My Mom and "Harvey"

You can usually tell a lot about a person by finding out what their favorite movie is. Movies are a nice barometer for personality; you don't find a lot of ex-hippies listing "The Green Berets" as their favorite, for instance, or serious minded people jotting down an Abbott and Costello movie.

I watched one of my mom's favorites last night, Jimmy Stewart's "Harvey". For those who haven't seen it, "Harvey" is a 1950 movie about a man named Elwood P. Dowd who frequents bars with his companion, a 6 foot 3 and a half inch tall invisible white rabbit named "Harvey". Dowd is a gentle soul who wouldn't hurt a flea, but his lifestyle and travelling companion make life difficult for his long suffering sister and niece. After Dowd ruins a social gathering, his sister decides to finally have him committed to an institution. The resulting chaos serves to reveal why Dowd sees Harvey, who and what Harvey is, and on a deeper level, a great deal about how we all choose to live in the world and what constitutes reality and sanity.

I have seen it a few times now, on tape and on TV. I just remember my mom loved the film, and if you knew my mom, it's obvious why she did. "Harvey" really celebrates a philosophy of gentleness and fellowship, of compassion and good will. It's about taking time to appreciate the simple but significant pleasures of life; good conversation, the smell of a flower, getting to know new people. Dowd is really everything my mom loved in a human being; polite, kind, soft spoken, unassuming, yet still intelligent, whimsical and funny.

There aren't a lot of people like that running around today. The hyperkinetic nature of our society seems to have ground most of the whimsy and gentleness out of most of us. Does anyone really take five minutes to appreciate anything anymore? Even if we try, that five minutes is no doubt interrupted by the electronic clang of a cell phone call or the screech of an incoming fax. It's impossible to "get away" from the world around us long enough to draw in a deep breath and just revel in the joy of living. Even in the era that "Harvey" was made, we see distractions from appreciating the small things of life; careers, social obligations, family issues. Dowd's "solution" to all of these pressures was basically to opt out of them and create his own world that allowed him to remain at peace with himself. "I struggled with reality for 35 years, and I finally won out over it", he says at one point. His beloved mother gone, Dowd apparently turned to the bottle for solace and in doing so attracted the attention of a "pooka", a mischievous, benign animal spirit that often associates with "rumpots and crackpots".

The lesson, I think, of "Harvey" is that we all do what we have to do emotionally and mentally, to survive, and that sanity is really a relative term. Even though Dowd's world was one that was offputting to most of the world, he wasn't harming anyone, and in fact, as the film's climax showed, he was actually providing comfort of a sort to his sister. Given the choice between accepting Harvey in her life and perhaps changing her brother's whimsical personality, she finally opted to accept Harvey.

I think each of us accept "Harveys" in our own lives and in the lives of our loved ones. As long as they don't hurt anyone, they have to be tolerated because often they are what makes the rest of the person happy and able to cope with the world.

My mom and I each had our "Harveys", I guess. And we accepted them. I watched too much TV and was on the computer too much. I didn't like to drive much and both of us were very set in our ways. My mom was agoraphobic. I had OCD. But our "Harveys", like Dowd's, didn't hurt anyone and were so intricately a part of our identities that to remove them would have changed us so radically that we may have become unrecognizable. So we accepted them, and were content with the person that bore them.

This world is so difficult. It's full of pain and disappointment and sorrow. People that we love die, and we are too weak to know how to cope. We get so attached to people that without them we are really lost, we cannot envision our lives without them. Coping mechanisms are many and varied. Some are benign, others malicious. I guess we all have to try to balance the cost we pay for our coping mechanisms against what we would be without them, and try to determine if they are worth it, or if change is truly needed or desired. Dowd was an unorthodox soul, to be sure, but he served a purpose. He was kind to those in need, he provided smiles and comfort to everyone he met, and his simple forthrightness and decency often illuminated truths that others were blind to see (as witnessed by his serving as the catalyst for the romance between Dr. Sanderson and Nurse Kelly).

In all of those things, he was a lot like my mom.Publish

God bless them both, and God bless their "Harveys", that allow these gentle souls to survive and bless us all.