a pretty lonely, solitary, sad man.

"Everywhere he goes the questions seem the same, as if he has some special vision into the future of new heroes, and everywhere he goes, too, older men grab his hand and feel his arm and predict that he could still go out there and hit one, and the smile on DiMaggio's face is genuine. He tries hard to remain as he was--he diets, he takes steam baths, he is careful; and flabby men in the locker rooms of golf clubs sometimes steal peeks at him when he steps out of the shower, observing the tight muscles across his chest, the flat stomach, the long sinewy legs. He has a young man's body, very pale and little hair; his face is dark and lined, however, parched by the sun of several seasons. Still he is always an impressive figure at banquets such as this--an immortal, sportswriters called him, and that is how they have written about him and others like him, rarely suggesting that such heroes might ever be prone to the ills of mortal men, carousing, drinking, scheming; to suggest this would destroy the myth, would disillusion small boys, would infuriate rich men who own ball clubs and to whom baseball is a business dedicated to profit and in pursuit of which they trade mediocre players' flesh as casually as boys trade players' pictures on bubble-gum cards."

"The reporters waited silently then DiMaggio walked slowly into the cage and picked up Mantle's bat. He took his position at the plate, but obviously it was not the classic DiMaggio stance; he was holding the bat about two inches from the knob, his feet were not so far apart, and, when DiMaggio took a cut at Benson's first pitch, fouling it, there was none of that ferocious follow through, the blurred bat did not come whipping all the way around, the No. 5 was not stretched full across his broad back.
Di Maggio fouled Benson's second pitch, then he connected solidly with the third, the fourth, the fifth. He was just meeting the ball easily, however, not smashing it, and Benson called out, "I didn't know you were a choke hitter, Joe."
"I am now," DiMaggio said, getting ready for another pitch.
He hit three more squarely enough, and then he swung again and there was a hollow sound.
"Ohhh," DiMaggio yelled, dropping his bat, his fingers stung. "I was waiting for that one." He left the batting cage rubbing his hands together. The reporters watched him. Nobody said anything. Then DiMaggio said to one of them, not in anger nor in sadness, but merely as a simply stated fact, "There was a time when you couldn't get me out of there."

Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste.

Me and my friend Kathleen laughed to the point of tears and aching stomachs the other day from reading this list of the 25 funniest analogies.

As I read through Esquire's September 2010 issue, I noticed this line from Tom Chiarella's "The Itinerant Artist," a profile on James Franco:

"When asked what he's reading, Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste." (p. 124).

Wonderful.