Buddy and Fozzie Bear and I were walking behind Jefferson Elementary tonight after the janitor wheeled his pickup out through the new snow.   It’s against the law to walk dogs on city property, but I take plastic bags and scoop the poop. 

            This is the nineteenth year I’ve walked dogs behind the school.  Yodi, the eldest of those dear friends, is buried in the backyard; Jaxie, whose whole life outside the Human Society was one ecstatic sprint … Jaxie’s  ashes are mixed into the cement of  my driveway; and our dear Norty – dog of literary legend, thanks to Ed Micus --  Norty’s ashes are mixed with the mortar in a stone wall on a lake north of Spokane, where the Dear Nortskur caught the only animal out of all those he chased in his ten years, a baby raccoon he was too surprised to hurt, although the little raccoon nearly drowned in drool.

            Before I took the job at MSU I’d never lived in the same city longer than two years since college.  My first year teaching high school in Monroe in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, Rio, Iowa City, Rio again, Dijon, Palo Alto, Greenville, NC, for my first college job, Moscow, Idaho, for my second, back to Spokaloo.  Then here to Mankato in ‘86.  I’d never stayed in one place long enough to see the arc of life extend itself and bend my neighbors toward the horizon.  I’ve seen men and women go gray here, kids grow to have kids themselves, seen good racquetball players take on a weight of years so heavy that even noble commitment couldn’t carry it any longer.  Observation of the arc of life is a sobering experience.      

            I like being part of a community, even the tiny part of the Mankato community that my character allows.  I like living so close to Indian Lake, a great place for dogs to run; I like the new, beautiful – and free -- racquetball courts up at the college.  And I like living across from Jefferson Elementary; I like seeing the kids. It’s a target-rich environment for Buddy and Fozzie to launch smooch-attacks and in return receive the  affection of children.

            The dogs were out ahead in the new snow barreling south for the black-topped basketball courts, the steep bank where kids slide down on their butts, and the deer scent on the hillside.  There was enough snow to cover everything -- the old tracks, the mud, the grass, the deposits other dogs had made, everything; the only intrusions were Buddy’s and Fozzie’s paw prints side by side.   There’s something resonant in that singular note in new snow; even the janitor’s boot tracks and the tire tracks of his pickup curving out of the parking lot touched me.  These natural symbols are the most powerful symbols we encounter.  They’re not art, like literary symbols, and they’re not culture, like the flag; they’re the signature of chance in nature, and chance means possibility, and it’s tough not to feel the vibration when life suggests that things are possible.  Such are the ruminations, not just of clinical depressives but thoughtful people in general.

            Maybe you’re thinking that a single ripple on an inanimate surface suggests solitude, and maybe it does if you’re feeling isolated or if you’ve been reading Sartre.  I don’t see it that way.  For one thing, just because the surface is placid doesn’t mean it’s inanimate; just because we can’t see the flux doesn’t mean there is none.  This flux[1], the eternally flowing current of life in the universe, is what so many of us mistake for God.  Just because we can’t have a personal relationship with the wave doesn’t mean we can’t have the time of our lives riding it to the final shore.    And who the hell would want to live forever in a place as inhuman and spiritless as any religious heaven?

            I heard a boy yelling and Bud and Fozz barking.  Not every kid likes dogs, and although the only way these dogs would hurt a kid is by licking him temporarily unconscious, causing him to miss supper, it’s impossible for me not to imagine the terror, the bite, and the law suit.  But this kid was calling the dogs by name. 

            I met the boys and dogs at the crest of the hill above the courts.  The taller kid hung back.  I recognized the shorter kid.  He’d stopped at the house in fall to look at motorcycles, and he’d met the dogs then.   Now he was giving them both enthusiastic rubs.  Buddy was weaseling around his feet, and Fozzie stood with his paws on the kid’s shoulders.  This youngster stayed out pretty late on a school night for a twelve-year-old; he might have been younger.  His face and his short hair glistened with sweat in the snowy air and the lights high on the back wall of the school.  His coat was open, and his shirt and pants were soaked with sweat and melted snow; he’d been sliding down the ice paths on his stomach.  He was husky, not fat so much as bear-like.  He was a little potato-headed bear cub, just like me back in grade school.  And in that moment I remembered a time in my life I hadn’t thought of since I’d lived it almost fifty years before.  I said good-night and thanked him for being kind to the dogs; I waved to his pal, and Buzz and Fozz and I lit out for the big white house at the dead end of James Avenue.

              Not a day goes by when I don’t think of my father and regret that we were never friends.  But until I saw this boy out late on a school night and imagined his frenzy to be anywhere besides his home, did I remember that this had been my boyhood.  What’s funny is that I often think of what a little gym rat I was, shooting baskets till whatever coach locked up whatever gym was open on the northwest side of town; I think of my friend Earl Overlie and his house on the corner of Wabash and Ash where I ate pop corn and watched TV with him and his brother Vaughn and his parents and grandmother until the late news came on and I knew I had to go.   Usually my dad would be asleep on the couch, or if he wasn’t asleep I’d say, “Great time shooting baskets,” or “Had fun watching TV with the Overlies,” and I’d whip downstairs and read a novel until I fell asleep.      

            My father didn’t like me.  He was a stranger to me.  I was afraid of him, although he never hurt me physically.  If we had been friends I’d be a different man.

            I know what you’re thinking:  Oh, boo, hoo, hoo, Davis!  Boo hoo!  Don’t you baby boom pussies ever stop blaming your lives on your parents?

            I love my life.  When those 300 milligrams of Effexor are working at even a sixty per cent clip, I love my life.   But I’ll regret till I die that my dad and I weren’t friends … more for his sake than mine.

            Davis, you’re thinking, how can a father not like his son?  Fathers love their sons.  That’s biology.  That’s how life works.

            Maybe it is.  He said he loved me.   And he gave me all kinds of stuff, including money when I needed it, which was often.

            Dad’s name was Roy Davis, no middle name or initial.  He was in the car business all his working life.  When I was in school at the University of Iowa in ’71 and my VW went to hell, he bought me a car, drove it to Iowa City and caught a plane back to Spokane.  When I was in Rio in ’73, he sent me a transistor radio with an earplug so I could listen all the time and learn Portuguese.  When my life went down the toilet in ’80, he gave me one of his rental houses so I’d have a place to live.  It breaks my heart when I look back on these gestures of affection.

            The thing is this: I’d give a zillion times every nickel he ever gave me if I could live my boyhood over as his friend.  I know he must have spoken to me in a normal voice many times, but hard as I try I can’t remember a word he said that wasn’t yelled or twisted with contempt.

            What’s it mean for a father to be a friend to his son?  It means he can’t keep the smile off his face when his boy walks into the room – like I can’t keep the smile off my Mister Potato Head mug when Pascal or Joshie or Sasha breaks into view, because they’re just so much fun to have around.

            I wish my dad had let me know him.  I needed to know what a man was.  He could have told me this by telling me who he was, but he didn’t.  I must have asked him a hundred times if you were still afraid of the dark when you got to be a man.

            Yes, of course little Roy Davis learned to be this way from the wolf-people who raised him.  But that’s just the way he was raised doesn’t let us fathers off the hook for the most important job we do.  And that job is not feeding and clothing our off spring; it’s by the constant rain of our affection teaching our children that they’re worthy of love.

            I loved sports for the pure joy of playing.  But I played so hard in organized sports to earn the respect and affection of my coaches.  Nothing made me feel better than to swing my bike up to the baseball diamond and see in Coach Cobb’s face that he was glad Davis had shown up.  Years later when I became a teacher and coach I put that look on my face for every kid.  For some kids the look was a lie, but I held it there.

            When Vision Quest, my first novel, became a movie, Dad barked at me to do something smart with the money.  He didn’t say he was proud of me, but I could tell he was.  Being a writer – or an artist – to him was being a misdirected soul.  What a man did was work eight-to-five – or eight-to-eight when you were on till closing – and pick up a check every two weeks.  But somehow I had hit the winning number with that little book.  If Rock and Roll Were a Machine, my third novel, is about the kid I really was; Vision Quest is about the kid I wished I was and maybe could have been.

            My father was so tough that something in me didn’t believe he would ever die.  Emphysema did a job on him, though.  Still, no matter how sick he was, when we talked on the phone, his voice always carried that commanding resonance.

            I was worried when Mom called and told me he was in the hospital again and that I’d better get on a plane.  I spent two nights a home with Mom, who had emphysema too.  She was the one who looked like she was dying.

            Dad didn’t look great lying there in the hospital bed, but he sure didn’t look as sick as his wife of fifty years.   If I closed my eyes when he was talking, I heard that eternal strength again.  He might as well have been at his desk with a cigar in his mouth, or his pipe, closing a deal on another Olds Cutlass.

            The TV cut from pro football to a Mr. Goodwrench commercial.  I looked up at the actor in his General Motors blue and white striped shirt.  “That’s what I should have been,” I said.  “I should have been a mechanic.”

            “You should have been a writer,” Dad barked.

            My first thought was Yeah, Dad, y’r right.   I shoulda been.   I couldn’t quite pull it off, though, could I?

            He was wearing his blue-and-white striped robe from home over his hospital gown.  We had the same wild tuft of white chest hair sticking out the necks of our T-shirts.  Something in me recognized the possibility that my father was telling me I had taken the right path in life even though it was a path he couldn’t see no matter how hard or how long he looked.  But he said it in the same tone he’d used with me for fifty years, and there was only one way I could react.

            I didn’t say anything more about what I should have been.  I told him good-bye, that I loved him, that I’d see him again.  But there was a phone message waiting for me at the Northwest counter.  Mom had called to say Dad died.

            My father had probably been trying to make his peace with me.  I wanted to hear it, believe me.  But I’d gone deaf to the possibility.

How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness

            Gather ‘round fellow Depressives; friends with other psycho-bio baggage take seats in the second tier, please.  We’ve convened to praise the most articulate, mercifully hearted and historically outsized of our antecedents.  We’ll amaze ourselves anew at the wondrous complexity of the human animal.  And we’ll work to believe that Bi-polar Disorder has the power to fuel greatness along with desolate submission to the savage god.

            Before I write another word I ask this of you: forgive me for mentioning myself in the same bunch of words with Abraham Lincoln.   I’m soaring on a propellant-mix of amazement and hope, my chute hasn’t popped yet and I’m still eight miles high.

            Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk came out this month.  The subtitle is How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.  I hadn’t heard about the book until I saw Shenk on CSPAN (Everywhere Spirit, bless Brian Lamb), and then I couldn’t get up to Barnes and Noble fast enough. 

            Shenk looks so much like the actor Giovanni Rabesi I had to knuckle myself in the temple to get the movies out of my mind and pay attention.  Shenk is a quiet, self-effacing independent scholar.  His prose is clear, direct and without a granule of affectation.  It was his own depression, he says, that led him to research Lincoln’s melancholy.

            I’m old enough at nearly three-score to have grown up with the word melancholy; in college we read the Keats ode.  The word hasn’t been used much for years, but it’ll probably come back for a while now.   Coincidence can surely bring a smile: I was talking to my son a few hours before I caught Shenk on TV.  Pascal had been getting on me to write my autobiography; I told him I’d started it and that the title was A Melancholy Nature.  “Dav-ass,” my friends have said since grade school, “why are you always so sad?”  I didn’t have an answer for thirty years.  The answer is “I’ve got bi-polar disorder.  The electro-chemical stuff in my brain doesn’t work right.”  That electro-chemical stuff is a biological predisposition that allows environmental influences to send us over the edge.

            It’s clear from reports of Lincoln’s behavior and from his own accounts that he was chronically depressed.   Minutes after Lincoln was nominated for president, William Bross, the lieutenant governor of Illinois, saw him sitting alone in the convention hall.  “Lincoln’s head was bowed, his gangly arms bent at the elbows, his hands pressed to his face.  As Bross approached, Lincoln noticed him and said, ‘I’m not very well.’

            “Lincoln’s look at that moment – the classic image of gloom – was familiar to everyone who knew him well.  These spells were common.  And they were just one thread in a curious fabric of behavior and thought that Lincoln’s friends and colleagues called his ‘melancholy.’”

            “Those of us who are familiar with melancholy, Shenk says, “well know its elusive nature.  It operates in deep recesses of thought and feeling, hidden not only from the view of an observer but, often, from the melancholic as well.”

            Listen to Shenk on the word:

                           In a modern dictionary, the noun “melancholy” has two

                        definitions.  First, it means “thoughtful or gentle sadness.”

                        This comes through when, for example, Stanley Crouch

                        writes of his “melancholy resentment” about the neglected

                        history of African Americans or when Andrew Delbanco

                        alludes to the “melancholy suspicion that we live in a world

                        without meaning.” Melancholy often qualifies ideas or feelings

                        that are anguishing but familiar, and somehow connected to

                        what William Faulkner called “the agony and sweat of the

                        human spirit.”  Thus is melancholy the province of lovers,

                        poets, philosophers – anyone who reflects on the true experience

                        of sentient beings.

            I hate being either desolate or enraged, barking inappropriate greetings in the halls at school, crying for reasons that no one can see and afraid to go out in public because everyone seems so good-looking, smart, happy and coupled.   But I don’t hate reflecting on the true experience of sentient beings.  I like that, and I do it constantly.  I’d like to say I do it by volition, but I don’t; I can’t help it.  You’ve read me doing it – or trying to -- in this column.  I want to be a man who reflects on human experience, and eventually I want to understand our life on earth.  Maybe it is possible for depression to fuel positive qualities in us.  After reading Shenk I have no question that depression did fuel greatness in Lincoln.  This is Shenk’s thesis:  “[Lincoln] learned how to articulate his suffering, find succor, endure, and adapt.  Finally, he forged meaning from his affliction so that it became not merely an obstacle to overcome, but a factor in his good life.”                                

             I’ve always written in the margins of my books; okay, and other people’s, too.  But in the past year I’ve started to make the notes more complete and legible so my grandchildren – and their parents – can know their crazy old Pop.  Is it any wonder I’m scared to lend books?  Gather close, M-Ds and listen to the pathology that Shenk considers in Lincoln’s experience and in subsequent studies.  Abe was the poster boy before the term was coined:

·        Lincoln often got the blues, and had some strange sort of

                                    spells, and wanted to be alone all he could when he had them.

·        … moody spells and great sense of humor.

·        Episodes characterized by a marked decrease in pleasure, a change in appetite or weight, excessive or insufficient sleep, agitation or lethargy, fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, indecisiveness or trouble thinking or concentrating, and thoughts of death and/or suicide.

·        …harsh life events and conditions, especially in early childhood.  In the emotional development of a child, pervasive tension can be just as influential as loss.

·        Lincoln pursued his interests in defiance of established norms. Far from being praised, he was consistently admonished. He may well have paid an emotional toll. Many studies have linked adult mental health to parental support in childhood.

·        [Lincoln] also took up a popular cause among sensitive people, the welfare of animals.  His stepsister remembered him once contending that an ant’s life was to it, as sweet as ours to us.

            I used to love to fish.  Some of my most sustaining memories are of fishing with my maternal grandfather, whom I called Pop, on Bear Creek in the foothills of the Rockies in far northeastern Washington State.  When I imagine heaven, it’s a summer evening on Bear Creek with Pop and Gram; and my mother is there because it’s not the time of the month when she’s down in bed with all the curtains closed.  I feel the dust from the road on my skin and the inside of my nose, I hear the water, and I smell it; and I smell the wild onion.  Do you know the splendor of an Eastern Brook or Rainbow trout?  They’re the color and texture and heft of perfect beautiful pulsing life.  Fifteen years ago when this thing laid me low, I stopped fishing; I stopped hunting.  I know how bleeding heart this sounds, but I couldn’t stand to hurt even a fish.  Yes, like the great man – and years before I read this about him – I feared that those living things might love their lives as much as I did.  And if that could be so, I sure as Christ wouldn’t kill them anymore.  And what if deer loved their children as I loved mine?  When I saw a doe with a fawn, it sure looked like that child loved its mother.  And you know the greeting-card photos of  the momma polar bear with her cub all wrapped around her, ecstatic in the infinite white?  You think that’s not love?  Of course it’s love.       

            Lincoln was profoundly wise, and although he was as politically astute as anyone, he was without guile when it came to his or anyone’s feelings.  “The inclination to exchange thoughts with one another,” he said, “is probably an original impulse of our nature.  If I be in pain I wish to let you know it, and to ask your sympathy and assistance; and my pleasurable emotions also, I wish to communicate to, and share with you.”  This may be an original impulse of our nature, but it takes courage to practice because it is seen as weak by the self-protective, and that’s just about everyone.  “He spoke openly,” Shenk says, “about his misery, hopelessness, and thoughts of suicide.”

            I wish I could write the great man a letter.  I’d call him Mr. President and Sir and thank him for the example he sets of tenacious introspection, brutal self-evaluation, constant study, and  a decency so Christ-like that its source may reside in the extra-human matrix of his pathology.  I’d edit that out. 

            How many of us could conceive this, let alone admit it?  “I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.” 

            The Gettysburg Address is among the most revered pieces of prose in history, but there’s something astonishing and revelatory in a speech Lincoln made three years earlier in 1860.  He was invited to speak at the Cooper Institute, the largest hall in Manhattan, as one of a number of western Republicans.  Party insiders hoped to find a man who could challenge William Seward for the presidential nomination.  Lincoln rocked the house, and here’s how he did it.

            The country was in turmoil over the question of whether the federal government could constitutionally regulate slavery in the territories.  Nobody knew what the signers of the Constitution believed on the question of slavery, but pro-slavery forces – and states-rights advocate Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s old nemesis -- waved high the Tenth Amendment, reserving all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government “to the States respectively, and to the people.”   But Lincoln put in the work to discover where the signers stood on slavery regulation.  No one had done it before. 

            In his introduction, Lincoln recounted how twenty-one of twenty-three signers of  the Constitution still living and in the legislature, “supported a federal power to regulate slavery in the federal territories.”   He tied Republican ideals to the Founders’ vision, and he nailed the South through the heart: 

                        You say you are conservative – eminently conservative –

                        while we are revolutionary, destructive ….  What is

                        conservative? Is it not adherence to the old and tried,

                        against the new and untried?  We stick to, contend for,

                        the identical old policy on the point in controversy which

                        was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government

                        under which we live’; while you with one accord reject,

                        and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon

                        substituting something new.

            Lincoln contended that slavery’s extension must be opposed on the principle that slavery was wrong.   And he earned his party’s nomination for president.  And he served through the dissolution of the country and the War Between the States 

            In his Second Inaugural Lincoln illustrated what seems to me preternatural wisdom and mercy.  Listen to his conclusion.  It’s as though he’s a creature from a world where greater humanity is possible:

                        With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness

                        in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on

                        to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds;

                        to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his

                        widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and

                        cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with

                        all nations.

            Lincoln was never able to exercise this charity, of course; he gave the speech in March, and he was killed in April.  I can’t imagine he could have bound up the nation’s wounds, but who knows.  “What Lincoln sought to forestall,” Shenk says, “would in fact come to pass.  A vengeful reconstruction policy, the backlash it provoked, and the failure to provide adequately for the well-being of four million freed slaves had ramifications that would last to the present day.”

            What a thrill it is to read this book and to know Abraham Lincoln, even from this boundless distance.

--30--

I remember the moment I became conscious of myself in the cosmos.   Yes, I know the word is elevated beyond this low-rent column and belongs to Carl Sagen, anyway, bless his soul.  But it’s the word I want because it means the whole cosmic system of matter and energy, which is precisely what I mean, rather than “in the world.”  Back then, in the Fifties, we didn’t know the fantastic extent of the cosmos.  I learned that the Milky Way was the universe, and that’s what I was gazing at in the early minutes of 1957 on a bristling cold night, forty miles south of the British Columbia border in eastern Washington.  The Pepsi-Cola thermometer on the screened porch of my dad’s cousin Ray Johnson’s house read minus18.   

Ray and Edith and their son Robert, who was four years older than I, lived on the Tiger road seven miles northeast of Colville.  Mill Creek was five minutes south of the house on a path through a meadow where the grass was up to my waist and full of garter snakes.  The place names are mythic to me still, decades after I understood that the people who homesteaded on Deadman Creek and Gold Creek, lost their homestead to Lake Roosevelt when Grand Coulee Dam was built and the Columbia rose, fed rodeo stock in the Methow Valley; got T-boned by a logging truck outside of Laurier, fell through the trailer roof shivareeing Ernie and Sharon on Nancy creek by Brauner’s mill there on 395 between Barney’s Junction and Boyds – that these work-till-ya-drop people were Okies, whether or not they made their way to the Columbia River watershed from Appalachia through Oklahoma in a Diamond Reo or from Sweden on the cheapest boat they could find.  Some of these people never attended school, most never finished high school, and not one of them went to college, but they all did real well; a lot of them made more money than I ever will.  They remain mythic to me along with the places; it’s just that now I have their mythic stature in perspective.

I was out on the packed snow in the freezing splendor of the New Year making a pop run.  Ray was a Pepsi distributor, and his warehouse, with the two-ton white, blue and red delivery truck and all the pop, was there on the acreage.  I was alone because Robert was sick.  He’d been sneaking whiskey since the poker game started and hadn’t even made it to nine o’clock.  I would sneak plenty of whiskey on subsequent New Years Eves, but then I couldn’t even stand the smell.   I’d stood in front of the big black-and-white Zenith and watched the ball drop and the New Yorkers celebrate in Time Square.  Mom and Gram and great aunt Dorothy Dillman and Edie Johnson turned in their chairs at the table, but the men kept their eyes on their cards.  Midnight came three house later for us, of course, and they’d stopped the game then, wished each other a Happy New Year, and had s’ing t’ eat, as my Mom’s father, Bert Thompson, whom I called Pop, said; it meant “something to eat.”  For us the only thing on TV at midnight was the test pattern.  Maybe you’ve seen it: a smaller black circle inside a larger black circle, and between them, at the top, a black-and-white drawing of an Indian in full headdress.  

When we work with Narrative or Screenwriting, among all the other things we talk about, we talk about creating moments, and what a moment life created for me,

… for little Terry Davis,

person-to-be.

Forty-nine years ago, and I still hear the crackling silence, turn a circle and see the deep dark of the hunkered mountains, the shallow dark of the snowy meadow – the creek was down there, running too fast to freeze, but I couldn’t hear it; it was too far away -- the colored lights around the top of Ray’s and Edith’s porch, and full circle again I see the huge pole shed I thought of as a warehouse.  And then I look up at the Milky Way, that beach of light, like someone threw a thick black wool blanket on the dining room table to play cards, then someone dumped a truckload of diamonds on it and they tumbled out and filled forever: there are as many worlds up there and beyond, they say now, as all the grains of sand on all the beaches on all the bodies of water on Earth.

A monsoon of beauty rained down on me.  It was, indeed, a drenching beauty, as Louise Erdrich says.    No supernatural voice needed to tell me I was less than a dust mote in the vastness I saw and felt.  But I was something.   I was a system of matter and energy, too.  The awareness in me of myself, which is consciousness, or maybe the soul, became aware in that moment of its tiny part and brief residence in the grander system. This isn’t what I said to myself; I wasn’t capable of saying it; it’s what I felt. 

Nobody had to tell me life was short.  We had taken my dad’s dad, Harry Davis out of the Vets Hospital in Spokane to drive up with us.  And Ray and Edith’s older son, Art, had been electrocuted that fall in the little radio station where he worked in Oregon.  My dad told me that Ray’s first words on the phone had been, “I lost my boy.”   Why would I remember that little sentence for almost fifty years?  Some of the reason lies in what happened to me that night under the stars. 

I did not suddenly manifest signs of intelligence; I did not go back in and apply for early admission to Stanford.   What I did was open the door of the warehouse, switch on the lights and fill my double grocery bag with glass quart bottles of Pepsi and Canada Dry mixers.  If you were a Pepsi distributor you carried Canada Dry products too.

But my life did change.  It was that sense of awareness … of myself and of the life around me.

I loved watching these people play poker and sit around and take part in the banter.  Nobody got drunk.  It was fun to see them together with people they’d known for years.  They were different than they were with me.  My father hardly ever laughed at home, but he laughed a lot playing poker on New Years Eve.  And he was sharp and funny.  It was a thrill to see my father happy.