Today, while talking to someone on the other side of the world, I remembered a line from a film, As Good As It Gets, that Jack Nicholson’s character, Melvin delivered. The three main characters are sitting in a car after pulling over during a road trip. Simon is broke, Carol’s son is sick and Melvin’s in love with Carol but staggers under the weight of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Simon has just gotten out of the hospital and they’re traveling to ask his father for money to get his life back on track. He tells the sympathetic Carol how he and his family were estranged. It’s a horrible story with no happy ending. Carol says in response:

Hey. We all have these terrible stories to get over and you . . .

Melvin interrupts her to say:

It’s not true. Some of us have great stories. Pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just, no one in this car, but a lot of people--that’s their story. Good times. Noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad but that you’re that pissed that so many others had it good.

They don’t agree, nor do I. The person to whom I was speaking has had a life with a prettier story than the one in which I presently play our hero. It was so clear and obvious that even I could see it. The story I’m living in is one I don’t often share, certainly not in detail, for a number of reasons. Sympathy is an anchor with which I do not care to attempt the swim to the other shore. If I even smell a hint of it the smoke alarm sounds and I instantly ring up the internal fire department.

It might be easier to be angry at the supposed injustice of life. When I look at the angry people I don’t think their life is better or easier. It’s just angry and they like that energy. They feel it gives them a sense of power and control. It doesn’t but they don’t know that yet. They’ve yet to discover the terrible price they pay for that illusion of power and control. They may not find out. What I know is that it’s a dead end. There is nothing down that road for me. The not so pretty story of our hero’s life is what made him our hero. Had he had the lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad he’d be looking for a hero to help him find a way to fill the void in his heart. Our hero is sixty-three and has lived every one of those years. He has known physical pain, the emotional kind and the spiritual kind that comes from the void in the heart. He’ll take the physical kind over the emotional kind any day. To take it a step further he’s willing to endure the physical and emotional kind to have the void in his heart filled.

Jack’s character was spiritually blind for the majority of his life. His understanding was tiny, stunted. He was like a peeping Tom who looked into the window to see someone’s life and only saw a little piece for that short span of time. The trailer for the film with the lakes and boats and friends and noodle salad. He didn’t see the rest of it. The grind of being human in the pain factory we call the world. The life sucking events of everyman’s existence who has a hole in his heart. Most people die long before their bodies give up the ghost. Without heroes they have no hope of being reborn, transformed, born again, born free, or at least freer. The hero’s job is not one to be taken lightly, not one to be coveted, though many do before they know the cost. Sadly we take our heroes for granted or we worship them and later take them for granted, if they survive the worship. There are certainly days when I think those horrible words about which John Greenleaf Whittier spoke when he wrote:

For all the sad words of tongue and pen,

The saddest are these, “It might have been”.

There’s nothing down that road so I will stop here. I am the most fortunate man alive, though I rarely have the good sense to see it. My life is charmed in the most hidden way. For you see, the hole in my heart is being mended by the Master Mender.