character development

  It has been said we are all just players on the stage. It's true, we have all just been cast in this play we call life. We didn't get to choose the role. we just have to play the part. As to whether the script has already been written I'll leave that up to you to decide. Personally I do think we are all here for a purpose, a part of some plan. The universe is too ordered to have been a chance occurrence. My thinking is whoever or whatever created all of this surely wouldn't leave the pieces to chance either. Some of us are a part of that creation, and others are the sacrificial pieces. You always have sacrificial pieces when building anything. 

 In thinking about all of that I have to consider the other characters in the play. After all, I will spend my lifetime interacting with those characters. I have to say I grew up with a host of characters. I find myself thinking about those characters a little more every day. I have it in mind to perhaps record their stories, from my perspective of course, my thoughts on them. I'm thinking it could be a sort of remembrance or tribute to their memory. Sharing them to, and for, posterity, ensuring their names do not go unmentioned. If I don't keep them alive, who will? Sometimes I wonder about that. Seems almost like an obligation to me. A record of a lost time. Nostalgia perhaps, but a period in time that will never be again. A time in American history. And history is what we remember it to be. It's just that we don't all share the same memory. 

 The thing is though, to tell the story, the main character has to be developed. That is the basis of storytelling. The character has to become someone. As for me I figure I'm just a bit payer in the whole thing. I place no fault, no blame for any of that on anyone, or anything. There isn't much interesting to tell, my story would hold little interest to the public in general. People don't want to read stories written in the first person, unless that person is them. There are exceptions for the famous people though, then tell all's are a good thing. Dirty secrets are only good when those dirty secrets belong to someone else, someone famous, everyday dirty secrets are just mundane. Funny how that works isn't it? People are interested in what a celebrity has for breakfast or what shoes they wear, but as for you and I, not so much. 

 For that reason I think about it more than actually doing anything about it. Should you write a song that no one will sing, or a book that no one will read? It could be said, and often is, that you should do things just for yourself. But I do think in terms of reward. I think all of us do, whether we admit to that or not. Doing something solely for ourselves. I suppose it all depends upon the amount of recognition we are seeking, what satisfies us.

 Today we hear a lot about heroes, everyone is a hero. It wasn't that way when I was a child. Heroes were special people held in high regard and to the highest standards. We all knew, even then, that those people were people just like you and I, but we made believe anyway. And even the press of the day didn't report negative things about those folks. Secrets were kept, human frailty wasn't exposed as readily. The objective when I was growing up was to not make mistakes. You didn't receive praise for overcoming your mistakes, you tried to keep that quiet. that's how heroes are made. Heroes always do the right thing. That's what stories are written about. Seems like role reversal these days. The more times you screw up and recover the greater the praise you receive. 

 The people I grew up with weren't heroes. They were my family and friends. Many of them I admired, looked up to as examples, and others I took lessons from. I wasn't aware of it then but they were forming my character. I extracted a bit of each one to build myself. I say they weren't heroes simply because they didn't do anything I wasn't capable of myself. You can't set out to be a hero. that just happens as part of the grand scheme of things, something beyond our control. But all those people are deserving. They should all be remembered. And it's my feeling they should be remembered the way I remember them, the correct memory. Not heroes, but friends. And where I grew up we had a saying, colloquial in nature, that describes those folks. It would be said of them. "they are of the finest kind." A compliment reserved for those special people that come into our lives either by accident or design. Sometimes we called them, characters.