It is the mind that moves.

Whenever I want to give myself a kick in the rear about getting stuck in patterns of reaction I think about Bert Waninger. In fact, I think about him anyway every couple of years.

Bert was a quiet, gentlemanly guy with manners from another era. He was brought up in Austria and his parents taught him Old World ways and values which he brought with him to Los Angeles. Some played well; some didn’t.

He had a strongly-developed sense of justice which he usually served up with a side order of grievance and moral absolutism. We kidded him to his face about being a Pollyanna.

He had a hard time getting girls and I used to give him dating advice. Put yourself out there. They won’t come to you. Knowing in my heart that he came across as just too good. He was an ambassador from another time.

Time passed and I lost touch with him until I opened the newspaper one morning and saw his name on the front page of the Metro section. There had been a spate of “Follow-home” robberies that year and apparently some thugs had followed him to his house and demanded the keys to his car when he got out.

Bert refused and they shot him in the head and left him to bleed to death like roadkill in his own driveway.

The article went on to interview his neighbors who all commented on how shocked they were that he had taken a stand because he was such a quiet, gentle guy. He must have really loved that car, they said.

Some how it made things sadder when I read that the car he was desperately protecting was the same Mercedes he had had when I had known him several years earlier and it wasn’t new then.

But I think I knew why he refused. It wasn’t the car. He was always too careful to drive uninsured, anyway. It was the fact that what these punks were doing was wrong and immoral. You didn’t just walk up to someone and put a gun to their heads and demand their stuff. And he couldn’t get past that.

So, I thought, that’s why he died. Because the world wasn’t fair and wasn’t right. And he couldn’t accept that and get on with the business of living. Couldn’t move away from the sense of justice instilled in him so many years ago. So he died protecting six cylinders and a fancy hood ornament.

I think of Bert every once in a while. And when I think of him I always remind myself that the optimum mind is flexible.