Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [2]
I am a living, breathing example of the Triple T syndrome. Were you able to see me, you would notice two things about my physical appearance. First, my hair is Thinning (that’s T No. 1). Once endowed with thick, wavy tresses, I am now a victim of one of life’s cruel ironies. With each passing day, a few more hairs fall from my scalp to the shower floor. They are, metaphorically, the dropping of the blooms of my youth—a visceral reminder that my time is passing. I’m not sure of the female equivalent to Thinning. I might guess the “change of life,” but that doesn’t start with a T, and I’m liable to be swarmed by emails from perimenopausal women enraged that I’d compare their state of hormone-induced agony to the relative insignificance of a few missing follicles. In any event, as my hair goes, so, I am reminded, goes my time on this mortal coil.
A glance down my frame reveals T No. 2: a Thickening of my waist (I actually spelled that waste at first—a nice Freudian slip). With each new dawn, I seem to take up a larger portion of the universe. I am not alone, of course, in this matter of my appearance. On this continent, our level of girth has become an epidemic. I’m sure you’ve seen the same statistics as I have that suggest that over half of all Americans are overweight. They are usually displayed on some chart with a graphic of a little silhouette man with love handles and a potbelly. Sadly, that’s me. Another reminder of T No. 2: I can’t run like I once could. I get tired just watching basketball games now. I am less attractive than I was in my youth (in my case, this is truly unfortunate since I was starting that particular race from a long way back in the pack). I could be William Shatner’s body double (give or take a few inches off the top). I am Thickening and Thinning; I am more and less than I once was.
If the first two T’s seem like harbingers of doom, it is the third T that offers a glimmer of hope—false, battle-scarred, unreasonable hope, but hope nonetheless. The third T is Thirsting. In the face of the first two T’s—with their foretaste of aging and waning prowess, with their glimpse into the maw of mortality, with their backhand to the cheek of youthful promise—we seek to achieve before it is too late. It is these first two T’s that feed the last. We (read “I” in this case) see that our lives are finite, we feel our strength ebb, and we know that the time to make our mark on the world draws short. We are a beagle on its morning walk—we long to pee on the tree of life to mark our passing. We thirst to be better, to be more, to be “something.” Like Marlon Brando, we long to be a contender.
Perhaps that is how I discovered Ben; my radar was up for fellow Thirsters. As I scanned the newsstand one day, I spotted Franklin’s face on the cover of Time magazine. In the article, “Citizen Ben’s Great Virtues,” Walter Isaacson describes Franklin this way:
Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and through his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens who learned to be tolerant of the varied beliefs and dogmas of their neighbors.2
Who knew? A “ruling class of ordinary citizens”? “The common good”? And what about these “self-improvement tips for cultivating . . . virtues”? For a Thirster, this appeared as an oasis in the desert.
Isaacson goes on to caution that “the lessons from Franklin’s life are more complex than those usually drawn by either his fans or his foes. Both sides too often confuse him with the striving pilgrim he portrayed in his autobiography.” With that warning, he throws out a challenge—an invitation, if you will, to more closely examine “Citizen Ben”:
It is useful for us to engage anew with Franklin, for in doing so we are grappling with a fundamental issue: How does one live a life that is useful, virtuous,