Richard J. Alley

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

Feb. 14, 2013

Can a dad take a personal day off?

Despite the ease with which this column must seem to be written, each verb and subordinate clause just rolling off the tongue, there are those weeks that I don’t feel like writing it at all. I just want to ignore it the way my kids ignore their mess, their homework and my good advice.

These are weeks when little of note is going on in my house or with my kids, so I’ll call each of them into my office one by one and ask a series of questions, have them tell me a story, or amuse me with a joke like I’m a talent agent on the vaudeville circuit. They aren’t much for auditions these days, though, so there are weeks when I think, like many a vaudeville agent must have, of firing these four kids and hiring four more; four kids with pizazz and some stage presence, kids who will heed my advice and clean their rooms.

But maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s me. We all get a little burned out, don’t we? On our jobs, our routine, the television shows we watch and food we eat. Even the Pope knows when to say “enough is enough.”

Sometimes we can even get burned out on being a parent. It’s OK, you can say it. We all need a break sometimes, though it’s never quite that easy. You can’t just tell your baby you’re taking a personal day and leave a stack of diapers where they can be reached, a dish of baby food on the kitchen floor. Hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign around your neck is often met with even more questions you aren’t in the mood to answer.

I know people without children who consider their pets to be kids. They’ll even sympathize, shaking their heads and saying, “Oh, I know what you mean, I have a Labradoodle and a Whippet.” But I can’t leave my kids in the backyard with a bowl of water and a rawhide to chew so that I can have a quiet meal out and see a movie. They find their way back inside the house every time.

Enough times of this and I’m pretty sure the neighbors would call child protective services to come take them away. I wonder if they’d take them just for the night and have them back around lunchtime the next day?

I’m not looking for a permanent vacation. This isn’t a resignation letter to be taped to the television for my kids to see and, most likely, ignore. I still need this job; it makes me whole, completes me, all of that sappy stuff that makes up a good parenting column.

All jobs should have personal days built into the time off schedules; a day here and there to wander off alone and read a book, see a movie, shop or visit the zoo. Being a parent is work — hard, demanding and unpaid work — and some days I just don’t feel like doing it.

So I’m calling in sick, giving myself a time out, and I’ll ask that someone come by this afternoon to toss a tennis ball to my kids in the backyard and refill their water dish.

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Daily news story for The Memphis Daily News

Oct. 26, 2012

DeNeuville Learning Center. KIPP Memphis Collegiate Schools. Shelby County Books from Birth. WriteMemphis.

These are some of the nine recipients of this year’s GiVE 365 grants. GiVE 365 is an initiative of the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis whose members pledge a dollar per day per year, and are encouraged to vote on what causes that money will go. This year’s theme was “Eyes on the Prize: Organizations helping students graduate from high school or college,” and 11 finalists were asked to give three-minute presentations in front of voting members.

“Each of these organizations defines what that looks like a little differently,” Melissa Wolowicz, vice president of grants and initiatives said of this year’s theme. “DeNeuville is working with women on their GEDs, Hatilloo (Theatre) wants to teach students a skill set related to the theater and the arts that will give them something to help earn money while they’re getting their education.”

The total grant amount was $50,394 with individual amounts ranging from $3,200 to $7,500.

These are amounts that can make a difference for the respective organizations and in the lives of those they seek to help … (read more)

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

May 30, 2012

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

“My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book,” Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as “chaotic,” yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, “The Roots of the Olive Tree” (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family’s olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It’s a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, “ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots.”

It’s a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that’s only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo … (read more)

Contributor of copy and editorial direction for Memphians coffee table book

The Nautilus Publishing Company; Oxford, MS

ISBN 978-193694603-7

2011

Feature profile for The Commercial Appeal

Oct. 16, 2011

To hear Emil Henry tell it, climbing the Matterhorn at 55 years old wasn’t so difficult. There was little training, only to be tested on skills, endurance and altitude sickness; it wasn’t even a life’s dream.

“As tall, high mountains go, it’s probably the easiest of all the high mountains in the Alps now,” Henry said of the summit that has seen 431 deaths, 58 in the 21st century alone.

Researching and writing a biography of Edward Whymper, the first person ever to scale the 14,690-foot mountain, however, became a monumental task of endurance, travel and expense. And a challenge he wouldn’t give up for anything.

“It turned out to be the most enjoyable occupation of my life,” Henry said of the book, “Triumph and Tragedy: The Life of Edward Whymper” ($18.31).

Henry, now 82 with three children and five grandchildren, began life in Memphis, growing up in Chickasaw Gardens before going away to a boarding high school in Pennsylvania and college at Yale. He joined the Navy during the Korean War, spending three years on a destroyer in the Pacific Ocean, and then went to Vanderbilt for law school.

After practicing law in Memphis for five years, he was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission in 1962. When the chairman resigned only eight months later, Henry was appointed, “at the ripe old age of 34,” chairman of the FCC by President John F. Kennedy … (read more)

Victoria Ford, a child of the Memphis political dynasty, survived her parents’ disgrace to stand on a stage in Carnegie Hall and accept a national writing award

Feature profile for Chapter 16 (an online journal about books and writers, sponsored by Humanities Tennessee)

June 29, 2011

“You may not understand this now, but she isn’t coming back. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Day after that. And no, she hasn’t left anything behind—a sticky note on the refrigerator door or a quick message for the answering machine, her voice a distant echo calling your name and mine. Nothing.”

So begins the award-winning essay “To a Restless Little Brother Calling for Mama in His Sleep,” one of the five essays that last month helped Victoria Ford, eighteen, win a national Scholastic Art and Writing Award—and a $10,000 college scholarship. Past winners of the prestigious award include Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, and Truman Capote. For Ford, the awards ceremony, held May 31 in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, was a moment to remember, one that surely marks the beginning of a life of creativity and success.

Victoria’s last name might not be so well known as the literary giants who took home the Scholastic prize years ago, but it already carries a kind of notoriety in her hometown of Memphis. Harold Ford Sr., the first African-American Tennessean elected to Congress since Reconstruction, was her uncle. Harold Ford Jr., now retired from Congress, is her cousin. Other family members have been elected to the city council, the county commission, and the school board in Memphis. Victoria’s father, John Ford, was a state senator for three decades, another cog in the familial political machine.

Among young African Americans growing up in Memphis, Victoria’s story is far from typical. Memphis is a city with higher-than-average rates of poverty, drug use, single-parent homes, and criminal recidivism, but Victoria grew up in a two-story brick home with a mother and father. She attended an above-average city school … (read more)