March 2004 Issue - Essay # 2
Halfway
to Ninety: Still Trying to Be Brave
By
William Joseph
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I
remember a six year old me. He
was standing in the alley behind our house in Canarsie, the same alley
where he, Jamee, and Gary had set that lady's bushes on fire the year
before. Technically, it was
Jamee and Gary who set the bushes on fire, by accident, when the box they
were igniting blew too close to the fence. But he was part of it, despite
what he told Jamee's mother when she asked if he had helped light the
fire. If she had asked if he
was there, if he was involved, if he was planning to light the fire, he
probably would have said yes. But
she asked if he had helped light the fire, and he said no.
It wasn't until she walked away that he dropped his unlit match to
the sidewalk and ran home, ashamed. Ashamed,
not because he lied, but because he wasn't brave enough to tell the whole
truth, wasn't brave enough to face the consequences of having been
involved. If
I live to be ninety, I don't think I'll ever be as brave as I want to be.
It's not that I'm a coward, it's just that I'm only brave about the
easy things. For instance,
when we were vacationing last summer, and the ocean was much more
persistent than usual in its attempt to pull swimmers away from the shore,
I helped a young boy who most probably would have disappeared had I not.
That's easy: you're in the water, someone needs help, you help
them. But not too long before
that, I was talking on the phone with a business associate who jokingly
made what I thought was a racist remark, but it was just ambiguous enough
that I wasn't sure if he meant what I thought.
If it went over my head, I figured, I was off the hook, so I gave
him no indication of my reaction and we went on with our conversation.
The only problem is, I wasn't off the hook, because it didn't go
over my head. A braver man
would have asked, "what did you mean by that?" or stated simply,
"I don't appreciate that kind of remark."
One
time, before cell phones were commonplace, my wife and I were driving with
my at that time only son in the car, and we passed a young man beating up
his girlfriend in their car on the side of the road.
I drove ahead and dropped my wife off to call the police.
That's easy: you see someone getting beaten up, you call the
police. I circled back around
to find that an older man (probably as old as I am now, but back then I
thought of him as older) had
stopped and gotten out of his car. The
young man had gotten out of his car, too, and was very much in the face of
this older man. I pulled over
and stepped out of my car, but with my baby son in the back, I was happy
enough to have an excuse not to go closer.
I believe my presence had the effect of calming things down; with a
witness right there, the young man was not about to resort to violence
against the older man. But the
older man was the braver man I should have been, getting out of his car to
stop the beating. I
watch the commercials for Fear Factor, if not the show itself, and I
think, that's not brave. Eating
a plate of worms, letting bugs crawl all over you, that's just stupid.
I know people who've jumped out of airplanes, but that's not
necessarily brave, either, just adventurous.
Bethany Hamilton, the teenage surfer who had her arm bitten of by a
shark last year, was back in the ocean surfing competitively just months
later. Well, that one is very
brave, I have to admit. Or
maybe all of those things are brave, but they're not the kind of brave I
aspire to be. I want to be the
kind of brave Atticus Finch was. The
kind of brave where you don't choose to do the right thing, you do it
because that's who you are. The kind where, if I had been on that bus with
Rosa Parks, I would have said to everyone there, "Let her sit where
she wants." The kind
where, when my friends were picking on the unpopular kid at camp, I would
have said, "C'mon guys, leave him alone."
If my biggest client calls me up tomorrow and tells me gays
shouldn't have the right to be married, I want to be the kind of brave
where I tell him, "Of course they should," not to be
argumentative, but because I honestly don't see why only heterosexuals
should enjoy the benefits of marriage.
That's the kind of brave I want to be.
The kind of brave where my being brave can't help me, might even
hurt me, yet I do it anyway. The
kind of brave that prompts someone to say to my boys, "Stand up,
boys. Your father's passing." I
want to be, but I'm not. I
would have kept silent while they arrested Rosa Parks, just as I kept
silent when my friends taunted the unpopular kid.
I don't know for sure how I'll handle my client's phone call, if it
comes, but fortunately for me I probably I won't have to.
I might run into a burning building to save a baby, if I ever come
face to face with that situation, but that's easy: a building's burning, a
baby's inside, you go in and save it.
There
is hope for me, though. At
fourty-five years old, I'm in the middle of a fight to keep a tenant in my apartment,
because the owners downstairs want her out for what I think are the wrong
reasons. Maybe I'm not just
getting older, I'm also getting braver.
I hope so. The six-year-old me was standing in that same alley where they lit the fire, maybe eight houses away. He was standing as still as he could; within arms reach was a rosebush, swarming with bees. Bees won't bother you unless you bother them, he had been told. If you stand perfectly still, they won't sting you. For twenty minutes, he stood waiting for the bees to leave, so that he could go on home, but they continued their pollinating. Finally, he summoned up his courage and raced past the rosebush, past the bees, and into the present tense, where he is halfway to ninety and still trying to be brave.
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Author's Biography William Joseph lives in Saint James, NY with his wife and sons, where he does "something with numbers" from nine to five. He's an average, middle-aged man doing average, middle-aged things, and remains unknown to all but his family and friends. In his fantasy life, though, William is a well-known writer and changer-of-the-world. E-mail
William at williamjoseph117@aol.com
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Essay
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