My father once told me, there are two kinds of people in the world, wolves and rabbits, predators and prey.  “What kind of a man are you gonna be?” I had no idea. I was only eight years old. I preferred rabbits, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the answer he was looking for. 

Throughout my life, I have had these dystopian dreams where the warrior buried deep inside me engages in these vicious battles for survival. I’ve beaten and killed hundreds of bad guys in my dreams… (My father would be so proud if could catch a glimpse of that!). So what if  I’m still toting around some Daddy baggage at 62 years of age …

 Full disclosure: I’m just little man who’s never been in a fight… aside from the tussles I had with my younger brother. They stopped when he got bigger and stronger than me. I’ve always had this innate fear of getting hit in the face.

But in college, I liked to think of myself as a man of action, the kind of guy who leaps into the fray and … takes care business. But reality can crush even the most vivid dream… or fantasy: I was 18 years old and riding a city bus through downtown LA with my pal, Bruce. Each of us were lost in our own thoughts, breathing in the thick smell of tightly-packed humanity; we both heard the unmistakable sound of fist to flesh. We turn in our seats and see this young guy pummeling the face of an older man. There are lumps, a gash, and so much blood.  

And I begin shrinking into myself, my chest collapsing, arms withering, and I wonder how and when it will all end. My mind starts racing: We could physically intervene, but we’d risk a beating of our own. We could ask the bus driver to radio for help; or we could try to reason with the guy: “It’s not worth going to jail over this!” Or, we could look out the window and pretend we don’t notice what’s happening…

      The beating stops as suddenly as it started, which was probably because the old man was unconscious… And this pregnant woman leans across the aisle and whispers to me, the Man of Action, “You should have done something, you good-for-nothing.” And she was right… 

… Fast forward a couple decades, and I’m living in Berkeley. It’s a beautiful Sunday and I’m returning from an ice cream outing with my kids, who are eight and ten at the time. We see these two skinny white dudes on a porch with this old lady who’s all hunched over and weighs about 90 pounds. One of the guys starts cursing her out while the other one raises a skateboard above his head. The old lady releases this heart-rending wail…

I tell my kids, “Wait here!” I sprint over, and the old lady starts pleading for help… with her eyes.

“What are you guys doing?!”

“You mind your own business, Motherfucker!”  

The Skater rests his board on his shoulder, but he starts creeping to my left, like he’s trying to get behind me. I press my back against a post.

“What do you want from her?”

“We’re gonna do a few chores… for some money.”

“She doesn’t seem interested…”

“Well, that’s beside the point. Idn’t it?”

And I feel my chest expanding, my fists balling into bludgeons. And I want the guy with the skateboard to take a swing at me, so I have a reason to beat the shit out of them. There’s no thinking about right or wrong or the possibility of getting hit in the face, or the trauma I’m inflicting on my kids.

The four of us remain on the porch… eyeballing one another… The old lady has these pale blue eyes, they’re all watery. Eventually, the punks slither away. The old woman slips into her home, and I jog over to my kids, trying to slow my breathing. We start heading home with the jerks walking in the same direction as us… but on the opposite side of the street. When we open our front door of home, my kids are still gasp-crying. I tell them, “It’s okay. We’re safe now.”

My daughter sobs “But now they know where we live.” She had a point.

My son asks, “Why didn’t you just call 911?”  I had no idea.

As an older guy, reflecting on these two incidents, I’m clear that when I was on that bus so many years ago, there’s nothing in the world that could’ve pried me out of that green vinyl seat and got me to engage, just as 20 years later, there’s nothing that could’ve got me me to keep on walking with my kids and mind my own frickin’ business.

And I realize my father had it all wrong. See I think we have all these different animals inside of us; we just don’t get to choose if, or when, it’s paws, wings or claws that emerge from deep within us.