I was watching a VHS tape over the weekend that my sister had bought me for my birthday several years back. I had never watched it before and I’m guessing that’s because my VCR didn’t work all that great. I inherited another VCR from my oldest brother recently and I ran across the birthday tape. The tape is a variety of old western shows strung together without any commercials that would interrupt my viewing pleasure.

All of the westerns were pretty much before my time, so I remember them only as reruns. Those old cowboy shows were a big part of my early childhood. They influenced me more than any living human being. There wasn’t any living human being that could possibly come close to the heroic actions of those bad guy killing, women getting, make believe characters on my small TV screen. There happened to be one cowboy that I was particularly fond of that I wanted to grow up to be just like him and he was one of the cowboys that were on that tape. His name was Roy Rogers.

Roy Rogers was the epitome of a good guy. He even wore a white hat. I wanted to be the good guy and Roy Rogers was the perfect mentor for me. He could beat up any bad guy around but he was also everybody’s best friend. Kids loved him, animals loved him, women loved him, men admired him, and bad guys feared him. I wanted to be him and in my imagination…I thought I was.

There were two half hour episodes of The Roy Rogers show on this tape and I watched both of them thinking how I had probably seen both of these shows when I was about six or seven. I was shocked at how simple the plots were and how corny (I’m talking cornball) the dialogue turned out to be. The show was in black and white and so was the ideology. There were only good and bad people. There was no room for gray complicated people who have moral dilemmas or make mistakes in judgments. The good people were always right and they won out over the bad people that were always wrong.

I hate to admit it, but even though my Dad is a preacher and I was raised religiously, as I sat watching Roy Rogers once again, I realized that it was shows on TV like his which supplied me with my moral compass and not any living human being. My church was the TV and my Gods wore cowboy hats. What I saw in those two episodes was an inner part of me that I always thought was a core me or a me which I considered to be me.

What I came to grips with was the fact that what I took for granted as my core values were actually values instilled into my young impressionable mind by cowboy show writers. By the time I was a teenager I knew I couldn’t lick all the bad guys, I knew I couldn’t woo all the girls, but I did think I had a good sense of what was right and wrong. I felt good when I was doing right and guilty when I was doing wrong.

It took me a long time to figure out to be happy all I had to do was follow my own heart. There is no guilt when we follow are own hearts, there is only a sense of doing what is right because we are on the right path. Before I figured this out I was miserable trying to fit what I thought was right and wrong into a real life situation. I guess I was thinking subconsciously what would Roy Rogers do in this situation?

There is no telling what kind and how many influences have shaped my psyche or yours. There were a lot of things going on back then just as there are now. Are we a product of what is going on around us or is there a core us that has been there all along that we can truly call us? Personally, I feel closer to being a me right now than I have ever felt. I feel connected to something that draws me down a path that I know is the right path even though it’s not a smooth path. I follow this connection that I call my heart and I feel I’m being true to myself. To me this is the core of me.

Watching and wanting to be Roy Rogers didn’t hurt me I don’t think. Watching that old show now I see how unbelievable it all is, but as a kid I believed there was a man such as Roy Rogers. I believed I was going to grow up to be a man like Roy Rogers. I’m not far off the mark, you know…I still wear a white hat on the inside.

Happy trails until we meet again.