What I learned from the bear

By David Myers
Southwest Kansas Register

Last night I had a dream (this is true, by the way) in which a buddy and I were camping in a cabin up in the mountains when a bear decided to pay us a visit.
In my dream the bear was foraging through a back room. My buddy told me that he heard that bears enjoy Heineken beer. I frantically looked in the fridge. One beer left. I slowly opened the door to the room with the bear. The massive beast, looming tall and curious, slowly turned to face me, his lips curling around a mouthful of teeth suited for devouring small cars. I slowly reached out with the beer, which the bear accepted with his large paw.
Then, in my dream, I suddenly had another beer in my hand. The song, “I Have Friends in Low Places” broke out, and the bear and I clinked bottles in a kind of inter-species toast. When I woke up, the song was still playing on a continuous loop in my brain. “I Have Friends in Low Places.” I wondered, as only my twisted mind does, what the dream meant: Had the bear been the friend in the low place, or had it been me?            
I could almost imagine this bear, with its huge claws and big long teeth, sitting me down like a child to attempt an answer:
“Yes, son, it’s true that I forage for berries and that I hibernate in the winter,” he would say in his deep and generally bear-like voice.
“And it’s true that I do do in the woods the doodoo that people say I do. But when was the last time you saw a bear rob a bank or cheat on his income tax? When was the last time a bear got so mad because his wife cooked tuna casserole for the umpteenth time that he stormed out of the house and down to the corner bar where he got into a fight and wound up spending the night in jail? Huh? When?”
“Never,” I said quietly, my head lowered. “I’ve never seen a bear get mad because of too much tuna and then go to a bar and wind up in jail.”
“That’s right, son,” he said patiently. “Only man is predisposed to such folly. And occasionally woman … but she probably has a good reason.”
In my dream, it was I, ironically, who was the friend in a low place -- a lowly human who gets mad about silly things like too much tuna casserole -- and not the bear, an animal that lives quietly in the woods.
I thought about those times when I felt superior to others. I thought about the time, years ago, when I stepped into the lobby of an ancient motel in a Colorado mountain town. Sitting around a table was a group of men who made Grizzly Adams look like a business executive. I was a young reporter fresh out of college, and, as such, considered myself a tad superior to those mountain folk.
I listened in on their conversation for a moment, expecting talk of skinning deer or how fast they could fell a tree, and instead heard a philosophical argument about Nietzsche’s vision of the superman. At that point, all I could think was, “Please don’t ask my opinion. Please don’t ask my opinion. Please don’t ask my opinion….”  But I prepared an answer just in case: “No ... uh ... speak ... In-glis?” which works in most cases (but not at our department head meetings, I’ve found).
I thought about all those times, years ago, when I walked into an auto mechanic’s shop. I wore a tie; he wore greasy work pants. He unbolted things; I worked at a computer. “Please fix that thingy that’s making funny noises,” I would say from upon high, to which he did my bidding.
The higher the height from which you look down upon others, the farther you have to fall. When the day came that my car broke down on a lonely street in the middle of a questionable part of Denver, and the mechanic who came to call discovered what was wrong, he suddenly became Einstein, Pasteur and Newton all in one. I’ve never looked at mechanics the same way again, those men and women who can do what I could never begin to do, who can pluck me from the grip of helplessness and send me once again rolling down the road.
What I’ve come to realize is that it’s when we look down on others that we diminish ourselves. When I see an immigrant – struggling with English, straining to integrate – if I look at him or her as anything but a brother or sister, then I’m ... well, I liken it to being rude to God.
Christ, the highest of the high, came to be among us, the lowest of the low. Despite his suffering up on the cross at our hands, he never looked down upon us. In fact, in his suffering and death, he held us aloft – each and every single one of us, regardless of color, regardless of our station in life -- as if we were the greatest gift.  Just as he does today; just as he is doing right now.