Posture is important. I once knew a man who stood with a
pronounced slouch. There was something crooked in his posture and in his
demeanor. He looked like a question mark when he wrote on the blackboard. The
crooked man had the power to allow or restrict my access to an opportunity. I
had been the top student in the German’s math class, but the crooked man held
the cards of all our fates for the following year. I had earned that
opportunity, but somebody with money and power had paid him off to give away my
opportunity to someone else. It was the girl who chased my coattails, who ended
up being promoted with the advanced class.
The crooked man admitted his betrayal to me privately. In his
weakness he thought that his reasoned excuse would appease me. He assumed that
everyone was as cowed by privilege as he. Instead, his betrayal only focused my
detestation for him. But now, I was stuck with the crooked man for nine more
miserable months. He talked to us like children, but we were young adults. His
classroom had floor to ceiling windows that opened on the ground floor. I
always sat in the back. In the warm months we would open the windows, and during
class I would gradually ease my chair backwards until I was sitting entirely
outside. I was bored by his class, but I was always prepared to answer when
called upon. Otherwise, I was inching my way outside, free but tethered, under
the fluttering maple leaves and a blue sky – until he yanked me back with his
insipid droll and his crooked stance.
By the time we were done together, I hated not only him but the
very thing I had excelled at prior to meeting him. It did not matter that the
girl who had been given my spot washed out after a year and transferred
somewhere else to disguise her embarrassment. Nothing could correct the wrong that
had been done to me.
However, hate is a self-destructive emotion, and pity is
useless. If there is no recourse to right a wrong, the individual still must
figure out how to overcome its shadow. Yet that man was just a piece of a much
larger puzzle. I carried a lot of rage, for a lot of reasons, for too much of
my youth. It does not matter whether rage is haphazard or directed at
injustice. Rage cannot be contained. It corrodes the vessel in which it is
carried, struggling to get out. It took me a long time to learn how to set
those negative feelings free from the sanctuary of my mind.
Scars scab over, but some of the residue of trauma never leaves
you. Twenty-something years later I came across that same man again, at the
wake for one of his colleagues. The man who had passed had been a mentor and a
hero of mine. But I knew by then that some people attend events surrounding a
death, to pay their respects to the deceased and their loved ones, while others
attend to be seen attending. The crooked man stood like an old tree that had
been permanently bent by a perpetual wind, even more crooked than I remembered
him. He was still weak, and still mealy mouthed.
It made my skin crawl to be near that cockroach. But cockroaches
live in the shadows, so most people never see all the things that they do in
the darkness. As far as I knew, the crooked man only ever abused the trust of
those powerless to defend their honor against him. The time for discussing his
betrayal was long passed by now. He would get nothing from me, but that which I
chose to give him. I understood that my etiquette was about me and not him, so
I straightened my shoulders, made my spine extra erect, and tilted my head only
enough down to look him in the eye. Then I said "Hello."
We exchanged pleasantries in the company of some others. In my
mind, some part of me was still seething, yet I remained polite, betraying no
emotion. After a few moments, I excused myself. As I walked away, I looked back
over my shoulder. The crooked man was speaking with a lovely woman who had been
his colleague all those years. She must have known who he was, but perhaps she
did not know that there was anything to be done about it. Dealing with a sick
mind can confound even the most well-meaning people, especially when no obvious
solution reveals itself. Perhaps she was just being polite in the same manner
as I had been. Sometimes there is no choice but to trust others to their own
judgments.
When I was a boy, we had a diseased peach tree in the side yard.
It would drop rotten fruit all over the yard and then we would go about picking
it up to throw away. My mother did not know what to do about it. I think that
she wanted to save it but did not know how. I always suspected that it might
have been beyond saving. Then, in 1985, Hurricane Gloria came along and blew
the tree partially over, leaning it propped against the neighbor's fence. It
took us a couple more years to figure out what to do, but eventually that tree
became so profoundly diseased and crooked, that resolution became imperative. It
was abundantly obvious that its life was more painful than any pleasure we
might derive from having a peach tree growing in our yard. The neighbor was a
landscaper, so he came by and took it down.
Walking away from the wake, now with some distance from the
crooked man, I stopped and turned. The wake had been held in a building I knew
well. To anyone who noticed me staring, it might have seemed that I was
assessing the structure. They would have gotten the action correct, but the
object wrong. The crooked man looked like that old peach tree standing bowed by
the weight of its own disease. In that moment, I allowed myself to think of the
Portrait of Dorian Grey, that novel by Oscar Wilde, about a man who appears
youthful to the world, while all the evils of his character are revealed on a magic
portrait of himself that he keeps hidden in his attic. That novel was a
fiction. In the real world, nature has her way of delivering justice to those
who deserve it.
Even as a little kid, my great uncle Lou used to admonish me on
my posture. Lou looked like Benny Hill, and he had a similar, though perhaps
more wholesome, sense of humor. He was the first person I knew with a VCR, an
old beta max that he would play on his projection television. Uncle Lou had a
collection of Benny Hill and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In videos that he would
show to anyone who was willing. I loved sitting on the carpet and watching
those videos with him. I had a huge crush on Goldie Hawn as a child. She played
dumb, but I thought her bits on Laugh-in were clever. I also liked looking at
all the pretty women Benny Hill would chase too. Comedy and pretty girls produced
the surface level appeal but spending time around Uncle Lou was the real prize.
It takes a village to raise a child. Some children have their village delivered
to them, while other children need to go out searching for it. Uncle Lou was
part of my village, and I learned valuable lessons from his about how a man
should act and strive to carry himself. Uncle Lou was the one who told me to “Try
something new every day.” To this day, that phrase is a central tenet of my
risk assessment matrix.
Lou had been an MP in the military during WWII, but had once divulged that he
never loaded his gun. He diffused most situations with a smile and his good
humor. I was more terrified of disappointing him, than I was of him per se.
When he would tell me to stand up straight, or pick up my feet when I walked, I
just thought those were the sorts of things that old people say to kids.
Now that I am older, I see how these things matter.
In the past I have posted about how everyone gets a chance to
become their own kind of hero. Thinking back on the heroes in stories I read or
watched as a child, none of them ever slouched. All those heroes lived by a code of
honor, and dignity and integrity. When I played with building blocks as a
child, the structure never stood long if the foundation was not solid. Posture
is the foundation. Everything, about who you make yourself to be, is built upon
how you choose to stand.
