The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

by John McCain

That was it. Accumulated memories. I had reached an age when I had begun to feel the weight of them. Memories evoked by a connection to someone or to an occasion, by a familiar story or turn of phrase or song. Memories of intense experiences, of family and friends from younger days, of causes fought, some worth it, others not so much, some won, some lost, of adventures bigger than those imagined as a child, memories of a life that even then had seemed to me so lucky and unlikely, and of the abbreviated lives of friends who had been braver but not as fortunate, memories brought to mind by veterans of a war I had not fought in, but I knew something of what it had cost them, and what it had given them.

What God and good luck provide we must accept with gratitude. Our time is our time. It’s up to us to make the most of it, make it amount to more than the sum of our days.

Many an old geezer like me reaches his last years wishing he had lived more in the moment, had savored his days as they happened. Not me, friends. Not me. I have loved my life. All of it.

What a privilege it is to serve this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, magnificent country. With all our flaws, all our mistakes, with all the frailties of human nature as much on display as our virtues, with all the rancor and anger of our politics, we are blessed.

We live in a land made from ideals, not blood and soil. We are custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.

Who am I to complain? I’m the luckiest man on earth.

I’m not sure why, but my enjoyment of a fight of any kind is inversely proportional to the odds of winning it.

When a reporter asked me the next day if I had something to say to the terrorists responsible for the mass murders of the day before, I answered, “We are coming. God may have mercy on you, but we won’t.”

I’m the son and grandson of admirals. That’s the first line of my biography. But I am my mother’s son. I always have been. Thank you, mother, thank you.

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it,” spoke my hero, Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And I do, too. I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one. It’s been quite a ride.

And I wish all of you great adventures, good company, and lives as lucky as mine.