The Person We Think We Have to Be

I think just about everyone has had a role model growing up. Maybe it was an athlete, a movie star, a teacher, a coach, or someone you only knew from a distance. Whoever it was, there was something about them that made you stop and think, “Man…I hope I’m like that someday.”

When we’re young, we don’t spend much time asking ourselves why we admire certain people. We just notice the things that stand out. Their confidence. The way people gravitated toward them. The respect they seemed to earn without ever asking for it. So we do what most kids do. We try to become a little more like them.

I think I spent years trying to become the person I thought I was supposed to be. The strange part is, I don’t think I ever stopped to ask what it was about that person I admired so much.

I didn’t know it then, but I was paying attention to the wrong things.

Because if there was ever a man I wanted to be like, it was my grandpa.

 

The Role Model Who Shapes Us

He wasn’t the loudest person in the room, and he definitely wasn’t someone who constantly had everyone’s attention. Now don’t get me wrong, every once in a while he’d tell a story from his time in the war, and when he did, you sat down and listened because you knew it was going to be a good one. Those stories just didn’t happen very often. Most of the time, he was a man of few words.

What made him so special wasn’t what he said. It was how he made people feel.

It’s hard to explain if you’ve never known someone like that. Sometimes it was nothing more than a glance across the room that made you feel like the two of you were in on a joke that nobody else knew about.

I remember one Christmas, or maybe it was his birthday. I honestly can’t remember which. I just remember sitting there while he opened what felt like his fourth or fifth Marine Corps gift. He looked over at me and gave the slightest eye roll, almost as if he was saying, “Alright already…how many Marine gifts does one guy need?” We both started laughing from opposite sides of the room without saying a single word.

For those few seconds, it felt like we were the only two people there. I think that was his gift.

He made people feel seen without making a show of it. He wasn’t handing out compliments every five minutes or trying to be the life of the party. A look, a smile, or a few words at just the right time somehow made you walk away feeling better about yourself.

I remember hearing some of my older cousins tell stories about Grandpa and how he had made them feel so special over the years. I used to smile to myself because I already knew I was my grandpa’s favorite.

At least that’s what I told myself.

Then, I started to realize something that never crossed my mind as a kid. Maybe we all thought we were his favorite. Maybe every one of us walked away feeling that way because that’s just who he was.

I knew a lot of older men who had served in the military. They were good men, and some of them loved telling stories about their time in the service. Every now and then you’d get the feeling they might’ve added a little extra to the story over the years, but without fail, a lot of those same men would eventually say something like, “You ought to ask your grandpa. He saw a lot more than I ever did.”

It wasn’t until years later that those comments really began to sink in. I had always known him as the best man I’d ever met. It wasn’t until years later that I started realizing just how extraordinary he really was.

What I Thought Made Him Great

Man…I wanted to be like him.

I remember telling my mom I wanted to join the Marines someday. Grandpa had spent thirty years there, and I can still picture the look on his face when he brought over some of his Marine magazines after hearing me say that. There was so much pride in his eyes that I wanted nothing more than to make him proud.

That dream ended before it ever really had a chance to begin.

I got into trouble, got kicked out of high school, and before I really had the chance to chase that dream, it was gone.

For a while, I honestly didn’t know what came next. All I knew was that I still wanted to become the kind of man people respected the way they respected my grandpa.

Growing up, I heard all kinds of stories about him. One of my favorites was how he supposedly walked into a bar one night, calmly hung his coat on the coat rack, threw some drunk guy out on his ass, grabbed his coat, and left. Whether the story grew a little over the years or not, it didn’t matter. To me, it just became another reason to think my grandpa was larger than life.

Then there was the day he picked me up after I had served at a funeral when I was in eighth grade.

On the way home, a car full of teenagers reached out the window and grabbed one of those orange construction cones sitting along the road. The second Grandpa saw it, he slammed on the brakes. I could tell he was thinking about going after them, and I don’t remember saying a word, but inside my head I was begging him.

Please don’t do it, Grandpa.

There were five or six of them, and he was somewhere in his sixties.

Thankfully, he decided against it.

At the time, I remember thinking how lucky I was that we didn’t go after them. Today, I can’t help but wonder if maybe they were the lucky ones. Knowing what I know about my grandpa today, I honestly don’t think five or six of them would’ve been enough if he had decided to track them down.

Those were the stories that stuck in my teenage brain. So when my dream of becoming a Marine disappeared, I convinced myself there was another way to become like him. If I couldn’t wear the same uniform, maybe I could earn the same respect by being tough.

The problem was, I completely misunderstood what I was looking at.

My grandpa probably did the hard things because they needed done. He stood up when the situation called for it. He protected people. He carried himself with a quiet confidence, and if someone needed put in their place, he wasn’t afraid to do it.

I fought because I’d get drunk and confuse having a reputation with earning respect. Back then, I honestly thought they were the same thing. They weren’t. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I was just a dumb ass.

 

The Parts That Really Mattered

I can only remember hearing that one story about my grandpa ever getting into an altercation, yet my younger self somehow took that one story and built an entire definition of what it meant to be a man.

The truth is, he probably didn’t fight very often because he never had to. He didn’t have anything to prove. The respect he earned wasn’t because people feared him. It came from the way he lived his life every single day.

Meanwhile, I was out getting drunk and fighting far more than I ever should have, honestly believing I was following in his footsteps.

Of course, I was not.

What surprises me now is how the qualities I admired most in him slowly found their way into my own life. Not in the way I expected, but in the way I probably needed.

People have always seemed comfortable opening up to me. Even when I was a kid, adults would talk to me like I was one of them. Maybe I just had an old soul. Maybe I just listened. Or maybe those adults actually liked the advice my ten-year-old ass was giving them. I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that it never really stopped.

To this day, I’m still amazed by how comfortable people feel opening up to me. Customers on my route have shared some incredibly personal parts of their lives. Friends have called me during some of the hardest moments of their lives. People I’ve only known a short time have shared struggles at home, mistakes they’ve made, and problems they’re trying to work through.

It still catches me off guard sometimes, and I’ve often wondered why people seem so comfortable telling me those things. The only answer I’ve ever come up with is that I’ve never seen much value in judging people for being human. I’ve made more than enough mistakes of my own.

If someone trusts me enough to tell me their dirty laundry, the last thing I want to do is make them feel worse than they already do. Most people know when they’ve messed up. They don’t need another person piling on. They need someone willing to listen, help them sort through it, and remind them that one mistake doesn’t have to define the rest of their life.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized my grandpa and I probably made people feel safe in different ways.

People respected my grandpa so much that they never wanted to disappoint him. I know I didn’t. My mom used to threaten to call him whenever I got in trouble because she knew that was usually enough to straighten me up. Just the thought of letting him down bothered me more than almost any punishment she could’ve come up with.

The people who open up to me aren’t looking for someone to fear or impress. I think they’re looking for someone who will understand them without pretending their mistakes don’t matter.

Those aren’t the same gifts. Still, I wonder if they grow from the same place. Compassion.

For years, I thought I was trying to become the man my grandpa was.

Maybe what I was really doing was carrying a small piece of the man he taught me to admire, while learning to express it in a way that could only ever be my own.

 

Paving Our Own Road

For a long time, I thought honoring my grandpa meant becoming as much like him as I possibly could. I wanted his courage. I wanted the respect he earned. I wanted people to think of me the way they thought of him.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot something that should’ve been obvious.

My grandpa never spent his life trying to become someone else. He was simply himself. He probably never even realized people were trying to become more like him.

Maybe that’s why he left such an impression on so many people. He wasn’t performing. He wasn’t chasing a reputation. He wasn’t trying to fit someone else’s definition of what a man should be. He just lived by the values that mattered to him, day after day, year after year. Everything else seemed to take care of itself.

The older I get, the more I realize that the people we admire aren’t handing us a blueprint to copy. They’re giving us a direction to walk. Their kindness doesn’t have to look like ours. Their strength doesn’t have to become our strength. Their compassion doesn’t have to be expressed the exact same way.

I still hope I carry a little more of my grandpa with me every day. I probably always will. But I don’t think my job was ever to live his life. It was to take the values he passed down to me and build a life that was honest to who I am.

Maybe that’s what the best role models really leave us. Not a road we’re supposed to follow step for step, but a direction worth walking. The road itself…that’s ours to pave.

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