My Favorite Characters

I think you can tell a lot about yourself by who your favorite character is. I have a progression of favorite characters that mirror things in my life.

When I was a kid, I really thought Captain Kirk was cool, except that he kept spending time with girls, instead of hanging out with Spock and McCoy and shooting things with his phasers. My dad liked the girls' outfits, though, and somewhere down deep, I knew that the outfits were praiseworthy. And Yeoman Rand, in spite of being a girl and all that, was really pretty.

Then I thought Fonzie was cool. Imagine my disappointment when, after not having seen Happy Days for fifteen years, I realized that Fonzie was a loud-mouthed ass.

I used to think Magnum was pretty cool. Still do, in fact. I mean, how can you not like a guy who was the starting QB at Navy, was a Navy SEAL, a captured POW, and now he's staying at this big estate in Hawaii and driving a Ferrari. And yet he's still a regular guy. He even got to date Dana Delany and see her in really tight-fitting white jeans. What's not to love?

Around that time, I discovered Spenser. Not the guy played by Robert Urich on TV, but the real Spenser from Robert B. Parker's novels, a guy for whom honor and autonomy were important. I've always tried to act honorably, but I was probably drawn to Spenser because I've always ceded way too much of my own autonomy.

After a while, I identified with Drew Carey. The guy who worked for Winfred-Louder and fought with Mimi, not the Marine who struggled with depression and ran his sitcom into the ground. A decent, unspectacular man who likes beer and does the best he can to maintain some sense of being a good person, in spite of being kicked in the teeth. Just an ordinary guy you might want to have a beer with.

There's quite a step down from Magnum, Spenser, and Captain Kirk to Drew Carey. Drew Carey is just Norm Petersen seen through different eyes. Yeoman Rand is still cute. But Grace Lee Whitney, the woman who filled out the red minidress back in the sixties went through a hell of a time from 1965-1980 or so. Life is never like our favorite characters have it.

Still, that doesn't keep you from having favorites. I was flipping around the movie channels this morning. DirectTV has seen fit to let us watch all of them for free this weekend. There's a movie called Rocket Gibralter that Burt Lancaster was in. He seemed very similar, at least in the one scene I watched, to his character in Field of Dreams. Gentle, wise, and softspoken. I like that.

I also like Ecko on Lost. Ecko is a guy with a past filled with regretable decisions. In order to save his life at one point, he had to pretend to be a priest. At some point, the pretending ended, and he believed. Now, he really is a priest, in deed, if not in name. He is gentle, wise, and softspoken, but not a doormat.

I guess you reach a point in life where you recognize that there are more important things than being cool and driving a Ferrari and claiming autonomy and just trying to be a decent human being.

The thing is, I've been pretending to be gentle, wise, and softspoken. I still battle with softspoken, but at some point the pretending ended. I've become gentle and wise. Maybe I always was, underneath, but I was too busy trying for the other stuff. I don't know.

I do know that there are worse things to which to aspire.