Some of the best stories have unspoken words

Some of the best stories have unspoken words
                        

For me, it was always about the pictures. Sitting on my carpet square in Mrs. Denholm’s second-grade classroom as she read E.B. White’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web,” I would anxiously await her oscillating fanning of the book to her 7-year-old audience, displaying Garth Williams’ long-celebrated artwork.

For whatever reason, the initial drawing of Fern in a battled tug-of-war with her father over an axe, to be used to kill the “runt” of the litter, made its way into my long-term memory banks. Not so much because of the violence depicted in the penciled artwork, but rather the look of both confusion and shock on Mr. Arable’s face that his daughter would come at him in such a manner.

Along with Mrs. Denholm’s calm, narrative voice, those pictures brought Wilbur’s story to imaginative life — no easy task for a classroom of over 25 kids whose minds were recently awakened by the visual storytelling splendor of “Star Wars” on the silver screen.

Looking back, I think Fern and Charlotte and all their barnyard friends may have been the antecedent to my love of visual storytelling — a life filled with thousands of comic books mostly inhabited by the goings on in Gotham City.

But then that is what the best pictures, whether hand drawn or actual photographs, have always done: tell the emotion of the story.

As queasy as one might feel while looking at the iconic photograph of the 11 steelworkers on their lunch break — perched 850 feet off the ground atop a steel beam while constructing the Rockefeller Center — do yourself a favor and Google the long-speculated image of the photographer Charles Ebbets taking the actual picture. Whether factual or not, in terms of what he is actually photographing, it is even more harrowing and emotion-filled than his famous picture. One slip of the right heel on his brogue shoe, and that picture becomes even more famous for all the wrong reasons.

Or with a millisecond click of the shutter on May 4, 1970, how memorably John Filo captured the tragedy of the Kent State shootings. The raw grief on 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio’s face shocked a collective conscience — forcing participants and the world as a whole to look. The Kent State photojournalism major would win a Pulitzer Prize for the picture at the age of 23. In both photographs the case for a picture being worth a thousand words is strongly made.

This also was the case a few years back when, in the midst of the 2022 World Cup, a social media post went viral. The picture, filled with three rectangular images, shows a loving elderly couple rooting for their favorite soccer team, Fenerbahçe, a Turkish professional soccer club. The top picture, dated 2014, shows the man’s focused concentration on the game, with his right hand in what looks like a bag of popcorn. The woman sits to his left, with an intrigued expression on her face as if a shirtless Paul Newman from “Cool Hand Luke” just walked into the room.

The second pictured rectangle, directly underneath and dated 2015, again shows the couple in the exact same spot but with seats reversed. This time his hands are up in celebration, and she is looking at him with a smile filled with all the ups and downs of life that only an elderly couple would understand, saying, “Here we are … exactly where we want to be.”

The one time the woman is not smiling comes in the third and final rectangle, dated 2016. Again, she is in the same location, but this time she sits alone. One can surmise why her husband is no longer in the photo, and her expression shows a stoicism in the game she is watching because, for her, the soccer games clearly had so much more to do with the man sitting beside her than the game itself. She is a woman and widower filled with knowledge, compassion, sorrow and loving memories.

This picture was brought back to my consciousness because of another recent photo, again involving a sports team.

The picture came across my Instagram news feed of a Detroit Lions fan in a full-on blubber. I mean this guy is shedding the heavy tears of a long-suffering fan base, three decades removed from being even remotely relevant in professional football. Underneath the picture came the flood of comments and judgments for which social media, and the anonymity it protects its users from, has become famous.

“Imagine caring this much about a football game!” one commenter said.

“He’s from Michigan — this is what these people always look like!” and “I mean the (idiot) has sunglasses on his head … in a dome!” read a few others, and those are just the ones I can share.

In this case, however, motivated mostly by the rudeness of the comments, I had to discover the story behind the picture.

Turns out the young man shown sobbing in the photo is Aaron Wikaryasz, a 35-year-old Lions fan who attended every home game with his father Joseph until his dad was killed in a car accident when Aaron was 14. Prior to his death, Joseph was an iron worker who helped build the very stadium in which Aaron was sitting and crying as the Lions captured their first playoff victory in over 30 years. The connection he felt within the stadium went well beyond a passion for football, bordering on the spiritual.

“I don’t know my dad as an adult,” Wikaryasz told WXYZ-7 in Detroit. “So being there (at Ford Field), I can be 14 again,” he said.

It makes me wonder if his story ever made its way to any of the anonymous commenters; did they bother to find out the story behind the photograph and Wikaryasz’s tears or push their own narrative filled with nonsense? I think I know the answer.

Their view of the picture and their “thousand words” that come with it are trite. They must not have had a Mrs. Denholm who taught sometimes the best stories have words that are never spoken.

Brett Hiner is in his 27th year of teaching English/language arts at Wooster High School, where he also serves as the yearbook adviser and Drama Club adviser/director. When writing, he enjoys connecting cultural experiences, pop and otherwise to everyday life. He can be emailed at workinprogessWWN@gmail.com.


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