This is personal. Go gently. Writing is how I process and this has been on my mind. Please be cautious reading as there may be stressful passages.
I think a lot about what it means to be good. To be a good person. I want to be a good person, but at my core I don't feel that I am. I feel that I have to dig myself out of a debt and someday, maybe, I will do enough to deserve to think of myself as a good person. What incurred the debt? I don't know.
October 2022, I got a call from my grandpa. I was walking from La Colombe to Meridian Hill Park and was in that little flower garden at the southeast side, at the corner of W and 15th. "You really should talk to your father," he said. Here's everything that was unsaid: he is dying of some sort of lymphoma. He is going to be dead soon. "Well, he is your father."
My father is not a good person. Maybe he is now, I don't know. He was not a good person when I was growing up, despite what I wanted to believe. All three of us, grandpa, dad, and I, have the same name. There's a reason I go by Thomas, not Tom.
I approached it earnestly. Do I reach out to him, this person that I hate and spend all of my life trying not to be? I hesitate to display any emotion because I am fearful it will be manipulative, because he was so manipulative at all times. Writing is the only thing at which I am good. It is how I show people that I am true and that they are true to me. It is how he manipulated people. Me. I don’t want to do that.
I thought about my Great Grandpa. Roscoe was a good person. Quiet. I rarely heard him talk but he was respected by everyone. It seemed to me that he knew the right thing to do. He lives in me, “What would Roscoe do?” My great uncle writes that Wallace, Roscoe’s father, was an alcoholic and that his actions ruined Roscoe’s childhood. Modeled to Roscoe what not to be. Still, Roscoe helped Wallace pay utility bills and buy groceries for the extent of his life. Wallace lived to be 96 years old, so this was an awfully long time. My Great Grandpa was a better person than I am or ever will be.
I sat down at my desk one day and decided I would write out a list of rules for me if I were to call. They looked like this:
I realize now that these things are my core values. Truth, kindness.
I called another grandpa—a benefit of several generations of broken homes is that you've got options. I already knew my decision, and I was looking for validation. I never called my dad. Some folks, after a glass or two of wine, might know the extent of my hatred for him. I don't like feeling that way.
Maybe that is why I struggle to think of myself as good. Because I remember a night a long, long, time ago.
I'm perhaps eight years old. I am sitting next to my sister in her little rocker, eating Schwann's peanut butter cup ice cream. We're two feet from a console television watching cartoons as mom and dad scream and chase each other around the diningroom table. I feel the floorboards vibrate as they storm around and I hear the door slam and the screams and then the pounding. Will this be the second door to be beaten down? I know the first time the door was hollow and now it is solid. Is that why time feels so slow now?
I am not crying. But I think... through the diningroom and through the kitchen and out the mudroom and through the door and down the steps and across the wide gravel drive and under the pale blue light beside the water spicket next to his building there is a rusted shovel with a long red handle.
If I take that shovel and retrace my steps and take a right in the diningroom and pass the laundry room and the bathroom I can end all of this. I can end it with a swing.
I think about that moment sometimes. I didn't do anything but sit there next to my sister in her little rocker and the night fades into the countless others.
Maybe I feel that I owe a debt for having a thought like that. No, I doubt it. There is a part of me that would be glad to go into the wilderness of Tennessee and find him and destroy him, because I feel destroyed. But a small part. Violence never fixes anything, and you will feel worse for the doing of it. I know that. Maybe that that part of me exists is why I think that I am not a good person. Maybe it's because I lie in the dark at night and I don't know how to trust anything or believe anyone and it's because of him.
Would you believe that was only one night of years and years? Remember Belleville. Or East St. Louis. Or Meadowview. So many things in such a short time.
I am perhaps ten years old and I read to escape. The school library only lets me check out two books at a time. So I start to just take books, smuggling them in my bag. Getting them back in hasn’t occurred to me. I know I have a pile at home and it's getting to be a problem.
I get off the bus and walk down the driveway, crunching gravel. I feed the dogs and the cats and walk up the ramp and go inside. My mom is standing there, 29 or 30 years old and there is a stack of books on the diningroom table. "Wait til your dad gets home." The books have their library cards in the little pocket behind the front cover.
An hour or so passes and I hear the truck pull in and he enters, big and tall and redfaced with his mustache and his buttondown shirt. I hear words between them, and then I'm in the diningroom. More words, and more, voices rising the whole time. I am bawling and hiccuping and sobbing and I am told to stop it or I'll be given a reason to cry.
"I won't have a thief living in my house!" He starts at me. I run into my bedroom and I am picked up and tossed. I hit the wall above my bed and I land on the Batman sheets. I'm being hit with a book. The book has a white picket fence on the front and is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, a combined edition. There is a picture of two runaway boys on the cover under a tree napping. This is not a stolen book. This is a book he gifted me.
The sounds: My voice. His voice. The book on me.
Mom: “Stop!”
The next morning I step onto the bus carrying a Walmart bag (two?) of books. I walk into the school and turn right down the tiled floor, with the orange, blue, and green stripes fading along the center. I am afraid. I go through grey doubledoors so tall on the left and I am in the library. Brown carpet and brown shelves and brown tables and brown chairs. I look to the librarian's counter to see who will give me shame this morning.
There is no librarian in the room and I am spared. I leave the bags on the counter over the return slot. I never tell anyone.
A couple of years pass and my dad is fired from his job. He has been embezzling money to pay for crack cocaine and other things. So, I suppose what he meant to say was, "I won't have any more than ONE thief living in my house!" Good joke.
I don't think I'm a bad person because I hate my father or because I stole library books in fifth grade. I couldn't tell you why. Is it because if I let myself believe that I'm a good person, I will cease to be one? I think I need to watch myself carefully to make sure I'm never turning into him.
I was having coffee with a friend the other day and she told me she thought I was a good friend, and then started to say some other compliment and I cut her off. I can't stand to hear nice things about myself. Though at the same time, like probably everyone else, there's a part of me that craves to hear them. I'm a little obsessed with knowing what people think of me, because I have no idea what to think of myself.
Being good. It hadn't occurred to me how important "truth" is until I re-read it in that note from October 2022. "5. The truth matters." Think about that. Sometimes I wonder what the truth is. It's not so simple a thing as black and white. Would it be pretty if it were?
Truth wasn't first on my list. The first moral statement on that list was kindness, then honesty, then truth. The truth can be cruel, and there are ways of telling the truth that are kinder and more honest than others. So do I have to perfectly align with these all the time? I feel like I do. When I deviate from them, I recognize it and I hate myself.
The other day I watched David Lynch's 1980 film THE ELEPHANT MAN. The film shows us the life of Joseph (John, in the film) Merrick, a real man with severe physical deformities, particularly around his face. All films featuring facial deformities affect me, yet, the character I most understood was Anthony Hopkins' Frederick Treves. “Rescuing” Merrick from the freakshow, Treves delivers him into a more dignified but perhaps no less humiliating cage. Treves and Merrick become friends, and Treves wonders:
"It seems that I've made Mr. Merrick into a curiosity all over again, doesn't it? ... My name is constantly in the papers, I'm always being praised to the skies. Patients are now expressly asking for my services. ... What was it all for? Why did I do it? ... Am I a good man? Or am I a bad man?"
Does intent matter? Does the initial intent forever define what comes after? The other day I asked two coworkers after a few drinks: "Do you think you're a good person?" (I am as fun to drink with as this sounds.) One answered "yes" immediately. The other also said yes, but thought it was a good question to think about. They both thought intent mattered, but it is complicated. Intent matters as far as the intent is true. You can't lie to yourself and then feel comfortable being good.
Like many things in my life, part of my thinking on this was implanted by The West Wing. Leo McGarry, someone I think about a lot ("What Would Leo Do?" is not a small thing to me), says, "Who is the monk who wrote, 'I don't always know the right thing to do Lord, but I think the fact that I want to please you, pleases you.'" The full prayer is a meditation on intention and goodness. Here is the first stanza:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going
I do not see the road ahead of me
I cannot know for certain where it will end
Nor do I really know myself
And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean
That I am actually doing so
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing
I imagine these sentiments speak to many souls. I am faithless and a doubter and an atheist on top of that, but they speak to mine, and if I do not have a soul they speak no lesser to my heart. I love that it interrogates itself. It might relinquish ultimate power and judgement to god, and free the supplicant. Imagine what evil could be committed in, "I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you."
I think, Merton (who was writing in the 50's in Kentucky, not in medieval times), valued the struggle. I am weary of it. I wouldn't trade it for comfort, though I wish I accepted reassurance. Not from a god, whose word would mean nothing to me other than a trip to a hospital, but from people who know me—am I good? Does it show itself in my speakings and writings and doings?
I hope it does. I hope my handwringing about being good is not too annoying. It is that I don't trust myself. It's strange — I feel that I have a crystal clear sense of right and wrong, yet even then I find myself seeking perspective. Even if I know what I will do, I seek input. Validation? I worry that I will start telling myself stories and the Lord of Merton's prayer will be some shadowself that doesn't seek to do good, but something selfish.
Writing this, I have a reaction that the line of thought is so arrogant—who am I that it matters whether goodness is my mode? I barely exist in the world and if I vanished there would be no trace or memory. I wonder sometimes if anyone would notice I was here at all. Maybe that vanity—that desire to mean something—is what causes my dissonance.
When I was young, I heard a lot about my dad as young man. I heard about him taking pictures for the paper, about what a good person he was. I wonder if these things were true. I know what he became. If someone can be so good that everyone reminds their offspring of that goodness, and they fall as deeply as he fell, what stops me?
Nothing. Nothing but myself. But no, that is not right. The desire to isolate and suffer through things is exactly what leads to the fall. No one can go through it on their own, we depend on each other. Is that right? I think it is. And yet.
I wonder if I am good enough and if I am doing enough good.
For now, I am doing the best that I can.
Thomas B
