Leonard Johnson walked across America once. He’s 80 years old, but looks more like 60, maybe 55 on a good day. He’s leaning forward on the bench in his hand-drawn Obama t-shirt that says “Da Man” above a pretty spot-on depiction of the president. Leonard’s from Cleveland but says he loves Philadelphia more than he ever loved his hometown. Says there’s an energy here, a feeling. Says he used to sleep on the street in Old City and sell his paintings for money. This wasn’t long ago, maybe ten years ago. A 70-year-old man, sleeping on the street. About to walk across America. Probably in better shape than I’ll ever be. He shows us pictures of his paintings on his iPhone, tells us of the one that had to get approved by Bill Clinton to hang in a federal courthouse. It’s a watercolor of an important-looking man that I’ve already forgotten the name of, but the painting is good, great even; the eyes are alive, the make-it-or-break-it characteristic of portraits. He shows us a painting of his late wife and she looks real, as if you could feel her through the tiny screen, her smile is warm and convincing and lovely and Leonard pauses briefly and in silence, as if he’s seeing her again for the first time. Now we are looking at an image of Leonard, five years ago during his walk across America, wearing a fanny pack and a baseball hat and standing in what appears to be the middle of the desert. “This is during my walk,” he says and then flips to the next photo. So nonchalantly, as if it were just a picture of him standing in his front yard, not walking across this vast country at an age where most people have trouble walking to the corner store. Which was his point: he did the walk to prove to himself that he could, because he had gone to a childhood reunion where he discovered that nearly all his childhood friends had passed away. He felt there was something different about him, maybe he had taken care of himself better, had better genes. Whatever the reason, he wanted to celebrate this victory, cherish the life he still had, make something of himself before he left Planet Earth.
As humans we seem to have this need to make something of ourselves, as if just merely living in itself were not a feat. As if getting up and facing the myriad challenges of day-to-day-life were an easy task, as if loving and creating and working and feeding yourself and managing your money and raising a family were not enough, that your life would have been pointless had you not taken the extra effort to do something that really made you stand out from everyone else. We all have an inferiority complex with ourselves, have the feeling we have to do more and more and more or is it just me? Pushing ourselves to take the road less traveled so that eventually we can say we did when other people are around, and feel good. And we will know we did something with our lives because it was hard, and it will be the struggle that we talk about later, because the history of human beings is overcoming adversity, which we need to do to find meaning in our lives, to measure ourselves by the amount we suffered for what we now have.
Leonard got up at 4:30 AM this morning to bike to Germantown to get in line to see President Obama. He didn’t have to; we got there at 1:30 PM, and took the train. He didn’t have to do it the hard way, but he did. Said he wouldn’t have felt as good about it if he hadn’t.
I knew what he meant.
