Heroes

On Sundays when I put my weekly column up here I like to look at its topic from a fresh angle. This week’s is about how friendly the world is when instead of smiling and looking away at people you smile and keep on smiling.My Aunt Grace used to do this. I’d be walking a little behind her on the street - you know how kids are, so mortally embarrassed by their grownups  - and I’d watch the faces of the people approaching her. They’d be hustling along looking sort of sour and preoccupied and then they’d see this wonderful smile coming at them. It almost made them stumble, fall off the curb, walk smack into a mailbox thinking "Do I know this person?”  But then they’d look again and realize she was smiling at them, and for no reason at all but only because they were there, walking down the same street in that same slender slice of mortal time.She was my first model, the first person who ever made me think, “I want to be like her."And now I am like her, in just that way: I see people in their cars or walking along and they look so sort of worried. I know I can’t fix all the pain in the world but I can smile at someone, or wave. And I don’t use that quick  wave you see people use in their cars; I wave like a kindergartner  because someone else I love does that too,  even though he’s 6 foot 4 with an extravagance of manly muscles. He opens his hand and gives that rapid left-right-left-right wave.He was 19 when I first got to know him but “I want to be like him,” is what I thought right away. Proving that you take your heroes where you find them whether, like Aunt Grace, they were born with Woodrow Wilson in the White House or, like this other, they came along the year Queen released “Bohemian Rhapsody.” :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ&feature=related]