Old Yeller. Everybody of a certain age has heard of it, and most know exactly what it means. Old Yeller used to be a cultural reference that elicited immediate recognition and response from almost everybody when it was invoked. Old Yeller has right near disappeared from our cultural consciousness, as it had from my own until recently.
For reasons I cannot interpret much less explain, sometime over the past month, Old Yeller moved into my mind and took up residence without invitation or explanation. Without becoming a preoccupation, much less an obsession, it has simply been there waiting for a quiet moment, usually in the morning, when nothing else is on my mind. Otherwise almost perfectly passive, it has stood forth in my memory for me to consider and contemplate.
It came to me as a single image, a still image because of course I first encountered it in a book. The book had pictures, and I remember vividly the climactic moment when boy faces dog, the latter looking out from the shed or truck where it had been confined, wind-driven rain slashing the surrounding darkness. What an image. What a thought!
The book was a collection of stories, I think, large format, with a familiar castle on the cover. I associate, and perhaps confuse, that image with the one that began the television program The Wonderful World of Walt Disney that we watched as a family almost every Sunday evening. It was there, I think, that I saw the film version of the story, which may have been in black and white, either in the original or simply as I saw it if it was before we got our color television at Thanksgiving when I was nine.
Old Yeller is a hard story. It’s about a boy and his dog, yes, and the dog is an adorable puppy who grows into a beautiful, loyal, smart, strong, and wonderful friend to the boy. That much would resemble any story with currency and popularity today, but its unfolding and conclusion make it hard to picture families today reading it, or flocking to watch it with their children, and harder still to imagine the Disney of today proudly presenting it.
Old Yeller is an old story, you see, from the time before The Parent Trap and Flubber, before Haley Mills and Kurt Russell. It goes back the days of the original Cinderella, but was live action and not animated. There are no princesses or princes in it, and I believe Disneyland never had a ride based on it.
It is from a time when pets or other animals were not presented as protagonists or even heroes. The presence and use of firearms in the story would incite violent protests today. The depiction of the family, and what would today be called ‘parenting techniques,’ would draw scrutiny and perhaps opprobrium.
But it is none of those aspects that stuck with me, and they are only peripheral to the central image and central impression that present themselves unbidden before the eyes of my mind. What I remember is that the boy did it. Through tears, yes, but at his own insistence, and even in the face of suggestion that he leave it to his dad. At least I remember that the offer was made; my memory is imperfect but I have declined to check it on the all-knowing (sic) internet.
The memory that has been making itself known is one of resolve and responsibility, borne on shoulders still small but clearly strong. Absent the other anachronistic trappings, would anybody in our own time, whether for entertainment or exhortation, present this lesson as one for approval and even imitation? Are we forming our children, or even strengthening ourselves, for the solitary work of moral decision and action?
In our time of internet anonymity and crowd-everything, opinion polls, consensus, and committees, institutional processes and policies, are we nurturing any habits besides following the herd and passing the buck? Will we ever see leadership again, or are we consigned to the doom of being perpetually “left no choice but to (insert pusillanimous action here).”
Doing the hard thing because it is the right thing must start young, but will never become automatic, much less easy. The necessity and virtue of taking responsibility for our own actions and their consequences, even the unintended ones, is a lesson our infotainment celebrities, corporate barons, or governing sycophants will never produce, much less present.
Jesus used parables because stories are effective at teaching complex realities and imparting lessons that endure and mature with time, experience, and consideration. Old Yeller is a story that came back to me after decades of desuetude because of its vivid presentation of a virtue that I treasure and I crave, to which I aspire and whose absence I mourn. But everyone who knew the story then or has even a vague recollection of it now will tell you that Old Yeller is a story that is very, very sad.
Monsignor Smith
