RIDING HARLEYSWITH NIXON AND THE POPEby WENDEL POTTERNovember 28, 2004
The other day, a friend and I were discussing world-famous personalities and he asked me who would be my choice if I could sit down in private conversation with one person. My first answer was Warren Buffett, provided he was drunk and was in the mood to give away money.
But thinking about important contemporary figures, a more serious candidate came to mind: Pope John Paul II. Not just because I was raised a Catholic, either.
I can only imagine what it must be like to stand in the presence of such an intellectual and peaceable man. This guy is such a pacifist he would have made a Gandhi peace demonstration look like a Pacers-Pistons game.
In meeting the pope, one thing I might have a problem with would be kneeling down at his feet and kissing his ring. After all, this is the cold and flu season and you don't know who might have last touched that ring with germ-infested lips.
Now if you narrow my choices to historical figures gone before us, an obvious pick might be Jesus Christ. As a matter of fact, when the fellow asked me to select a figure from the past, I immediately said, "Jesus Christ!" Then I added, "That's a tough one."
Actually I wouldn't want to waste a choice on Jesus, since I hope to one day meet him anyhow. And it won't make any difference whether or not he's drunk and giving away money.
So I pondered my friend's challenge once he had defined his terms. Historical and dead. Okay. Well then, I told him, it would have to be Richard Nixon.
Either my friend was astounded by this choice or he, too, was voicing his preference for Jesus Christ.
"You didn't say I had to pick someone I voted for," I said. "Richard Nixon had a great and twisted political mind. It would be a hoot to slam down a few beers and shoot the breeze with Tricky Dick. Besides, Nixon was known to understand the game of football better than most NFL coaches."
So there we have it. Nixon was my final answer. But that wasn't the final question.
As we talked about past history (is there any other type of history, by the way?), the "what if" game got more interesting when we started discussing our teenage years in the 1960's.
I mentioned that it would have been fun to hitchhike cross-country and have seen San Francisco during the Summer of Love, when hippies lingered near Haight-Ashbury and bands like Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead were changing the face of music and ushering in the psychedelic age.
My friend asked me, "What if you could go back and do things differently? Would you have tried LSD?"
I guess he was just assuming that I've never actually dropped acid.
"Yes I would," I replied. "But only before 1966 when it was legal and widely used by the CIA and the United States Army for mind control experiments. I'm still an upstanding citizen and a patriot at heart."
Then we talked about moments in history that we wish we could have witnessed first hand. My friend mentioned such diverse events as the parting of the Red Sea and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Me? Woodstock. Those were three magical days in history that will never be duplicated in any way, shape or form. I would like to have been there, listening to the music in the midst of those 300,000 young people peacefully pressed together in the heat and the rain and the mud and... I guess, on the other hand, watching the video isn't too bad, either.
And I would like to have stood along the mourning route and saluted when that train passed by, carrying Robert Kennedy's body on the journey to his final resting place, America's hopes and dreams derailed while the train rolled on into the Senator's last sunset.
I've wished, too, that I had learned to drive a motorcycle. Movies like "Easy Rider" and books such as "On the Road" instilled a wanderlust in many of us in our younger years and we could see ourselves cruising the byways of America on our Harleys with life clipping along, our faces set hard against the wind.
Actually, the only time I ever drove a motorcycle was when I was 16 years old and a friend just bought a Honda 90. I lost control of it almost immediately, starting in an alley and ending up in my friend's back yard where I repositioned his little sister's swing set.
I never tried again. I should have.
In reality, we can't go back and change things. Choices and decisions are made as we go along and they become like handprints that harden in the concrete of the sidewalk we follow through life. Good or bad, we've made our mark. That is how history develops.
But playing what-if can be kind of fun. For a brief moment we can go back. We can change things in our minds and make them turn out the way we want. We can even ride Harleys with Richard Nixon and the Pope.
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