Spider-Man Says Our Choices Make Us Who We Are

When you let your mind wander, where does it go? Where are you, or what are you doing when you open the door for it, like a dog or cat that needs out, noses around tree trunks or tires, nudges corners with its cheek, and pisses the boundary of its wide, private territory?


There's a Ray Bradbury story I remember about a boy, bedridden with illness, whose pet dog wanders and brings impressions of the world back to his owner, who can experience the world no other way. Isn't that the imagination? Don't we all have a wonderful pet dog who explores where we're forbidden or afraid to go?

My dog usually sits in front of the door and sighs to go out while I'm showering. But sometimes I'm in the car, and he's all head and tongue out the window, barking at the big trucks or lurching after a squirrel careening across the street. My dog wanders into 'what might have been territory' when I let him out. He breaks through a hedgerow or digs under a fence into a new, strange world where I'm a professor or an entomologist.

I remember and replay old days, sift through a catalog of regret or embarrassment, or make up characters for the novel I've been dreaming about writing for almost twenty years. I have a few darlings, poignant memories I turn to again and again for no good reason except that I guess I love to relive embarrassing moments. I'm what you'd call 'hard on myself', and while I rarely remember the bright days on my calendar, I never forget the rotten apples, and I don't forgive myself easily, either. You know what they say about spoiling the whole bunch? Yeah, I'm that apple most of the time.

I'm learning something about regret. It holds you back. Dwelling on my past mistakes makes me afraid to move forward. Instead of learning a lesson or two from them, I stew, I steep, I reek with indecision, because I think I don't want to go through that again. It feels like vanity. I hate it.

Can I tell you something? I'm tired of regret. I don't want my son to see it on me, I don't want my step-daughter to see it on me, I don't want my wife to see it on me. I don't want my future marred by it. I've already spent too much time recreating my bad decisions and reliving them until I'm crippled. Ugh, it's terrible. So tonight I'm thinking about the things I love, the smallest things to the grandest: peeling an orange; smelling and kissing my son's sleep hot forehead; garden grit under my fingernails; the unbelievable curve of my wife's body under her blanket, and her sweet smile, and her crooked eyebrows; yellow pages of an old book I'm reading for the first time, hell, let me just be thankful I can read! I like to read and I can do it, so I do, and as often as possible. It's good to have these lists, to soothe the sting of the other list. When I got stung by wasps as a small boy, my mom would moisten meat tenderizer with water and spread the clump if it over the sting.

I'm watching Spider-Man 3 with my son. It's the worst of the series, but Henry, who is only three himself, loves Spider-Man and doesn't care about the movie's flaws. At the end of the movie, Peter's in the cemetery for Harry's funeral, and he's got this little monologue about choices. "It's our choices that make us who we are", he says.

Just now my son brings me his recent favorite toy. It's a plastic flip phone with key tones and a few prerecorded greetings activated by pushing one of the function buttons on the side of the phone. Another feature allows you to record your own special message, and he holds the phone out to me as he pushes that button and says, "Momma wants to talk to you." I can hear the slightly tinny but still melodious voice of his mother saying, "Henry, I love you so much!" Tears well, as they do, as they always do. I'm grateful for that sound. It snaps me back to sweet reality. I can moan and groan about what I've done wrong, or despair over missed opportunities, but every decision I've ever made brought me to this moment, where my son stands before me laughing and smiling, where his mother's voice confirms the rightness of this moment in spite of my secret doubts and private disappointments. I don't get this life, the one I'm living right now, the one I do love, by God, if I hadn't made the choices I did, up to and including the one to pursue her, to have this child with her, to marry her and be with her for all time.

Honestly, and I think I just learned this, it doesn't matter what I've done. What matters is what I am doing, right now. It feels silly to type that, "What matters is what I'm doing", like it should go without saying, you know? Or like it's a sentiment for a self-help book. But coming to that conclusion after all this time feels like freedom.