http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/robinson200312230101.asp

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Lopez: What’s your most treasured life lesson inspired by RWR?

Robinson: That one’s easy. The pony in the dung heap.

It was Reagan’s favorite joke.

Worried that their son was too optimistic, the parents of a little boy took him to a psychiatrist. Trying to dampen the boy’s spirits, the psychiatrist showed him into a room piled high with nothing but horse manure. Yet instead of displaying distaste, the little boy clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to all fours, and began digging. “What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked. “With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

To Reagan, the pony in the dung heap was more than a gag. It was an approach to life.

Reagan’s father was a drunk. His first wife divorced him. And just as he was starting his second family, the motion-picture industry turned away from good-natured, sunny actors such as Reagan himself to dark, brooding actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, leaving Reagan out of work for months at a time (family finances grew so tight at one point that Mrs. Reagan had to return to acting, accepting a part in a third-rate science fiction flick called Donovan’s Brain). Yet in each of these misfortunes, Reagan seems to have insisted upon finding good.

“A lot of people have a mistaken conception of free will,” Rev. Lorenzo Albacete, a priest I got to know during the Reagan years, once told me. “They think exercising free will means choosing their own reality. Try hard enough, and you can make yourself rich or famous or beautiful — that kind of thing. Well, man, I’m sorry. But it just ain’t so. Nobody gets to choose his parents. Nobody gets to choose whether he’s good looking or ugly or whether he’s intelligent or stupid. We all have to take reality as it comes to us — presidents, popes, all of us.

“The question is what you choose to do with reality. Reagan never permitted his misfortunes to interfere with his development as a human person. Instead he used them. All his life Reagan exercised his free will by choosing to seek the good in reality as it came to him.

“The pony in the dung heap?” Father Albacete said. “That’s it. That’s the entire anthropology of human existence. You become a complete person by digging for the pony in the midst of all the crap life throws at you.”

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Now let me get back to looking for my “pony”!

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