The Life I Choose and Live

The Life I Choose and Live

Some movies never get old, and that is the case with almost anything with Martin Sheen. I know I have spoken about his son Emilio Estevez’s great movie The Way about the Camino de Compostela. It resonates with me now more than usual because this month we were supposed to be flying off to Barcelona with my ragged band of motorcycle pals. We were planning to drive north through Catalonia towards Andorra from whence we would head north through the Pyrenees Mountains towards Pamplona, which is in the heart of Basque Country. The entire world is crazy about their own. Catalonia doesn’t want to be part of Spain, the Basques have never considered themselves a part of anything other than themselves, but the Camiño de Santiago is universal. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it has roots in many cultures for some reason. To the Brits it is The Way of St. James. To the Romans it was Peregrinatio Compostellana. To the French, who tend to think they own anything with soul, it is Camino Francés (even if it mostly in Spain), The followers of Charlemagne still figure that since the Basques killed Roland and that was only thirteen hundred years ago, the Basques still owe them.

From Pamplona we were to head towards Burgos and Leon. The Camino is about 800 km long and can take a month or more to walk. The pilgrims who walk the Camino are seeking some form of self-discovery or redemption. The story of The Way is about a man’s dirge for his dead son who was an anthropologist who preferred to meet the cultures of the world himself than to study them and write dissertations about them. He meets Jost from Amsterdam, who is trying to lose weight but can’t stay off the Lamb Cordero. He then meets a Canadian chick, Sarah, who is trying to stop smoking, but is really mourning her solitary and childless life as she passes from her age of conception. The third member of the gang is the Irish writer, Jack, who is suffering writer’s block and digestive tract distress. They are all on the Camino for their own reasons, but they find solace in one another’s presence, right up until they don’t and then they apologize and do again.

In the opening sequence Martin Sheen’s son, played by the author, Emilio, asks his father to join him on his travels (Sheen doesn’t even know where he is off to). When he tells his son that he knows that Emilio has no respect for his father’s life as an ophthalmologist in Ventura, California he explains that it is the life he chose. That is when Emilio says to his father (both his father in the role and his father in real life) that you don’t choose a life, you live it. That is one of the word plays that always sounds so clever. Two nights ago during a screening of Dan in Real Life, Steve Carrell is told by a fifteen-year old boy that love is not a feeling, it’s an ability. There you go again, another clever turn of phrase and another thoughtful sentiment.

Somewhere in Galicia, the troupe of peregrinos encounter some gypsies who are trying to rehabilitate themselves, or at least their images. They invite them to a fiesta and as they see them off the next day, the gypsy king says to Sheen, “our children, they are the best and the worst of us.” That speaks to me. This has nothing to do with my children (or at least I am making sure I keep those thoughts to myself). It is about me and the blend of my mother and my father in who I am. I have spent a lifetime thinking that I am 100% my mother. She raised me and it is she I admire and espouse to be like. She was and still is my hero, less because she was my mother and more because she is the person I always wanted to be. She was the adventurer who sucked the marrow out of life, she spent her life helping others and giving little or no thought to tomorrow or to material things. She was no grand philosopher, but rather as pragmatic as any person on Earth. It was just that she prized life for life’s sake and no other.

But I was wrong in thinking that I was all about the good things my mother had to offer the world. The truth is that she, like all of us, had a flat side. She never let it slow her down, but she would likely be the first to acknowledge it. While I will never suggest that I don’t have at least one flat side, I’m sure I have several and maybe even many, I know now that I don’t have the same flat side as my mother and there is really only one reason for that. I do have to admit that I have inherited some of qualities from my father as well. That is hard for me to admit given his absentee nature during almost all of my life and the fact that there was so little to grasp onto with what I would call respect. But when I force myself to think more objectively, my father had a similar but more directed motivation and drive to make something of his life. She was a random adventurer and he was a very directed adventurer. She bought and ran an art gallery in Pacific Palisades after twelve years working for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela. He escaped Venezuela on a War Brides Visa and immediately had 8×10 glossies made to pursue his ill-fated movie career. He never was without a blue blazer and grey slacks. She was as comfortable in a housedress or business suit and wig. She was a woman of substance who also got a facelift in Switzerland at fifty-five. He was a superficial materialist who was kind to old farmers he met in the San Joaquin Valley.

After we were to reach Santiago de Campostela on the motorcycle ride, we were to head down to Porto, but I am certain I would have found a way to go to Muxia or Finisterre (literally, the end of the Earth) to throw whatever cares that lingered with me into the cold Atlantic Ocean just like Sheen casts the final remains of his son into the sea. We next see Sheen walking through the Jamaa el Fna in Marrakech, soaking up the life of the nomad that he had inherited on the Camino from his son.

It’s a wonderful story of redemption and change and a heartfelt movie that I applaud Emilio for making. I doubt I will ever walk the Camino, but I can and do live the Camino every day through my writing. I live the life I both choose and the life I choose to live. I try to embrace all that life has to offer and to remember at every turn in the road to appreciate the experience and be thankful for all that I have been given, whether from my mother or my father. Make sure to watch the movie.