How I stopped searching for glory and found it barefoot on the lawn

Like many men, I prefer the heroic version of my life.

Triumph. Audacity. Grandeur. Master of the Universe stuff.

When I look backward, I do not see one complete life. I see something more like the Andes—a vast mountain range too large to take in all at once. So naturally, I select a few grandiose, great snowcapped peaks, and that’s the whole landscape of my life.

The victories. The adventures. The moments when I appeared unusually intelligent.

I quietly omit the years spent mowing lawns, emptying litter boxes, changing diapers, and trying to understand befuddled instruction manuals.

Those were not peaks. Those were parking lots.

My wife has never shown much interest in my Master of the Universe campaign. She does not oppose it exactly. She simply regards it as one of the harmless hobbies older men should be allowed to enjoy.

“If you want to find grandeur,” she told me, “Look through the eyes of your young grandson. Everything he sees is grand.”

She is usually right, which is a stretch in years.

Still, I resisted. Masculine life requires more stateliness and nobility than found in a four-year-old. We grandfathers have standards. There must be trumpets and TV cameras. At a minimum, someone should be taking notes.

Unfortunately, retirement offers few opportunities for heroic conquest.

I collect Social Security. I read AARP magazine. I have gone from youth and boyish good looks to being congratulated when I successfully rise from a low chair.

My heroic road descends from Grandeur to Significance, then to Mild Relevance, and finally to Invisible Weenie.

This is difficult for Grandeur Man.

Is there a dignified alternative to decline? The prospects were poor. Watching television reruns lacks nobility. Clearing a clogged drain requires courage, but no one commissions a bronze statue of a man holding a toilet plunger.

Then I came across a line in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

“When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.”

Greatness in small things!

That phrase stayed with me.

Perhaps grandeur does not require a mountain peak. It can exist in a single moment—provided we  to notice it.

I began remembering such moments: sitting quietly with my wife at sunset; receiving an unexpected call from an old friend; feeling, for no particular reason, completely content.

Then a single memory pushed all the others aside.

I was chasing my four-year-old grandson across a dew-covered lawn. We were both barefoot. Wherever we ran, our feet left dark tracks in the silver grass.

To me, it was only a lawn.

To him, it was footprints on an unexplored moon.

The cold dew squeezed between our toes. He laughed. I chased him, and for a few seconds neither of us was old or young, important or insignificant. We were simply alive together.

No trumpets sounded. No historian recorded the occasion. The Republic continued without interruption.

And yet the moment contained everything I had been searching for.

My grandson did not have to hunt for grandeur because he had not yet learned to overlook it. A wet lawn was an adventure. A grandfather in pursuit was a heroic figure. A few minutes together were not an interruption to life. They were life.

That must be the final education of old age. We spend our younger years striving to become important enough to be remembered. Then, late in the journey, we discover that our deepest wish is not to be remembered by the world, but by a handful of people we loved.

The great achievements fade. The speeches are forgotten. The trophies gather dust.

But somewhere in my grandson’s memory, there will remain the faint image of an old man running barefoot behind him through the morning dew.

That is enough.

I had spent years looking toward the mountaintops for proof that my life had mattered. But grandeur was never waiting at the summit.

It was down on the lawn, laughing.

And for once, Grandeur Man was wise enough to follow.