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Many years ago. I came across a movie character actor I really liked. Veteran character actors are people you see over and over again in different movies and shows, making it more challenging for them to convince you that they are a different person than the last time you saw them. This actors name was Richard Farnsworth and the movie was “The Straight Story.”

The Straight Story was released in 1999. It was directed by David Lynch, of “Twin Peaks” fame. It had the same pace and odd cadence of Billy Bob Thornton’s oddball flick, “Slingblade.” Slow, rambling, full of peculiar small-town characters that felt familiar to me. All these terrific actors in it—Sissy Spacek is the daughter, Rose, of the main character, Alvin Straight.

Alvin’s health is failing, he can’t legally drive anymore, and he’s restless. Alvin and Rose live in Alvin’s house in a small town in Iowa. When Alvin finds out his only brother, Lyle, has had a stroke in Wisconsin, he decides to go visit him. We eventually learn the two brothers hadn’t spoken in ten years, after having an argument. 

Since he can’t drive any longer, he loads up a trailer with supplies and hitches it to his riding lawnmower and sets out on the highway to drive to his brother’s house to see him. It’s a trip of some 300 miles. His odyssey makes him a sight for drivers to honk at.

He meets a group of bicyclists on a cross-country ride, a small-town tractor dealership run by quarreling twins, a fellow veteran like himself trying to forget the trauma of war, and a young pregnant teenager hitchhiking to run away from her family before they find out.

Along the way we become part of a journey to redemption. Alvin is a man full of regrets. He drank too much and paid for its years before. Now, though, he is single minded. He must put this right with his brother before he runs out of time. When the young pregnant teen, Crystal, comes to Alvin, camping on the roadside and roasting hot dog wieners with a stick over his fire, he offers her some supper and a conversation. He figures out her plight and asks, “How far along are you?”

Her secret out, she confesses that she left before her family could get upset about it. She knew the would be furious. Alvin says, “Well, they may be mad. I don’t think they’re mad enough to want to lose you, or your little problem.”

Crystal says, “I don’t know about that.”

Alvin replies, “Well, of course, neither do I, but a warm bed and a roof sounds a mite better than eating a hot dog on a stick with an old geezer that’s travelling on a lawnmower.”

Alvin then tells her his story of Rose, and the suffering she has been through. And he tells her about something he did when his girls were small. When they had a fight, he said, “I’d give each one of them a stick and, one for each one of them, then I’d say: “You break that”. Of course they could real easy. Then I’d say: “Tie them sticks in a bundle and try to break that”. Of course they couldn’t. Then I’d say: “That bundle… that’s family”.

When the morning comes, Crystal is gone. Beside the firepit is a bundle of sticks, tied together.

Alvin Straight’s journey is a universal one. Erik Erikson, the psychologist and student of Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Ana, had a theory about the stages of life that has been extraordinarily influential in our culture. There are eight stages of human development, he wrote, five of them in childhood and adolescence, with challenges and demands for our growth.

Three more stages comprise adult life. We have to navigate each one successfully in order to move fully into the next. If we are broken or have unfinished work, the next one comes harder for us. It’s simply the way it is. 

The adult stages are, first, intimacy, and second, generativity. This means more than marriage and sex or work. The first is about our relationships and closeness with other human beings. The second is about vocation, meaningful labor in life. 

The last stage, though, is what he called “integrity.” It is coming to the last miles of life with a sense of wholeness, peace, if you will, of the sense of having lived well and accomplished what matters.

If we have not achieved integrity, he said, we fall into the risk of despair, filled with regret and disappointment with our lives.

Alvin tells one hearer along his way, ““Anger, vanity, you mix that together with liquor, you’ve got two brothers that haven’t spoken in ten years. Ah, whatever it was that made me and Lyle so mad… don’t matter anymore. I want to make peace, I want to sit with him, look up at the stars… like we used to do, so long ago.” 

He’s looking for that last stage. “How did I do?” Old people spend a lot oftime with that question. They spend some time wondering about the way they have traveled and the choices they made. It can fill them with thankfulness and peace, or it can haunt them like a demon.

Richard Farnsworth, who played Alvin Straight, won an Oscar nomination for his work in the movie. I first saw him in “The Natural,” with Robert Redford, when he plays an assistant coach on the baseball team, but his most well-known roes were in westerns. 

Only a year after his Oscar nomination, Richard Farnsworth took his own life. He had advanced cancer, with no prospect of beating it. It made me sad, but also to wonder if that situation fed his pathos in the character of Alvin. Time was short, better get the hard stuff done.

Now when I saw this movie, my wife and some friends didn’t have the same reaction as me. It was a little slow, and my wife kids me now when a show is dull, she says, “I think I heard a lawnmower coming.”

But the meandering, aimless pace is the point. Under the dull and tedious parts of living there is eternally important work to do. It can fool us, the tediousness, even bore us so that we think time will go on long enough for us to waste some time until something more interesting comes along. Or worse, start some chaos as a substitute for the hard, good work of listening and talking into deep places.

After a lot of years when I was always on the go and in the fullness of life and work, I am now the main caregiver for my mother and father, both now in skilled nursing.  Not long ago, I was sitting with my mother during a medical procedure she had to have. While we waited on results, she told me about their wedding. It’s one of those many stories she tells me again and again. They married at my grandparents’ house out in the country, right out of high school. Mom told me again that her father loaned my Dad twenty dollars to pay the preacher because he didn’t have the money.  When Dad paid the preacher, he handed ten of it back. “Here, son, you need this worse than I do.”

I wish everyone could know, way early on, that they’d have to make that journey one day. That it might be a long way, and your transportation limited, and time running out. I guess then I might have lived some things a little differently. It was so easy when time seemed to stretch out forever to think it didn’t matter as much as it actually did, even then. That so much of the virtual foolishness of our time doesn’t mean anything at all, and other things we are neglecting mean everything. But I guess I wasn’t all that attentive when I was so busy. I’m glad for a few folks here and there who said to me, “Here, son. You need this worse than I do.”

In the Shawshank Redemption, the character of Andy DuFrame says to his friend Red, “Better get busy living or get busy dying.” We’re going to do both before it’s over. I’m trying a little harder these days to listen more, pay attention, and recognize the mile markers are winding down. Good work to do. Always was, always will be. Don’t miss it.