When I was a child, most of my heroes were ordinary men. They talked for hours, but not a careless word was uttered. They roared with laughter, gregarious undulations that only the spirit can manifest.
They owned two dress shirts. One, for an occasional splurge in a restaurant (other than McDonald’s), just to hear the children squeal with glee. The second, to bury their mothers and fathers and, God forbid, even sometimes their own kids.
They drove the same pickup truck for 10 years, and kept those contraptions running with no money in their pockets and just a drop in the tank.
They always made their children’s baseball games. Browbeaten, dirt-ridden, leaning on a chain-link fence, a gracious grin saluting proud while their son or daughter, heart aflush, knew he was watching.
A grin as hard-won as Iwo Jima, turning water to wine in the salt mines, yet easy as baby’s breath. They got into fistfights but spared the other man’s life. Sometimes, that’s how best friends met.
Trouble tiptoed around their families for fear of waking the lion. These men knew that the omnipotence required to satisfy the constant demands of family came from no phantom or primordial ooze. There was an overwhelmingly intelligent Creator that sustained all life and that Atlas was a fool not to cry out to a higher authority.
Their boys intently studied their gait, aped their mannerisms, and learned to drive a stick on their daddy’s lap. Their daughters wanted to marry a man in their mold. They commanded respect because their character was beyond assassination.
They accepted no back-alley bribes, kept no crooked books, nor propped up dead monoliths of greed built on the ashes of the demoralized impoverished. They’d rather run themselves through the gut than commit moral and spiritual suicide.
These men did not aspire to benevolent dictatorship, but gave heed to the siren calls of nurturing. On the right side of midnight, they would drag their tired bones home with a loaf of bread.
Having short-changed themselves, their dreams now a faint whisper, they have asked for no repayment of the outstanding debt we most undeniably owe. We did not earn their love, but they helped us survive, intact.
These ordinary men will stand before their Creator unashamed. And we who knew them will swear that Paradise would be meaningless without them.
They are fewer in number now. We watch as the hands of time pass over them and they are gone. Their bodies shrink, the eyes glaze, the mind no longer acknowledges the moment. But, now and then, like a drop of rain, I stumble on one of these men in a crowd, pocket the precious gems they’ve shared with me, and I feel the earth shift on its axis.
When these men die, you can hear the sun cry out.
Fidel Jaramillo (fideljaramillo@comcast.net) lives in Englewood.
