Good Boy

Irreplaceable.

Somehow, I established the reputation early on of being a “good boy”. Maybe because I was told that thousands of times before I was two years old or maybe because I acted like a good boy. My picture was even on the front page of The Del Rio News-Herald as an acolyte in the local Episcopal Church looking angelic.

Being good had its advantages. The mothers with daughters were more comfortable with their daughters being at parties if Tommy (the name I went by then) was around. I always managed to leave before trouble broke out. School teachers liked having good boys in their classes.

It was a different story when I went off to college, where being good is not much of a plus. Besides that, by the time I was college-age, I knew full well that the person on the inside was not the person showing on the outside.

The mid-60s and 70’s were turbulent years. President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations, civil rights, the Vietnamese War, demonstrations, drugs, and hippies. Cynicism became a companion.

Not long after Elizabeth and I married, we visited friends in Houston and went to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s—Jesus Christ Superstar. The person of Jesus, portrayed in a secular rock opera, electrified me. I had never seen such selflessness, such nobility.

You might properly ask what does all this have to do with being a “good boy” or with Jesus, for that matter. A question I have asked myself many times. My initial opinion is that our life direction is set at an early time, we are buffeted by our life experiences, we find meaning and purpose by the choices we make.

When it is all boiled down though, for me, loving and being loved plays the irreplaceable role in the lives we are privileged to live.