Starting
Point Young need heroes, old are heroes
By HARRY W. PAIGE
Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a lot on
the subject, once said that heroes become less important as we grow older. And
he was right.
Kids, still struggling with becoming, have a real need for heroes
-- role models, as we like to call them today. And when we were kids and saw
through the glass darkly, our heroes usually performed a single task and
performed it exceedingly well. Our heroes did things like hit home runs, race
automobiles, fly across oceans, act in movies or make music. They didnt
write stories about such things: They did them!
For kids, the heroism lay in the doing. And the doing must be
quantifiable. Thats why the obsession with statistics was born. Heroes
had to have records. Heroes had to hit so many home runs, win the Indy 500, be
awarded an Oscar or sell lots of records. If a kid brags about his hero, he has
to be able to back it up with some objective evidence other kids will
accept.
Sometimes, even when we are kids, our heroes let us down badly:
Thats a part of heroism, too. They have a way of behaving like ordinary
people sometimes, just as confused, just as lost. They take drugs, drink too
much or run off with somebody elses wife. But kids have more forgiveness
in them than a saint on fire. They just bite their lips, swallow their sorrows
and will themselves to believe anew.
The reason that adults dont really need heroes is because
they are heroes themselves (although many of them dont know it), and thus
they should know how fragile and vulnerable heroes are. They have been through
it all themselves and know that a home run is a wonderful thing, even for an
adult, but its nothing like patience or endurance or acceptance or
faith.
The only thing a home run will ever change is the box score of a
baseball game; but faith, as the saying goes, will move mountains. And while
home runs will desert you, patience is key if, later on, your wife or husband
or father develops Alzheimers disease.
A few years ago I attended a gathering of my old Army Air Force
outfit, going all the way back to 1943. It was our 50th reunion. And as I stood
there, full of drinks and fellowship and memories, I looked around and the
thought washed over me like a tide: These guys, my old buddies, are all heroes!
They were pilots, bombardiers, navigators, aerial gunners. They were part of a
story you will still be able to read about in a thousand years.
But their heroism lies not just in the stuff we all know about,
the daring in combat thats part of the public record. Its also
found in things only they know about. After 50 years, some had lost wives and
children. They had survived operations, had colons spliced, prostates removed
and pacemakers sewn up inside their chests. Some had seen their children turn
out badly, make the same mistakes they had made and yet went on loving them in
spite of it. They had buried their parents and now were orphans in a shrinking
world. They were over 70, and the hardest part was still ahead.
They drank too much, some of them, especially when the memories
surfaced. On top of all that, they still had to figure out how they were going
to exit this world with dignity and yet have a chance at making it across to
whatever might be waiting for them on the other side.
All that and more made them heroes. They survived; they endured.
They were there! Hemingway called this quality grace under
pressure, and he was right again.
Some might call Hemingway a hero, and some might not. Maybe he
thumped his chest too much for a real hero. Or maybe he was silly and overly
romantic where women were concerned. Maybe he wasnt loyal enough to the
ones who really loved him. Maybe he put too much emphasis on the physical, the
doing.
Whatever we make of him, we know he got old and sick and frail at
the end and sensed what was ahead for him, knowing all along that incapacity
was the worst, the ending up as an invalid. I think maybe toward the end he
thought of Manolete or Ordonez or the running of the bulls at Pamplona. I think
maybe he figured the sun would never rise again as it had before. So he put the
shotgun butt on the floor and leaned over it as a priest might lean over a
chalice. He bent until he felt the cold muzzle just over his eyebrows and then
he pulled both triggers.
Maybe a real hero would have done it differently. Maybe a real
hero would have reached down and summoned up all the strength he had from deep
within and then gone on living like a wounded hawk, waiting for the end with a
kind of fierce and distant pride. Maybe a real hero would have remembered a
fallen comrade or a childhood prayer. Or perhaps a real hero might just have
fallen quietly asleep, dreaming of lions.
Harry Paige writes from Potsdam, N.Y.
National Catholic Reporter, January 29,
1999
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