Sponge or Spigot?

Every time I look at a computer screen these days, I am reminded of old Brother Billy Vance back in my hometown. Brother Billy had a voice that could shake the acorns off a white oak tree and a burning desire to save humanity, whether humanity wanted it or not. He used to stand right out on the square, sweating through a three-piece Goodwill suit in the dead of July, shouting into a dented megaphone about the end of days and the high price of sin.

Brother Billy was that he didn’t particularly care if you actually comprehended the words coming out of his mouth. He just needed to know you were looking at him. If you walked by the courthouse without acknowledging the racket he was making, his face would turn the color of a ripe tomato and he’d yell twice as loud. He didn’t want to save your soul. He wanted to command your afternoon. He was a sponge for attention, soaking up every stray glance and dirty look just to feel like he was the center of God’s green earth.

We’ve gone and turned the whole internet into a town square full of Brother Billys. Everybody’s got a digital megaphone now. They call it a “blog” or a “newsletter” or a “personal platform,” but it’s the same old dance. Just a lot more eloquent sometimes. And less sweat.

Every morning, millions of folks log on, clear their throats, and pour their hearts out into the void. They bare their neuroses like a bad heat rash and dissect their childhood traumas for strangers, hoping to rally everyone around their own private flagpole.

Now, I’d love to sit here and tell you that I’m different. I’d love to pretend that I’m just a detached observer standing outside the circus, shaking my head at the vanity of the modern world. But that would be a lie. The uncomfortable truth is that Brother Billy and I are cut from the same cloth. Every time I hit “publish,” every time I check the analytics to see how many people opened the email, or watch the subscriber count tick upward, I’m standing on that same courthouse lawn. Every writer has a little bit of Brother Billy living inside them. We all want to be seen. We all want to command your afternoon, if only for five minutes, and we’re all terrified of shouting into an empty square.

The only reason the roof hasn’t fallen in on this whole fragile, ego-driven operation is because of the people on the other side of the screen. The quiet ones. The spigots who spend their lives pouring out care and attention without ever asking for a receipt or a round of applause.

We need a whole lot less Brother Billys, and a whole lot more Miss Claras.

Miss Clara lived down the road from us in a little white frame house with a screen door that banged twice every time it closed. She wore house dresses that smelled like starch and lavender, and she never said more than three words at a time if she could help it. She didn’t have a megaphone, she didn’t have a platform, and she didn’t hold press conferences on the front porch to share her feelings with the neighborhood. She was too busy living a life of quiet utility.

If Miss Clara noticed your car hadn’t moved out of the driveway in three days, she didn’t log onto a computer to write an essay about the loneliness of modern suburban existence. She didn’t start a podcast about neighborly love. She just went into her kitchen, fried up a chicken, put it in a CorningWare dish under a tea towel, and walked across the road.

She’d show up at your back door, knock with her knuckles, and ask a genuine question.

“Are you doing alright?”

And then she’d sit there and actually listen to the answer. She wouldn’t interrupt you to tell you how her back hurt worse. She wouldn’t try to turn the conversation back to her own life. She would just give you the rarest, most expensive commodity left on this earth: her undivided attention.

I look at my own subscriber list these days, and I thank whatever is above that it is absolutely full of Miss Claras.

They are the bedrock of the whole thing. They don’t hoot, and they don’t holler. They don’t walk into the comment section looking to pick a fight or show off how smart they are. You won’t find them leaving five-page manifestos trying to out-write the author. Instead, they quietly go about their days, spreading a little bit of cheer, leaving a digital heart on a post to let you know they were there, and dropping the absolute best comment a writer can ever hope to receive.

Just two words.

“Thank you.”

The pure performers will never understand that. They think a “good” audience is one that makes a lot of noise. But those two words carry more oomph than all the loud, empty praise of a thousand ego-strokers. When a Miss Clara types “Thank you,” what she’s really saying is, “I saw you. I read what you wrote. I took your thoughts into my home, sat with them for a spell, and they did me some good.”

It’s a handshake across the dark.

My daddy used to say there are two kinds of people you meet in this life. Those who walk into a room and act like they’re doing the room a favor by being there, and those who walk in and make the room feel better just by being present.

We’ve become a society that worships the performers. We give the awards, the money, and the attention to the ones who treat their lives like a spectator sport, thinking the guy holding the megaphone is the main event.

But we’ve got it exactly backwards. The miracle isn’t the guy shouting on the soapbox. The miracle is that there are still decent, quiet, faithful folks like Miss Clara who are willing to stop walking, pull up a seat, and listen.

Without the readers who genuinely care, the ones who look after others instead of trying to be looked at, the performers are just lonely people in damp suits, screaming at the trees. If you’re lucky enough to have a few Miss Claras on your list, you better treat them like gold. Because when the day is done, they’re the ones who will be crossing the road with a covered dish, making sure the rest of us are doing alright.