Bravery

One early spring night, my father told me to follow him down into the basement.  He opened up several drawers which held some cash and a few keys.  He took the keys out and told me what each one opened what drawer or box, including something called a “deposit box” in the bank.  “Remember what I am telling you,” he stressed several times.

“Why are you telling me this?”  I was becoming scared.

My dad looked up at the ceiling joints for a while, and then looked down at me.  “I am telling you this because tomorrow I am going into the hospital for a serious operation to remove shrapnel in my back from the war, and there is a possibility I might not come out of it.”

I stood there trying not to believe what he was saying.

“If I don’t survive the operation, you will be the man of the family and you will have to brave, very brave, and do things you might not want to do.”

I was nine years old.

Sunday night, in the fifties in my neighborhood, all the kids stopped playing hide and seek or kick the can or sitting on the porch steps yelling at cars, “YOU GOT A FLAT TIRE!”  The streets of my suburban town emptied of kids because they were all inside watching Disneyland.  My favorite segment was Frontier Land, especially Davy Crockett.   He was my first example of bravery, and I still remember the final scene at the Alamo with Davy swinging Ole Betsy at the enemy…..which probably did not happen, but as the newspaperman says in the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”

As I got older, all the legends of the screen that epitomized bravery began to be come fuzzy around the edges.  As I began to catalogue and quantify and evaluate the world, my parents’ bravery quotient increased dramatically.  Survivors of The Great Depression, they rose above their poverty and deprivation with ethics intact.  My father, wounded in World War II, demonstrated his bravery and courage many times over along with thousands and thousands of other men and women who entered the conflict as underdogs and emerged as leaders of the free world….despite twenty-first century morons labeling those same people as suckers and losers.

And what about me? Was I ever brave?  During my college days I marched in defiance of the “establishment’s” bigotry and greed.  I even was knocked to the ground by an officer who took offense at my existence.  But I did not feel brave, just a great deal of pain in my skull curtesy of the officer’s truncheon.

Perhaps I was brave when I taught high school.  Actually, I think most teachers are brave.  They get abuse from parents, from policy makers who think educators are overpaid and underworked (until they try their hand at it.  I remember one pseudo-teacher running out of the classroom upset and frightened.  She was not brave).  Worse, teachers absorb abuse from some of the very people they are trying so hard to help.  Yes, maybe I was brave then.  I also think I went up a few notches on the bravery scale because I challenged conventional teaching methodologies and utilized the ones best supported by educational research.  I took abuse for that, but I also enjoyed teaching more.  And I think my students enjoyed learning more.

Now in the autumn (winter?) of my life, my concept of bravery has changed dramatically.  Our culture puts bravery on a Rarity Pedestal, praising an act of courage as a rare and unique action found only among the best of us.  But I think that is a myth.  Too many people demonstrate bravery every day, not only teachers and health care workers and social workers and….well, just about everyone who gets up every morning and puts the kettle on knowing that the future is personally bleak and even forbidding.  You know, those individuals living lives of “quiet desperation,” with no resources and no prospects due to acts not of their own doing.

I think there is a great deal of bravery out there because there is a great need for people to be brave.

I have Parkinson’s, and one of the nasty and depressing things about this affliction is that I know it is not going to get better.  I know it is only going to get worse.  And I have to face that, and, yes, I think it takes some measure of bravery to do that.  The problem is that as the body grows weaker, so does the mind.  I think my mind tells my body to be brave, but old age makes it more difficult for the body to respond.   My body tells my mind, “Just let me be. I am falling apart.  It is too exhausting to be brave.”

The colloquialism, “Old age is not for the faint of heart,” is a truism no matter what physical condition one is in.  I have learned as a survival technique to accept the fact that I cannot physically do what I did at twenty-five or even at forty.  I focus on the reality that I can look back on the happier experiences of my life and put them in a perspective.  As Eric Weiner writes in The Socrates Express (if you read only one chapter of this book, read “How to Grow Old.”), “wisdom is seeing.”  I see things better now than earlier in my life, and that is a huge plus.  I realize the events and associations that led up to my being who I am now.  I see that whatever bravery I can muster now to face the present and the future grew from the models provided by my parents and the real and fictionalized personages that I valued as a child.  As Davy advised, “Be sure you are right, and then go ahead.”

“I think I’ve acquired some wisdom over the years, but there doesn’t seem to be much demand for it.”