“’You like to tell true stories, don’t you?’ he asked, and I answered, ‘Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.’
Then he asked, ‘After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?’
‘Only then will you understand what happened and why.’
‘It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.’”—Norman Maclean, “A River Runs Through It”
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I remember the first time reading, thinking after, that it was one of the few stories read where liked the movie more. That said, in the last ten years, I’ve read the story many times and watched the movie not at all.
I was too young for the story my first time reading. I’d yet to lose loved ones close in my life. I’d yet to love and wish to help another without knowing the means or way.
I did not know of silent battles we, and others, fight alone; never asking for help—aware and ashamed of predicaments and conditions we’ve found or lived our way into; believing we can help ourselves, if we only try a little harder—and so we push on and through too proud to acknowledge or accept the willing help and aid from others that surround us, others that love and care.
First time reading, I thought the story was the fishing. Older now, no longer fishing alone but for the purpose of sharing time and experience with others for whom I care—mostly my sons and father—I know better.
I make it nearly to the story’s end, an end I’ve read a dozen times. It hits me strong today; sudden warmth of face, heat in eyes, then run of silent tears.
A passage stands out as it never has, unmarked from readings of before.
I pause in the words:
“My mother turned and went to her bedroom where, in a house full of men and rods and rifles, she had faced most of her great problems alone. She was never to ask me a question about the man she loved the most and understood the least. Perhaps she knew enough to know that for her it was enough to have loved him. He was probably the only man in the world who ever held her in his arms and leaned back and laugh.”
That last line, this makes my tears.
Have I laughed this way with my mother? Do I laugh this way with my wife? Have I shown and shared this way of love to my daughter?
How often are the women we love—who make and hold a home together—left to face their own trials and worries alone? How often, still, do we abandon those who love us, isolated in home as we go into the world posturing to be men?
Men are tough—true—but true toughness does not need proving, and maybe much of the adventuring and machismo we seek for proof is mostly escape and diversion from the truer, humbler truth of what it is to be a man: a provider, a protector, a lover—as father, husband, and son—who neither dismisses nor diminishes the spirit of another but, in safety and closeness, encourages the ones he loves to become and reveal their full of selves.
A great man does not hide nor deny emotions. A great man possesses the strength to be vulnerable, to trust and leave guards low. A great man belly laughs with his mother, gives and shares his whole of joy when it is there. He lives and gives the full dimension of his spirit and, by this, others receive and respond in greater expression of their own.
He is tough and strong as well—when life demands that he must be; but it is not a posture, and it’s not a game, and those who ever see know clear there’s no pretend.
But even great men need help, and it’s hard to ask. It’s hard to receive—when you have it in your head you’re the one who’s supposed to be strong.
I’ve needed help.
I’ve lived dark days, hidden soul-depressions that, turns out, were not so hidden; nights my mother cry when I lied and said that I was fine.
I’m better now—I laugh with the women in my life.
The story changes the more you live, the more you grow to learn and see all it truly tells.
Warm eyes, silent tears: I feel its truth today.