There was something about Freddie, and the written word is useless as a method of explanation. Freddie* was an extraordinary storyteller. I believe that everyone is a storyteller. You may take issue with that statement, but let me explain. We humans communicate primarily with words. We talk. Words form sentences, and sentences are the way we communicate our thoughts. These thoughts are stories. If you are giving instructions  or a description, or a verbal reprimand,  all are  stories. 

Freddie spoke with a midwestern accent, the kind newscasters have. His diction was neither fast or slow, and I’m sure that if we measured his rate of speech it would have been one hundred sixty words per minute. That’s the same rate of speech as Walter Cronkite. Freddie was animated when he spoke. Being slightly less than six feet tall and with what Barney Fife called a sinewy body/   His movements were quick and cat-like. A  tattoo of the word “Screech” was on his left arm. We thought it was probably a nickname regarding his appearance. His hair was jet black and he could grow a five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning. He wore heavy looking black rimmed glasses with  lenses that made his eyes appear larger. We surmised that it made his face look like that of an owl. A screech owl! 

The stories Freddie would tell were not extremely unusual. Many concerned growing up in a small town or nautical stories from his time in the U.S. Navy. But his delivery surely was unusual. He produced sounds to illustrate his words. If he described someone leaving hurriedly, the statement would be followed by a “whoosh”!  The sounds of “whish, whoosh, bang, pow, gr-r-r, boing, whew, tick-tick,” and others would accent his words. To say his stories were entertaining was quite an understatement!

The effect is not one that can be reproduced in print.

We recently met Freddie for lunch and sadly noticed the lack of “whooshes, pows, and bangs”  in his speech. The years had rendered Jerry’s colorful language  black and white.

*not