"Children on Their Birthdays," one of his best-known stories, might read like a Tarkingtonian tale of summer romance, except for the author's calmly being able to throw its full-of-beans ten-year-old heroine, Miss Bobbit, under a bus.
If you encountered someone who was self-harming, would you calmly be able to ask them why they were doing it without a hint of panic, blame, anger, or insistence that they stop?
He's able to calmly step back and consider everything.
It was no small victory that he was able to calmly navigate an encounter that can be fraught with unexpected outbursts of emotion or violence.
The fun for him lies in reproducing those conventions deadpan, so as to be able to calmly expose the betrayal of images.
With the weeks that I spent there I slowly gained the access that I needed, and was able to calmly make films that stand out differently from what's normally being shown on YouTube..
And after pondering Ellen's work and remembering a new perspective on parenting I'd recently read in The Awakened Family: A Revolution in Parenting by Shefali Tsabary, Ph.D., I was able to calmly sit with her as she raged and kicked (the car seat, not me) and screamed.
Then Haralson, amid the violence, was able to calmly figure out, as though fine-tuning a tennis stroke, that he needed to hold a live grenade in his hand for a couple of seconds before throwing it, and then do just that.
After more than a month without her Michael, she was able to calmly tell us, "I lost my husband in the World Trade Center" with the same composure that someone would say "What's for dinner?" I admired her bravery, her poise.
And yet he's able to calmly explain legato to his violin-playing grandson.
