This story is a conjoining of thoughts from two recent events. First, last week Tina and I watched the Disney movie “Maleficent” with our Granddaughter Olivia. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a very creative retelling of that dark fairy tale character’s story. The second event was me in an antique shop this week discovering an old Daisy Model 102 BB gun. The BB gun of my childhood. How exactly does Maleficent and a BB gun find their way into the same thought? Well …
Once upon a time on a warm, clear Halloween night, 1972, in the idyllic little town of Montrose California, just as the sun began to set behind a little white stucco house on Roselawn Avenue near the corner of Oak Circle Drive, Olivia Sharp’s grandfather—then just six years old—strapped on the double pistol holster that held his two prized pot metal paper cap six shooters—the ones with shiny chrome barrels and the white plastic grips. Next, he secured his bright white straw cowboy hat to his head with a chin strap of twisted red and white yarn, pinned a tin sheriff’s badge to his leather fringed cowboy vest, and headed out the front door to join his other costumed friends, plastic trick-or-treat bag in one hand, his trusty Daisy Model 102 BB gun, in the other (empty, of course). And by the way, I’m fairly certain he was utterly adorable that night. Then again, I may be a touch biased. What I know for sure is most days he was just a six-year-old boy, but that night he would be a hero. He’d been told the world was full of good guys and bad guys. You were either good or evil. And being a hero meant being strong, capable, invincible, always right, always good, and pure of body, mind and spirit.
Flash forward half a century from 1972 to 2022. Tomorrow, on another warm, clear, Halloween night, his granddaughter Olivia, now also six years old, will replay the old ritual yet again. But unlike her Grandpa she is growing up in a world with far less black and white and a great deal more gray. Some of the old lines have blurred. Some have moved. Still others have been erased altogether. It’s a different world, and as a tiny living example, tomorrow Olivia will be dressed as Maleficent. But not the Maleficent of her Grandpa’s childhood. Not the purely evil villain who cursed Sleeping Beauty. No, Olivia’s Maleficent is actually a hero. A hero of a different sort.
Have no doubt, some things never change. Olivia wants to be a hero just as much as Grandpa did, but her hero doesn’t wear a white hat. Her hero makes mistakes, is not always right, is not always good, in fact at times she can act the villain. But the biggest difference between Grandpa’s hero and Olivia’s hero is that when Grandpa was six the world had told him the battle for good and evil happened largely outside of you. That’s why he needed his Daisy model 102 BB gun close at hand. Maleficent has also fought many battles but her greatest battle is always happening inside her. Maleficent has been wounded and disillusioned and misunderstood and assaulted, but she emerges from her story heroic, not because she overcame a villain or two along the way but because she overcame the ever-present temptation to surrender to her darkest, most wounded self.
Olivia knows more about where evil comes from than her Grandpa did when he was six. She is beginning to understand that real evil is born into the world simply because hurt people hurt people. She is beginning to learn that if you do not transform your pain inwardly you will transmit your pain outwardly. Olivia’s hero is not just imperfect but deeply flawed. And yet, at the end of the day she chose to heal instead of hate and rewrote her own story.
So what does Grandpa think about all this? Well, Grandpa can’t deny that he misses his Daisy Model 102 BB gun. He almost bought the one at the antique store for $35 so he could lean it up in the corner of his office and be reminded of what it feels like to be six years old....
