"H" Is For Heroes

Choose your heroes wisely, their influence can be pervasive.  Justine Musk, a Big Kahuna in the blosphere, suggests that bloggers chose just three bloggers to follow when they're starting out and want to see how it's done. More than three and confusion sets in.  I came across her advice long after I'd realized my own need for the clarity of three driving forces in my life.  It's always seemed to me that there was something mystical in the number three. It's the first prime number, and the sum total of the Golden Mean, which can be found in everything.

As a writer, I'm very careful who my heroes are.  Family is the soil that keeps me rooted, and friends are the golden streaks that run through my days.  Heroes are the raw materials from which I build my dreams.

I have just three, and they are:

1. Bill Moyers.  I look up to him because of his unapologetic curiosity, and his child-like manner of debating issues that genuinely seeks to understand before being understood.  He's not afraid of his naivete and seeks to cure it with layers of questions and a quick mind working on overdrive to take in what he hears, integrating one answer with another.  When he comes across a belief that is not his own, he's fascinated rather than defensive.  
2. John Steinbeck.  He's fallen out of fashion lately, but I think he might be staging a comeback.  His body is no longer living, but his voice is still as strong as ever, perhaps a voice we want to hear again.  The man loved language, and language was my love long before I understood it as an instrument of writing.  Steinbeck never swore because he considered it a sign of a lazy mind, instead training himself to instantaneously come up with emphatic language as strong and bold and clean as the raw emotion he was feeling.  I'm a little cautious of this hero because of his ruthlessness.  As a woman, it feels traitorous having him as a hero because of how he used his first wife, Carol, then threw her and her butchered uterus aside once his writing found its readers.  Perhaps I don't like one of my heroes because I can be just as ruthless as him. Perhaps I flatter myself too much.
3. Dorothy Parker.  A whip sharp wit bigger than her fragile, often-broken heart.  She, unlike me, was never paralyzed under the grip of wanting to be liked, wanting to please, needing friendship more than mastery, desperate to please others.  Damnit!  Others were supposed to please her, and when they failed, that wit came out like a sword and slashed them across the face, making others laugh as the damage was done.  Her words cut so deep she could almost be forgiven for her brutality, which was so wickedly fast and sharp it seemed like a joke about a joke.  Could twitter survive if she were still around?

If there's any one quality these three have in common, it's that they are all their own unique creation.  Something strong and clean and bold kept them on that "road less traveled by," which is, if the poem is carefully read, very confusing.  The narrator states he came to a fork in the road with two paths, both equally worn.  How can they both be equally worn if one is "less traveled by"?

Because those who take the path the majority pass, wander back and forth and up three steps then back down two, before finding what belongs to only them.