I'm supposed to be putting together my final paper/project for this Assessment class, but I've found myself here instead. I suppose life would get pretty boring if we all just did what we're supposed to do. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, right? This is something I've thought about for, well, probably all my life, really. Well before I knew the words for such things. But I think that's true for all of us. It's natural for us all to figure out what it means to be a boy or a girl, both on the larger scale and to us personally. And I think there is always a bit of fluidity in our notions about this, about the different personas and phases we try on as we try to figure out what fits on us and just what the hell we're supposed to do on this Earth anyway. I've been thinking about this in particular again, though, since I would say Andrew Luck retired. There was a lot of talk about why he decided to walk away from football, if he should have walked away, if players of earlier generations could have ever done the same thing or what would have happened if anybody had. It got me thinking if I could have done the same thing if I had been in his shoes. I think there are points in my life* where I would not have understood why. You just don't walk away from that kind of money, and (maybe more importantly) you don't walk away from a team and a city like that. *Which, if it means anything, Andrew Luck is three years younger than me. Now that I'm a bit older and (hopefully) wiser, I get it. There are things worth throwing away your body and your sanity for, but a job just isn't one of them. Even if your job is being an NFL quarterback. He's done quite well for himself. I trust he will be sensible with his money. And he felt he had other things he could and should be doing. And that loops back around to today, what finally motivated me to write this out. Before I sat down to start writing school stuff, I opened YouTube to kick off some music. But, instead of that, YouTube offered up a bit about Mr. Rogers. I don't really know why. Beth has recently gotten into watching Mr. Rogers on the PBS Kids app, maybe she's watched some clips on YouTube as well. In any case, I couldn't resist it. I watched it, and found myself just inexplicably crying almost immediately. I don't know what that reaction is. I had similar reactions to watching Won't You Be My Neighbor?, which I would highly recommend by the way. There is just something about watching a man who just seems to have an infinite well of caring and compassion for everybody. And somebody who used that caring to talk to children, to help them understand the world around them armed with nothing more a soothing voice, some puppets, and honesty. He wouldn't put it this way, but I do admire his commitment to talk to children on their level and do so without any bullshit. It gets pointed to a lot, but for good reason. The episode done in the wake Robert Kennedy's assassination is just brilliant. It might have been more geared to adults than the usual program, but the reason it works is just the same as any other episode. So, this all touches a nerve with me now, but I'll admit that I didn't always get it. I obviously understood that Mr. Rogers was a grown man, but I don't think I would have told you, even in my high school or college years, that he was a man I would have liked to grow up to be. He was too soft, he wasn't active, he was dorky and too straight-laced. I had a picture of masculinity that was maybe more traditional. You were more manly if you could be bigger or stronger or just somehow better and more aggressive. Not being a very big guy myself, that didn't always work out for me very well. But I learned that I was pretty bright, and I could cut pretty deeply with my words when I needed to. That was my edge, so to speak. Something changed along the way, though. I was getting older, and it didn't feel like a lot of things were going right for me, and I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get going in the right direction. Or even what that direction was. I'll write about that part in more detail some other day. I've got a whole article on failure I've been composing in my head. Anyway, one of the things I noticed about myself is that I had become pretty lonely. I wasn't doing a good job at connecting to the people around me, and the people I did have connections to weren't physically close to me.* And I think these ideas I had come to about what made a man had an awful lot to do with it. *Obviously that doesn't include Kristine. I was at least smart enough to hang on to her and marry her. And thank God for that. I don't think I'm some special case when it comes to this, either. I think I had a pretty similar view as to what makes a man as an awful lot of men, especially in this area of the country. But I came to learn about myself that, not only was I not doing a very good job at living up to this idea, but it was actively harming me. It was about this time that two things happened pretty close together. For one, I become aware of "toxic masculinity." Secondly, Brad Montague started becoming more involved with the Fred Rogers Center. The first thing gave me a vocabulary to put to the things I was feeling and becoming uncomfortable with being and participating in. The second thing gave me another lens into what I could be as a man and what I could be doing. Now, it may seem like the second thing is awfully random, and you're not exactly wrong. But, there is a history here. Let me take a minute to explain that a bit. I first heard of Brad through Dr. Demento, which searching the archive must have been 2002. I heard "I Would Still Love You," and I laughed so hard. It stuck with me enough that, a few years later in 2005, I reached out to Brad. My buddy Nelson and I were hosting our morning radio show, and we thought it would be fun to host a concert. We just needed somebody to play. I thought "Well, getting a comedy musician probably isn't that hard." And, by golly, apparently it isn't! Brad readily agreed to it, spent a couple nights in my dorm in Morris Hall. He kicked around the show with us, played a set that morning, played a show that night. Just generally hung out with us for the time in-between. He turned out to be a really cool dude. We became Facebook friends and kinda stayed peripherally in touch through the years. Then, the Pep Talk happened. It propelled Brad into a totally different atmosphere and opened up so many doors for him. It was weird as hell for me, because I saw it when Brad first posted it. I liked it, it's cute and uplifting. But I didn't give it a ton of thought. But then it started popping up on my Facebook feed, and people would ask me, "Hey, have you seen this?" And I would say, "Yeah, actually. I know that guy!" Huge, viral YouTube videos are not supposed to happen to people you know. Anyway, Brad was doing the Kid President thing, which led to him publicly espousing his admiration for Fred Rogers and now his expanded work over at Montague Workshop. And then Brad posted the picture you see up there, which also went weirdly viral. And, damn. Did that hit me hard. That might have been life altering. So, what did I need when I was younger? I think I needed somebody who would have told me that it was okay to be a little sensitive. Because I had been hiding that hard for a long time, to varying degrees of success. That not only is it okay to be creative, but it is good to be creative and to put that out for everybody to see. I did that a lot when I was really young, and I would get good feedback and everybody would dote on it. But, as I got just a little bit older, it somehow became frowned upon in school. By teachers and my peers. So, I kept doing it, but I got a lot more selective about who got to see it and when. Some different encouragement, and some differently placed encouragement, would have gone an awful long way. If somebody would have sat down with me and started shaping whatever native talent was there to begin with would have gone a long way. Hell, if somebody had just told me, "Hey, your story matters. Your story is important." That would have gone a long way. I did get that bit in college. I remember a time after picking Nelson up from the airport, we decided to eat at Little Mexico and we ran into Dr. Joy Castro. We said our hellos and chatted for a few minutes, but we didn't linger. Didn't want to pester her too much in her off hours, you know? To our surprise, when we went up to pay, we were told that our bill was taken care of. We both sent an email of thanks, and I remember getting a response back that essentially said it was her pleasure to give a little gift to a pair of budding writers like us. It's a little thing, and I hadn't thought about that episode in years. But getting that response back at that time was such a needed boost. So, now I am a parent and a full-fledged adult. That's terrifying sometimes. But now I feel like I have my feet under me a bit. I have a better idea of the kind of person I want to be and the kind of person I want to be known as. It's been a culmination of a lot of thought and experimentation and introspection and observing the world and the direction things are going. It might have taken me thirty-three years, but I think I've finally got a handle on the kind of man I want to be. Comments are closed.
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