Eagle Scout

Posted on July 19, 2003 in Book of Days Reflections

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a time you got what you wanted.

Every time Troop 38 consecrated an Eagle Scout, I’d tick off the scout virtues and compare them to the candidate: A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

It wasn’t hard to find flaws: I saw kids become Eagle Scouts who lied, who tortured lizards, who smoked and used drugs, who cut up during Mass. I ran my own character through the list and found myself wanting, especially on cheerfulness and the purblind loyalty to God and Country which Scouting demanded.

I didn’t want any honor or degree which required that I be a hypocrite.

My brother was an Eagle Scout. I won’t go into his failures to meet the list except to mention that his nickname the summer he became a camp counselor was “Pigpen”. Today he is leading his son in the Scouting way, which I find even more objectionable because it stigmatizes boys and young men who prefer their own sex. But that’s his business and his son.

My parents were proud of my brother, that he made the papers and attracted instant honor to them. They wanted me to follow in his footsteps. But I wanted to walk my own path, so I never got higher than Life Scout. In those days, Eagle Scout was a badge that required that you be able to swim and be an athletic superman. My coordination was poor, for some reason, so I never became much of a swimmer. I preferred the academic subjects and got merit badges like Chemistry, Space Exploration, etc. It was just how I was.

My father carved kerchief holders in the shape of an eagle for all the boys who became Eagle Scout in Troop 38. He used to say that there was one waiting for me. I never got to wear it and both my parents thought it shameful that I let my father’s work go to naught. It simply wasn’t what I wanted.

I guess the attraction of Eagle Scout is that it allows people to have something measureable, something that seems hard to attain that they can put on their resumes. Putting Life Scout on your resume doesn’t hack it: it marks you as a “quitter”, suggests that you don’t complete things. And for a long time, I had that insinuation whispering in my head: that I couldn’t finish anything.

Looking back, I finished many things. I finished high school and college. I participated in speech and debate, making the State Finals two years in a row. I kept journals for years. I saw through my love for Lynn. I found jobs. I found the money to go to former Yugoslavia to observe the war first hand. I built my web sites and took a chance on the net at a time when no one knew what the gazissax@best.com across the bottom of my business cards meant.

What I wanted most of all was to accomplish things which I felt were important, things that would benefit others and make a richer life for myself and those close to me. There’s a niggling doubt inside of me that says “You got what you wanted by avoidance, by refusals, so what kind of accomplishment is that?” These days I silence the voice by working every day, by writing in this blog and in my notebooks, by loving my wife, and cherishing my friends. I’m still not completely cheerful and I can list other times when I have failed to satisfy the litany of scouts. But I have enriched and deepened my sense of the world. I will die, hopefully not soon. When it comes to that, even if nobody else notices, I hope to die knowing that though I did not run my life running from point to point to point, that I died complete.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about passing time.