The Tao of Robert Duvall

The other day I was sitting outside Starbucks, drinking coffee and reading a book about Teddy Roosevelt.  Wait a minute, don’t give up yet.  This post is not about Teddy Roosevelt.  It is not about Starbucks.  It is about that singularly interesting subject, me.  Yeah, I thought that would pique your interest.  Now back to the story.

As I stated, I was reading a book and, as my finely tuned survival skills allow, catching dribs and drabs (mostly drabs… ha, ha, ha) of the conversations of my fellow Starbucks patrons.  My brain began to make sense of a pattern of information… Beatles… Rolling Stones… Eric Clapton; the music of my generation.  I paused my reading to take a look at the fellows with whom I might have something in common and was annoyed to discover a group of old men.  Gentlemen sporting bald heads, gray whiskers, pot bellies and Hawaiian shirts; they should be discussing the Big Band Era, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman.

I sat for a moment, observing these interloping critics and slowly realized… they were wrinkle-sporting members of the baby boom generation… MY G-G-G-eneration!   Somewhere, sometime, probably in the dark of night, my youth had been stolen.  Damn you, Peter Pan… why did you leave me behind?!?!

I checked my mental calendar.  Sure enough, in just about two week’s time, I would be celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of my birth.  What the hell had happened?  There I was, just a blink or two ago, cruising down Main Street (El Cajon, California… there really is a Main St.) in my 1966 Pontiac La Mans and now I was sitting outside a Starbucks in Escondido, California (life has not taken me far, geographically) teetering on the brink of senility in the company of old men with whom I have way too much in common.

Being uncommonly self aware, I should have recognized this epiphany looming on the horizon for some time.  I had sensed I was becoming invisible: Men walk by without assessing your size or condition; younger women no longer notice your glances, or if they do their acknowledgement wears a patina of pathos.  The front sight never comes into focus (shooting reference, tyros).  I’ve been invited to only one party in the past three years.  It is true, I have become an anachronism.

Such realization is accompanied by soul searching.  Who have I become?  I will never again be able to ask myself, “What would James Bond do?” or “How would Sergeant Saunders handle this?”  No, I would have to find a new source of inspiration; someone hampered by the same downgraded abilities with which I am now burdened.  I need a persona I could emulate who is not going so quietly into that good night:  A man who refuses to let his advancing years force compromise on his beliefs and values.

When one is young, one will have plenty of opportunity to correct ones course.  If a role model is a bit rebellious and demonstrates coolness toward authority, it can be blamed on youth and dismissed as a feature of immaturity.  But a wizened man would never display cool behavior.  The serious senior citizen wishes to display confidence born of experience and reason, not teen-aged bravado resulting from insecurity and intellectual dearth.  The wizened man is such because of his life experience.  It is too late to experiment.  He needs to know which way the wind blows and whether to take it face on or turn a deflecting shoulder.

A major challenge in identifying an ersatz role model is the presence of flaws in all human beings.  Vanity, pride, fear of mortality all conspire to direct a man towards compromise.  If we wanted imperfection, we could rely on ourselves.  But it is the fictional character in which we find the unblinking, truly moral hero.  As I search my mental rolodex, (you young smart-phone aficionados should use the contraption to look up rolodex and see what it is) I find one character that I would most like to emulate in my later years, Hub McCann from Secondhand Lions (New Line Cinema-2003) as played by Robert Duvall.  Having lived an active life, I would now eschew the search for trouble, and sit on my front porch waiting for trouble to come looking for me, with my shotgun resting handily on my lap. And this would be the tao:

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money... money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this... that love... true love never dies! Remember that boy... remember that. Doesn't matter if it is true or not, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in... got that?"