Gravel Magazine/July 2013
Terry Davis Atheist in a Foxhole
Four principles governed my father's life: 1. Look at things to see how they work; 2. Know how to fix things when they break; 3. Love the job you're doing; 4. Be a man who does what he says.
Joe Russell was not a moralist or philosopher. He was a mechanic. Those are his behaviors and my words to describe them. He lived those principles and taught them to me and my brother by example. It was later - after he and mom and Jesse were dead and I was desperate for a way to live - that I saw how he had lived and put it into words.
Principles reveal themselves in action. He showed me how to fix a flat on my bike with tire irons instead of screwdrivers so I wouldn't puncture the tube. None of my friends had even heard of a tire iron. When I broke a pane out of the storm door with the handle of my fish pole, he showed me how to cut the glass, how to replace it, anchor the pane in the frame with glazier's points, then seal it with glazing compound.
I was in fourth grade when I asked Mom about the word vacuum on my spelling list. She made me look it up, but I still didn't get it. I. State of emptiness. 2. Space in which the pressure is significantly lower than atmosphere pressure. And so?
So Dad walks me down to the three-car shop he built on our five acres northwest of Spokane. We've gone over the principles of internal combustion, but he says he left something out. He has a Triumph Cub engine on the bench, 200 cc., single-cylinder. The cylinder head is off, so we're looking down into the combustion chamber at the crown of the piston. He turns the engine sprocket and the piston goes up and down with a swooshy gulp. He grabs the head and sets it on the cylinder. He grabs the carburetor and holds it up to the intake port. "Okay, Dad says, "what makes the air-fuel mix flow into the combustion chamber?"
I refer to the following as the gas engine litany: spark plug ignites fuel-air mix and explosion drives piston down into combustion chamber; exhaust valve opens, piston is forced upward by action of crankshaft, and exhaust gasses are expelled; exhaust valve closes; piston goes back down, intake valve opens allowing air into chamber; fuel-air mix is sucked into chamber; intake valve closes; rising piston compresses fuel-air mix; spark plug ignites mixture and explosion drives piston ... and so on. I didn't say it quite like that when I was ten.
"Okay," Dad says. "But what makes the mixture flow into the combustion chamber?"
I look at him.
"A vacuum," he says.
I look at him.
"When the piston moves down on the intake stroke it creates lower air pressure in the combustion chamber than in the carburetor, so the fuel-air mix is sucked in.
I look.
"There's no air in the combustion chamber for that fraction of a second," Dad says. "And there's all kinds of air pressure in the carburetor and in the world. The air-fuel mix shoots in to fill the vacuum."
"Why?" I ask.
"Because that's the way nature works," Dad says.
My father did not say nature abhors a vacuum, which is an inaccurate observation as well as a cliché. Nature doesn't abhor anything. Nature has no feelings. Nature just is.
Dad conducted himself as though no force natural or supernatural existed to help him through the world. He lived as though he and his family were an unaligned nation, and only by living with meticulous care, and with the grace of fortune, would he be able to lead us through the world safely. I think he believed that the forces of nature, in league as they are with the forces of chance, are too strong.
I never saw him pray or set foot in a church. I don't think I ever heard him use the word God except in common phrases such as God knows or for God's sake, the imperative God damn and the adjectival goddamn. When he couldn't figure why something wouldn't work the first time he eyeballed it, he might use the more generous expletive which included both deities: Jesus fucking God. Dad didn't use this one much; he didn't mind offending deities, but he didn't like offending people.
He never talked to me about the thoughts behind his actions. He may not have wanted to articulate them, or he may not have been able to. I suppose it's also possible that he didn't bring his mind to bear on such questions. But it doesn't make sense to me that a man who could rewire a B-29 while people were shooting at him would be a stranger to introspection.
Dad saw to it that my brother and I had chores. Starting when Jesse was three he had to put his toys in his toy box before he went to bed. And it didn't take him long to understand why. Dad would come in to check on him, step on his tinker toys in the dark and smash them to smithereens; Mom would kick one of his favorite army men under the dresser and he'd think he lost it. The clincher, though, was Jesse himself getting up from a bad dream to snuggle with Mom and Dad, and taking a header on his Texaco tanker truck.
Jesse didn't survive to articulate it, but by the time he was six years old he'd learned that we become the cause of most of our accidents when we don't pay attention to how we live.
Work made sense. Jesse cleaned his room so his stuff didn't get wrecked or wreck him. I took the garbage out because it was ugly and smelled bad and attracted vermin when I didn't. I fed our dog Yogi because he couldn't open a can, and because we all loved him and didn't want him going hungry. But I could never make my peace with raking the yard.
We had a huge yard with big old pines and elms, so the crop of needles and leaves was staggering. I liked most work, and I could talk myself into liking what wasn't immediately likeable, but I hated raking leaves. Leaves were where Dad and I parted company. We were not buddies when it came to rake work.
One Saturday in late fall of my seventh grade year I went out to rake after Dad had told me for weeks to do it. The whole yard was covered: pine needles on the bottom, leaves over top of them, and the whole mess wet from rain. I stood in the middle with my brown cotton gloves, my rake, my wheelbarrow, and my awareness of life's inequities.
I was overwhelmed. I started where I stood. I raked a five-foot circle clear, then I raked another circle in another place; then I loaded the soggy mass into the wheelbarrow and pushed it to the garden. When I got back, Dad was standing with a rake in his hand in one of the circles of bare grass.
He handed me the rake. "Let me show you something, Karl," he said.
We walked to a corner of the yard and Dad started raking. He raked back six feet from the corner; then he started at the clear spot and raked another six feet. He did that until he had a rectangle of clear grass running the length of the yard. At the bottom of the rectangle lay a row of leaves and needles.
"See that row?" he asked.
It was hard to miss.
"That's a windrow," he said. "The leaves and pine needles are bound up together. They're binding on each other, and when the wind comes it's going to have a harder time blowing them around. That's why it's called a windrow. And look at that straight line," he said. He couldn't have made it straighter with a T-square.
"A guy can be proud of a straight line," Dad said.
Did I experience a linear epiphany? Did I redirect my life's goal of playing professional baseball and become a raker? No, I did not.
But I raked the whole yard in windrows, and the work went easier. And I did feel satisfaction in the straight rows of leaves and pine needles and the perfect square of bare shiny grass. Symmetry is another word I never heard my father use. But it was another thing he taught me.
When I'd done half the yard and had a big pile in the fire pit Dad showed up with the kerosene can and soaked it down and lit it. He tossed a pallet on. After a while the kerosene burnt off and that great smell of burning leaves and needles blew out over the yard. I kept coming with more; then I took a break and tossed on another pallet and watched the flames and the gray smoke.
"A guy can always find something to like about a job," Dad said. "If you don't like the feel of the rake through your shoulders, maybe you can like the smell of the leaves. Maybe you can like the color of the grass that's under there. If you're digging a ditch for waterline, you can like the feel through your foot and up your leg of the shovel biting into the ground. If it's rocky ground, and it's hot and the flies are swarming and you're thirsty and it's a miserable sonofabitch and you can't think of a single thing to like, you can always like it that you're alive enough to dig a ditch, that you're not in the ground yourself."
Dad served with the Army Air Corps in the Pacific. He was an airplane mechanic. The only war story he ever told was about being in a hangar on Iwo Jima when a Japanese 150mm artillery shell hit. The hangar was huge, Dad said, with a lot of men and planes in it, and it was reduced to sticks and corrugated metal. He was underneath a Marine Corsair at the other end from where the shell hit and the fire started. Guys knew he was in there. They called to him and he called back, but digging him out went slow. He heard men screaming and planes exploding. The fire got close enough for him to feel the heat and hear the crackling of wood and the crumpling of the long sheets of corrugated metal. His buddies gave up digging by hand, and a man Dad had never met -- a man named Karl Fisher from Muskatine, Iowa, jumped on a bulldozer and shaved a corner off the rubble. The blade caught a wing on the Corsair and gas went everywhere, including all over Dad. He scrambled through the mess, rolled to his feet and ripped off his clothes as he ran. He was naked as a jaybird when the Corsair blew. Dad was fine, but a piece of aluminum from the skin of the plane flew through the dozer's rollcage like a circular saw and cut Karl Fisher from his belt buckle to his spine.
I never heard my father thank God for saving him, like a wide receiver on TV thanking God for helping him hold that tough hook-and-go. But I did hear him thank Karl Fisher a number of times over the years.
Joe and Merry Russell named their firstborn Karl Fisher Russell.
As I look back I imagine how Dad’s time in the Pacific might have shaped him. I don't know that it did, but a guy's way of life has to have an origin somewhere.
In the eighteen years I knew him I never heard my father use the word morality. He did use intregity, but mostly it was honesty. Dad would say of people, "He's an honest man, or "She's an honest woman." If my father had no moral sense, then on what basis would he have taught me to keep my word? He did have a moral sense; he just didn't have a moral vocabulary.
I see now that practicality was the guiding principle of my father's life. He explained why I needed to be home when I said I would: he and Mom knew I was a boy who did what he said he'd do, so if I weren't home when I said I'd be home that meant I wasn't capable of coming home, and that meant trouble. So was I always home when I said I'd be? Even after I gained the independence that a driver's license and a '51 Ford give a teenager, did I always roll in when I said I would? Not a chance. But I always called.
Dad was consistent. If he said we'd go fishing, we went. If he told Mom he'd fix the screen where the flies were getting in, the screen got fixed. And when we didn't go fishing when he said he would, or when the screen didn't get fixed on time, he'd look me or Mom in the face and say, "I screwed up."
Dad's ultimate example of integrity -- although he never used that word -- was his foxhole speech. I never appreciated it until he wasn't around to deliver it anymore.
It was a summer evening in 1956. I was waist-deep in a hole in the unplanted part of the garden. I'd started digging to gather fishing worms, but after my Prince Albert can was full I got another idea. Dad spied the dirt flying and ambled over from the shop.
"I'm digging a foxhole," I say. "I'm staying here tonight. I'm going to spotlight the deer." Deer had been decimating our apples. I hold up the big battery lantern.
"Too bad you don't have a buddy to keep you awake," Dad says.
I look at him.
"What if you get tired and fall asleep and those deer walk through your perimeter? They'll eat the apples, and you'll never even know they were there."
I tell him I can stay awake.
"If you had a buddy you could trust," Dad says, "you could sleep awhile. He'd wake you when he said he would, then he could sleep awhile. Then you'd wake him when you said you would. When the deer came, one of you'd be up to wake the other."
I tell him I'm not tired.
"A guy gets down in a hole and leans his head against the dirt after a hard day," Dad says, "it can be so easy to fall asleep you don't even know when it happens. Then when the night is darkest, the deer walk in and eat your hat off."
I look at him.
"But if you can trust your buddy, and your buddy can trust you," he says, "you both get a good sleep. You won't be seeing visions of those deer sneaking up on you. You'll be the ones to give the deer a surprise."
As I hit these typewriter keys, I see my father silhouetted in the last glow of sun as he walks between rows of beans back to the shop. It breaks my heart to think he had been volunteering to be my deer-spotting buddy.
So why did this careful, practical man drive a plastic car? It was Fiberglas, actually, a 1958 Corvette. But when a drunk in a Buick Roadmaster wagon hits you and your wife and youngest son sitting on her lap at 75, the difference between the two non-metals isn't relevant. We had other cars: a '53 Willys Overland, and a two-wheel drive GMC. But Jesse begged to ride in the ‘Vette.
And why would this careful, practical man bring his little boy to be the third person in a two-seater? Maybe Jesse begged to go, and maybe Dad’s discipline wasn’t running on all cylinders that day. It was July 4, 1963, and I was playing a double-header. Maybe Mom and Dad felt that Jesse needed an afternoon alone with them. It was a seventeen-mile drive north from Spokane to the little town of Deer Park for the drag races. They would watch from the pits with Dad and his hot rod pals, then have a cookout by the slow little stream in the park on the other side of town, away from the roar and the fumes, where Mom would sit and read until Dad and Jesse tooled in top-down. Yogi had to stay home: no room in the two-seater for a silky moose-dog.
Was the death of my family a lesson in caution? No, it was not. I ride Dad's 1962 Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide every day the weather allows. And I don't wear a helmet. Do I have something to prove? Do I think I'm a tough guy? No. I just don't like wearing a helmet. Protective gear or not, we all take our chances with chance.
There is no atheist in a foxhole. This cliché implies that when the direct hit is on its way, every one of us knuckles under to our fear of death and begs God to intercede.
I wonder, in those last seconds when the Buick wagon bore down on the Corvette grill-to-grill, if Dad begged God for a hand. Everything I know about him tells me he was too busy trying to fix on his own the lethal thing that was breaking.
Four principles governed my father's life: 1. Look at things to see how they work; 2. Know how to fix things when they break; 3. Love the job you're doing; 4. Be a man who does what he says.
Joe Russell was not a moralist or philosopher. He was a mechanic. Those are his behaviors and my words to describe them. He lived those principles and taught them to me and my brother by example. It was later - after he and mom and Jesse were dead and I was desperate for a way to live - that I saw how he had lived and put it into words.
Principles reveal themselves in action. He showed me how to fix a flat on my bike with tire irons instead of screwdrivers so I wouldn't puncture the tube. None of my friends had even heard of a tire iron. When I broke a pane out of the storm door with the handle of my fish pole, he showed me how to cut the glass, how to replace it, anchor the pane in the frame with glazier's points, then seal it with glazing compound.
I was in fourth grade when I asked Mom about the word vacuum on my spelling list. She made me look it up, but I still didn't get it. I. State of emptiness. 2. Space in which the pressure is significantly lower than atmosphere pressure. And so?
So Dad walks me down to the three-car shop he built on our five acres northwest of Spokane. We've gone over the principles of internal combustion, but he says he left something out. He has a Triumph Cub engine on the bench, 200 cc., single-cylinder. The cylinder head is off, so we're looking down into the combustion chamber at the crown of the piston. He turns the engine sprocket and the piston goes up and down with a swooshy gulp. He grabs the head and sets it on the cylinder. He grabs the carburetor and holds it up to the intake port. "Okay, Dad says, "what makes the air-fuel mix flow into the combustion chamber?"
I refer to the following as the gas engine litany: spark plug ignites fuel-air mix and explosion drives piston down into combustion chamber; exhaust valve opens, piston is forced upward by action of crankshaft, and exhaust gasses are expelled; exhaust valve closes; piston goes back down, intake valve opens allowing air into chamber; fuel-air mix is sucked into chamber; intake valve closes; rising piston compresses fuel-air mix; spark plug ignites mixture and explosion drives piston ... and so on. I didn't say it quite like that when I was ten.
"Okay," Dad says. "But what makes the mixture flow into the combustion chamber?"
I look at him.
"A vacuum," he says.
I look at him.
"When the piston moves down on the intake stroke it creates lower air pressure in the combustion chamber than in the carburetor, so the fuel-air mix is sucked in.
I look.
"There's no air in the combustion chamber for that fraction of a second," Dad says. "And there's all kinds of air pressure in the carburetor and in the world. The air-fuel mix shoots in to fill the vacuum."
"Why?" I ask.
"Because that's the way nature works," Dad says.
My father did not say nature abhors a vacuum, which is an inaccurate observation as well as a cliché. Nature doesn't abhor anything. Nature has no feelings. Nature just is.
Dad conducted himself as though no force natural or supernatural existed to help him through the world. He lived as though he and his family were an unaligned nation, and only by living with meticulous care, and with the grace of fortune, would he be able to lead us through the world safely. I think he believed that the forces of nature, in league as they are with the forces of chance, are too strong.
I never saw him pray or set foot in a church. I don't think I ever heard him use the word God except in common phrases such as God knows or for God's sake, the imperative God damn and the adjectival goddamn. When he couldn't figure why something wouldn't work the first time he eyeballed it, he might use the more generous expletive which included both deities: Jesus fucking God. Dad didn't use this one much; he didn't mind offending deities, but he didn't like offending people.
He never talked to me about the thoughts behind his actions. He may not have wanted to articulate them, or he may not have been able to. I suppose it's also possible that he didn't bring his mind to bear on such questions. But it doesn't make sense to me that a man who could rewire a B-29 while people were shooting at him would be a stranger to introspection.
Dad saw to it that my brother and I had chores. Starting when Jesse was three he had to put his toys in his toy box before he went to bed. And it didn't take him long to understand why. Dad would come in to check on him, step on his tinker toys in the dark and smash them to smithereens; Mom would kick one of his favorite army men under the dresser and he'd think he lost it. The clincher, though, was Jesse himself getting up from a bad dream to snuggle with Mom and Dad, and taking a header on his Texaco tanker truck.
Jesse didn't survive to articulate it, but by the time he was six years old he'd learned that we become the cause of most of our accidents when we don't pay attention to how we live.
Work made sense. Jesse cleaned his room so his stuff didn't get wrecked or wreck him. I took the garbage out because it was ugly and smelled bad and attracted vermin when I didn't. I fed our dog Yogi because he couldn't open a can, and because we all loved him and didn't want him going hungry. But I could never make my peace with raking the yard.
We had a huge yard with big old pines and elms, so the crop of needles and leaves was staggering. I liked most work, and I could talk myself into liking what wasn't immediately likeable, but I hated raking leaves. Leaves were where Dad and I parted company. We were not buddies when it came to rake work.
One Saturday in late fall of my seventh grade year I went out to rake after Dad had told me for weeks to do it. The whole yard was covered: pine needles on the bottom, leaves over top of them, and the whole mess wet from rain. I stood in the middle with my brown cotton gloves, my rake, my wheelbarrow, and my awareness of life's inequities.
I was overwhelmed. I started where I stood. I raked a five-foot circle clear, then I raked another circle in another place; then I loaded the soggy mass into the wheelbarrow and pushed it to the garden. When I got back, Dad was standing with a rake in his hand in one of the circles of bare grass.
He handed me the rake. "Let me show you something, Karl," he said.
We walked to a corner of the yard and Dad started raking. He raked back six feet from the corner; then he started at the clear spot and raked another six feet. He did that until he had a rectangle of clear grass running the length of the yard. At the bottom of the rectangle lay a row of leaves and needles.
"See that row?" he asked.
It was hard to miss.
"That's a windrow," he said. "The leaves and pine needles are bound up together. They're binding on each other, and when the wind comes it's going to have a harder time blowing them around. That's why it's called a windrow. And look at that straight line," he said. He couldn't have made it straighter with a T-square.
"A guy can be proud of a straight line," Dad said.
Did I experience a linear epiphany? Did I redirect my life's goal of playing professional baseball and become a raker? No, I did not.
But I raked the whole yard in windrows, and the work went easier. And I did feel satisfaction in the straight rows of leaves and pine needles and the perfect square of bare shiny grass. Symmetry is another word I never heard my father use. But it was another thing he taught me.
When I'd done half the yard and had a big pile in the fire pit Dad showed up with the kerosene can and soaked it down and lit it. He tossed a pallet on. After a while the kerosene burnt off and that great smell of burning leaves and needles blew out over the yard. I kept coming with more; then I took a break and tossed on another pallet and watched the flames and the gray smoke.
"A guy can always find something to like about a job," Dad said. "If you don't like the feel of the rake through your shoulders, maybe you can like the smell of the leaves. Maybe you can like the color of the grass that's under there. If you're digging a ditch for waterline, you can like the feel through your foot and up your leg of the shovel biting into the ground. If it's rocky ground, and it's hot and the flies are swarming and you're thirsty and it's a miserable sonofabitch and you can't think of a single thing to like, you can always like it that you're alive enough to dig a ditch, that you're not in the ground yourself."
Dad served with the Army Air Corps in the Pacific. He was an airplane mechanic. The only war story he ever told was about being in a hangar on Iwo Jima when a Japanese 150mm artillery shell hit. The hangar was huge, Dad said, with a lot of men and planes in it, and it was reduced to sticks and corrugated metal. He was underneath a Marine Corsair at the other end from where the shell hit and the fire started. Guys knew he was in there. They called to him and he called back, but digging him out went slow. He heard men screaming and planes exploding. The fire got close enough for him to feel the heat and hear the crackling of wood and the crumpling of the long sheets of corrugated metal. His buddies gave up digging by hand, and a man Dad had never met -- a man named Karl Fisher from Muskatine, Iowa, jumped on a bulldozer and shaved a corner off the rubble. The blade caught a wing on the Corsair and gas went everywhere, including all over Dad. He scrambled through the mess, rolled to his feet and ripped off his clothes as he ran. He was naked as a jaybird when the Corsair blew. Dad was fine, but a piece of aluminum from the skin of the plane flew through the dozer's rollcage like a circular saw and cut Karl Fisher from his belt buckle to his spine.
I never heard my father thank God for saving him, like a wide receiver on TV thanking God for helping him hold that tough hook-and-go. But I did hear him thank Karl Fisher a number of times over the years.
Joe and Merry Russell named their firstborn Karl Fisher Russell.
As I look back I imagine how Dad’s time in the Pacific might have shaped him. I don't know that it did, but a guy's way of life has to have an origin somewhere.
In the eighteen years I knew him I never heard my father use the word morality. He did use intregity, but mostly it was honesty. Dad would say of people, "He's an honest man, or "She's an honest woman." If my father had no moral sense, then on what basis would he have taught me to keep my word? He did have a moral sense; he just didn't have a moral vocabulary.
I see now that practicality was the guiding principle of my father's life. He explained why I needed to be home when I said I would: he and Mom knew I was a boy who did what he said he'd do, so if I weren't home when I said I'd be home that meant I wasn't capable of coming home, and that meant trouble. So was I always home when I said I'd be? Even after I gained the independence that a driver's license and a '51 Ford give a teenager, did I always roll in when I said I would? Not a chance. But I always called.
Dad was consistent. If he said we'd go fishing, we went. If he told Mom he'd fix the screen where the flies were getting in, the screen got fixed. And when we didn't go fishing when he said he would, or when the screen didn't get fixed on time, he'd look me or Mom in the face and say, "I screwed up."
Dad's ultimate example of integrity -- although he never used that word -- was his foxhole speech. I never appreciated it until he wasn't around to deliver it anymore.
It was a summer evening in 1956. I was waist-deep in a hole in the unplanted part of the garden. I'd started digging to gather fishing worms, but after my Prince Albert can was full I got another idea. Dad spied the dirt flying and ambled over from the shop.
"I'm digging a foxhole," I say. "I'm staying here tonight. I'm going to spotlight the deer." Deer had been decimating our apples. I hold up the big battery lantern.
"Too bad you don't have a buddy to keep you awake," Dad says.
I look at him.
"What if you get tired and fall asleep and those deer walk through your perimeter? They'll eat the apples, and you'll never even know they were there."
I tell him I can stay awake.
"If you had a buddy you could trust," Dad says, "you could sleep awhile. He'd wake you when he said he would, then he could sleep awhile. Then you'd wake him when you said you would. When the deer came, one of you'd be up to wake the other."
I tell him I'm not tired.
"A guy gets down in a hole and leans his head against the dirt after a hard day," Dad says, "it can be so easy to fall asleep you don't even know when it happens. Then when the night is darkest, the deer walk in and eat your hat off."
I look at him.
"But if you can trust your buddy, and your buddy can trust you," he says, "you both get a good sleep. You won't be seeing visions of those deer sneaking up on you. You'll be the ones to give the deer a surprise."
As I hit these typewriter keys, I see my father silhouetted in the last glow of sun as he walks between rows of beans back to the shop. It breaks my heart to think he had been volunteering to be my deer-spotting buddy.
So why did this careful, practical man drive a plastic car? It was Fiberglas, actually, a 1958 Corvette. But when a drunk in a Buick Roadmaster wagon hits you and your wife and youngest son sitting on her lap at 75, the difference between the two non-metals isn't relevant. We had other cars: a '53 Willys Overland, and a two-wheel drive GMC. But Jesse begged to ride in the ‘Vette.
And why would this careful, practical man bring his little boy to be the third person in a two-seater? Maybe Jesse begged to go, and maybe Dad’s discipline wasn’t running on all cylinders that day. It was July 4, 1963, and I was playing a double-header. Maybe Mom and Dad felt that Jesse needed an afternoon alone with them. It was a seventeen-mile drive north from Spokane to the little town of Deer Park for the drag races. They would watch from the pits with Dad and his hot rod pals, then have a cookout by the slow little stream in the park on the other side of town, away from the roar and the fumes, where Mom would sit and read until Dad and Jesse tooled in top-down. Yogi had to stay home: no room in the two-seater for a silky moose-dog.
Was the death of my family a lesson in caution? No, it was not. I ride Dad's 1962 Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide every day the weather allows. And I don't wear a helmet. Do I have something to prove? Do I think I'm a tough guy? No. I just don't like wearing a helmet. Protective gear or not, we all take our chances with chance.
There is no atheist in a foxhole. This cliché implies that when the direct hit is on its way, every one of us knuckles under to our fear of death and begs God to intercede.
I wonder, in those last seconds when the Buick wagon bore down on the Corvette grill-to-grill, if Dad begged God for a hand. Everything I know about him tells me he was too busy trying to fix on his own the lethal thing that was breaking.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
September 2005
Grad students in my Form and Technique of Narrative class recognized the potent cheese factor in the sub-title of Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art. I didn’t argue. The sub-title is Winning the Inner Creative Battle. Not many of us feel good about carrying around a sign the subtext of which says I’m seeking help with my creativity.
What I did was run a strip of black duct tape across the cover of my copy to hide it. I don’t have a Ph.D., but in the world of adhesives I’m known as Dr. Duct Tape. I used the black because it’s not only more distinctive than the gray but more masculine. I limped across campus in my tattered Iowa Writer’s Workshop sweatshirt banging my taped copy, title out, against my thigh and crooning Roger McGuinn’s Ballad of the Easy Rider under my Wilfred Brimley moustache. In my imagination – and nowhere else – I was the archetypal writer-warrior in his third tour of duty on the fine art front. “Wherever that river flows, that’s where I want to be. Flow river, flow....” I was really headed for my recliner to read the book a third time. Pressfield, as everyone in class new, didn’t write his sub-title; a marketing person did.
Nobody in class expressed deep disdain for the book; some people were put off by the new-agey quality near the end where he invokes the muses and contends that angels fall in on our side if we give ourselves fully to the task, be it writing or painting or composing a symphony, starting a business, or undertaking “any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others..., or any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower.” Robert McKee, writer of the sacred text Story, wrote Pressfield’s foreword, but even early in the book, before you get to the angels, when Pressfield says that Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder may be real, but they can also be manifestations of Resistance, you look for a fold-out of Tom Cruse to spring from the pages and urge us to toss away our meds.
I’m three weeks shy of my fifty-ninth year in the world, but not only am I still learning things about what it is to be a human being, I still get blind-sided by insights that wiser people are able to articulate. With The War of Art it’s Pressfield’s recognition of Resistance. I am so naive – all right, so stupid ... okay, so self-involved, so cocooned in solipsism -- that I thought this force that has defeated me time after time over the years was particular to me. The truth is that I thought it was my father’s voice, or my voice speaking my father’s admonition that I couldn’t do any worthy thing. And maybe it is my father’s voice; maybe that’s the persona Resistance assumes when it overhears me gearing up for work of value to the world beyond what remains of my mother’s little Terry Davis shrine. Resistance knows the lethal faults in our sub-strata. At least it knows mine.
I was the most naive person in that class of seventeen adult human beings; I was the only one amazed that this man recognized in human nature – or in the nature of life – this virulent force I thought was my personal demon. I know, I know: “When are you ever gonna grow up, Davis?”
“Ter Bear,” you say, “come on. How can anyone past the epoch of puberty not know this?”
Self-involvement is the answer, I guess. I’m not sure but that even the most earnest work we do when our target is our self does any good. I don’t mean physical work. I know the physical work we do makes a difference. You start out puffing through a mile, then some weeks or months later, you run twenty-six and feel okay. I know we can change ourselves physically. And I suppose that changes our characters in a way. But what I’m talking about are emotional changes. I get so sick of working to be a better man. Something inside of me seems incapable of doing it. Actually, that thing inside seems not to want to. Christians would call this thing the devil. Pressfield calls it Resistance.
Maybe the Buddhists have it right: maybe the thing to do is let your self go and give up to higher power. This has saved plenty of drunks since those two wise men started Alcoholics Anonymous. But I don’t want to give up. If a guy gives up, what’s left? Jesus? Give me a break.
Pressfield says the thing to do is push forward and wait for help from higher power. You sit down and write every day, he says, and before long the muse shows up, and then you’re no longer on your own. He quotes Somerset Maugham’s response to the question of whether he wrote on a schedule or only when moved by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” Maugham replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
Here’s what Pressfield says:
When we sit down each day and do our work, power
concentrates around us ... we become like a magnetized rod
that attracts iron filings. Ideas come.
Pressfield earns a load of credibility with me. First, he describes the long tough road he took to make himself a professional writer; second he’s written some wonderful books: The Legend of Bagger Vance, by which most of us know him, of course, but Gates of Fire and Tides of War, based in massive research, too; and third, everything he says – even about the angels who come to him – rings true (for him) and in no way self-serving.
I do know from experience that sitting down long enough at the keyboard makes the right words come. But I’ve always thought this was how our intelligence works: we’ve learned a zillion things from reading, remembered a zillion things from our lives, and we’ve imagined a zillion things, and maybe ... maybe ... we have the memories of all our genetic relatives. This is what Jung’s Collective Unconscious really means, right?
All this information mixes in a storyteller’s stew; it cooks in an oven fueled by a distillate of knowledge, memory and imagination, and pretty soon the aroma rises, and then it’s time for supper. We gobble up the stuff for our story until we’re stuffed, then we put the pot back on the burner.
Pressfield attributes this process to divine forces, McKee attributes it to talent, which he says comes from the genes. You don’t care what Davis thinks, and this is a measure of your wisdom. But I’m going to tell you anyway.
Yes, there is such a thing as talent, but this gift is way, way more rare than we think it is. I know a talented writer in Mankato: her name is Nicole Helget. Further north there’s a talented writer named Louise Erdrich. I do not mean to insult these women by calling them talented; they are also hard working. “Davis,” you’re saying, “you numskull. How can talent be an insult?”
To call someone talented can be a subtle insult because it implies – whether we mean it or not – that the person was given a gift and doesn’t have to work as hard as the rest of us. Combine that gift with tenacity over time, though, and you’ve got the mix of gift and skill that Erdrich and Pressfield possess and that Helget, for my money, is making for herself.
For most of us, who were not given the gift of talent, our gifts are desire and tenacity, and to have been loved as kids so we carry loving hearts into the world. In addition, we might have been read to, which gives us a love of story and an understanding of story so deep it seems innate. What the untalented of us do is use our desire and tenacity – and our gifts of having been loved and read to – to teach ourselves, over a long, long haul, the skills it takes to create the illusion of talent. Even those of us who weren’t read to, I believe, can read and read and read and develop the understanding of story and feel for language of people who were.
“But what if we weren’t loved?”
You’ve got me there. As my old fraternity brother Jerry DeMello, from Hilo, used to say: That’s a mean one, man. That’s a f...... mean one.
I do know that we human beings are amazing animals. Our capacity to learn is vast and it might even be infinite. Some of us were learning love right now.
Grad students in my Form and Technique of Narrative class recognized the potent cheese factor in the sub-title of Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art. I didn’t argue. The sub-title is Winning the Inner Creative Battle. Not many of us feel good about carrying around a sign the subtext of which says I’m seeking help with my creativity.
What I did was run a strip of black duct tape across the cover of my copy to hide it. I don’t have a Ph.D., but in the world of adhesives I’m known as Dr. Duct Tape. I used the black because it’s not only more distinctive than the gray but more masculine. I limped across campus in my tattered Iowa Writer’s Workshop sweatshirt banging my taped copy, title out, against my thigh and crooning Roger McGuinn’s Ballad of the Easy Rider under my Wilfred Brimley moustache. In my imagination – and nowhere else – I was the archetypal writer-warrior in his third tour of duty on the fine art front. “Wherever that river flows, that’s where I want to be. Flow river, flow....” I was really headed for my recliner to read the book a third time. Pressfield, as everyone in class new, didn’t write his sub-title; a marketing person did.
Nobody in class expressed deep disdain for the book; some people were put off by the new-agey quality near the end where he invokes the muses and contends that angels fall in on our side if we give ourselves fully to the task, be it writing or painting or composing a symphony, starting a business, or undertaking “any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others..., or any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower.” Robert McKee, writer of the sacred text Story, wrote Pressfield’s foreword, but even early in the book, before you get to the angels, when Pressfield says that Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder may be real, but they can also be manifestations of Resistance, you look for a fold-out of Tom Cruse to spring from the pages and urge us to toss away our meds.
I’m three weeks shy of my fifty-ninth year in the world, but not only am I still learning things about what it is to be a human being, I still get blind-sided by insights that wiser people are able to articulate. With The War of Art it’s Pressfield’s recognition of Resistance. I am so naive – all right, so stupid ... okay, so self-involved, so cocooned in solipsism -- that I thought this force that has defeated me time after time over the years was particular to me. The truth is that I thought it was my father’s voice, or my voice speaking my father’s admonition that I couldn’t do any worthy thing. And maybe it is my father’s voice; maybe that’s the persona Resistance assumes when it overhears me gearing up for work of value to the world beyond what remains of my mother’s little Terry Davis shrine. Resistance knows the lethal faults in our sub-strata. At least it knows mine.
I was the most naive person in that class of seventeen adult human beings; I was the only one amazed that this man recognized in human nature – or in the nature of life – this virulent force I thought was my personal demon. I know, I know: “When are you ever gonna grow up, Davis?”
“Ter Bear,” you say, “come on. How can anyone past the epoch of puberty not know this?”
Self-involvement is the answer, I guess. I’m not sure but that even the most earnest work we do when our target is our self does any good. I don’t mean physical work. I know the physical work we do makes a difference. You start out puffing through a mile, then some weeks or months later, you run twenty-six and feel okay. I know we can change ourselves physically. And I suppose that changes our characters in a way. But what I’m talking about are emotional changes. I get so sick of working to be a better man. Something inside of me seems incapable of doing it. Actually, that thing inside seems not to want to. Christians would call this thing the devil. Pressfield calls it Resistance.
Maybe the Buddhists have it right: maybe the thing to do is let your self go and give up to higher power. This has saved plenty of drunks since those two wise men started Alcoholics Anonymous. But I don’t want to give up. If a guy gives up, what’s left? Jesus? Give me a break.
Pressfield says the thing to do is push forward and wait for help from higher power. You sit down and write every day, he says, and before long the muse shows up, and then you’re no longer on your own. He quotes Somerset Maugham’s response to the question of whether he wrote on a schedule or only when moved by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” Maugham replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
Here’s what Pressfield says:
When we sit down each day and do our work, power
concentrates around us ... we become like a magnetized rod
that attracts iron filings. Ideas come.
Pressfield earns a load of credibility with me. First, he describes the long tough road he took to make himself a professional writer; second he’s written some wonderful books: The Legend of Bagger Vance, by which most of us know him, of course, but Gates of Fire and Tides of War, based in massive research, too; and third, everything he says – even about the angels who come to him – rings true (for him) and in no way self-serving.
I do know from experience that sitting down long enough at the keyboard makes the right words come. But I’ve always thought this was how our intelligence works: we’ve learned a zillion things from reading, remembered a zillion things from our lives, and we’ve imagined a zillion things, and maybe ... maybe ... we have the memories of all our genetic relatives. This is what Jung’s Collective Unconscious really means, right?
All this information mixes in a storyteller’s stew; it cooks in an oven fueled by a distillate of knowledge, memory and imagination, and pretty soon the aroma rises, and then it’s time for supper. We gobble up the stuff for our story until we’re stuffed, then we put the pot back on the burner.
Pressfield attributes this process to divine forces, McKee attributes it to talent, which he says comes from the genes. You don’t care what Davis thinks, and this is a measure of your wisdom. But I’m going to tell you anyway.
Yes, there is such a thing as talent, but this gift is way, way more rare than we think it is. I know a talented writer in Mankato: her name is Nicole Helget. Further north there’s a talented writer named Louise Erdrich. I do not mean to insult these women by calling them talented; they are also hard working. “Davis,” you’re saying, “you numskull. How can talent be an insult?”
To call someone talented can be a subtle insult because it implies – whether we mean it or not – that the person was given a gift and doesn’t have to work as hard as the rest of us. Combine that gift with tenacity over time, though, and you’ve got the mix of gift and skill that Erdrich and Pressfield possess and that Helget, for my money, is making for herself.
For most of us, who were not given the gift of talent, our gifts are desire and tenacity, and to have been loved as kids so we carry loving hearts into the world. In addition, we might have been read to, which gives us a love of story and an understanding of story so deep it seems innate. What the untalented of us do is use our desire and tenacity – and our gifts of having been loved and read to – to teach ourselves, over a long, long haul, the skills it takes to create the illusion of talent. Even those of us who weren’t read to, I believe, can read and read and read and develop the understanding of story and feel for language of people who were.
“But what if we weren’t loved?”
You’ve got me there. As my old fraternity brother Jerry DeMello, from Hilo, used to say: That’s a mean one, man. That’s a f...... mean one.
I do know that we human beings are amazing animals. Our capacity to learn is vast and it might even be infinite. Some of us were learning love right now.
Life Cycles
June 2006
When last we left Davis, the T-Bear (handle with care!), was swirling down the pavement of James Ave. on his right elbow, having experienced what pilots of controlled projectiles refer to as sudden decompression when the badly weather-checked front tire of his ’59 BSA 350 went one direction and the front rim went another. The T-Bear and his venerable mount were slapped to the pavement as though by the hand of a wrathful god. Both suffered abrasions. It was shocking … and the T-Bear was awed. Was the hapless scribbler being paid back for blasphemies in these very pages? Probably.
But enough of me referring to myself in the third-person, like a rich,
unenlightened wide receiver. It’s me again, the T-Bear, himself sharing with Static readers a view from his dotage. And what is that view? It’s looking back, of course. What else are we able to do in our dotage?
I do nothing but smile when I look back on my life with motorcycles. I did plenty of things related to the business of motorcycles I can’t smile about. Paying too much for bikes, selling bikes on time and never getting paid, refusing to trade a bike for cocaine and going to gun play with white punks in Spokane. Guess who was better armed? Yes,
it was the T-Bear (approach with care, oh ye of small caliber). I have way too many weapons for a mentally ill guy. You may refer to me not as Mr. Saturday Night Special, but Mr. Three-Inch Magnum.
Speaking of things diminutive, I do have one instance of motorcycle riding that isn’t a pleasant memory. But this is the only one! Pascal is five, and we’re out on a ’69 500 Triumph we have ignited for the first time since I finally got it fixed. This, of course, should be a clue to disaster. So with the Boog on behind I’m riding down Division, Spokane’s busiest street, when flames shoot out from the battery carrier, which is beneath my seat in the proximity of my dear friend Mr. Tiny – I’m not referring to Pascal here. Mr. Tiny and I don’t go out on the town as much anymore, but back in the Eighties
we were a couple of real scamps.
Coincidence of coincidences, I pull off where my dad and grandfather owned Thompson-Davis Richfield, a service station, in the Fifties. I get the sidestand down and the Boog and I bail off. Pascal, the smart one, gets distance, and I try to put the fire out with my T-shirt. That doesn’t work, so I run into the tire store to get a fire extinguisher. Meanwhile the flames reach the single carb.
How much do you know about the Amal concentric? Are you aware that the concentric has a device called a tickler that helps you start the engine when it’s cold? It functions as an enricher, pumping more gas into the fuel mix. The tickler is outside the carb, though, the plunger part, that is. So you pump this inch-long metal stem, and it allows gas into the mixing chamber, as well as out the stem hole and all over the carburetor. It’s not a lot of gas, but when your bike’s on fire, it’s enough. When I got back with the extinguisher, the bike was fully involved, as they say. When it cooled off, we pushed it home.
A number of my colleagues in the English Dept. think motorcycles are a metaphorical penis extension. This is an accurate appraisal of Jim Peterson in Parks and Rec, and another writer/rider Bob Clark down at Hickory Tech, but not for the T-Bear (shaped like a pear). I tried to trade a motorcycle for an actual penis extension one time. I’d sold a ’73 850 Norton Interstate to a urologist, and I offered him a ‘65 Triumph Mountain Cub for a Super Six Shooter, pretty much the Ducati Monster of … of … penile prostheses, plus the … mounting. He said huge displacement was a passing fad and that good mileage was what the wise driver was looking for as we headed toward the new millennium. I faced the new century as nature made me: fat, crazy and unencumbered with … relationships.
When did I first encumber myself with a motorcycle and did it make me feel more manly?
I was sixteen and running room service at the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane. Yeah, yeah, I know: just like Louden Swain in Vision Quest. They call fiction imaginative writing, Davis. When are you going to actually make something up for a change? I don’t know; I guess I’m just not very imaginative.
I was making good money at the hotel. A couple of older guys working there owned 350 Jawa motocross bikes, my boss rode a Greeves Challenger, our center on the football team rode a Matchless 500 single, a couple guys on the wrestling team had little Hondas. I wanted an 80 cc Yamaha. Seems like a toy motorcycle now, but it was big enough for me then, and it was a thing of the truest beauty. My folks wouldn’t let me buy it with my own money, so I moved out. I bought the bike and lived in a motel for two days. Then I went back home and nobody said anything.
When you’re an adolescent – of any age – motorcycles are to a great degree about manliness. And if you’re stupid and adolescent, they’re all about manliness. That’s a false manliness, of course. But there are certain guys you would be desperately sorry if you said that to. You hardly ever see 1%ers around anymore. These are the ultimately hardcore bikers with the greasy jeans and the denim jackets with cut-off sleeves and often wearing colors, a club patch on the back But there were a lot of 1%ers when I was a kid starting out on my little Yammi. They carried chains and knives that showed and .32s that didn’t. And they hated Japanese bikes.
Tom Sears, Fritz McGinnis, Dudly Mizogouchi – each of whom went on to wrestle Division I -- and I were riding out at Seven Mile one evening after school when four of these outlaws thundered past us from behind. At that time virtually all of them rode black Big Twins – mostly panheads, a few knuckles, even some 45s; the shovel wouldn’t come out till we graduated -- and virtually all their bikes were black. I can’t count the times I heard guys say “Motorcycles are black! They yelled at us and flipped us off. Sears, a genuinely tough guy and a fighter, responded in kind. Except for Tom, we were like characters from Winnie the Pooh on our tiny colorful Jap toys. So they came back. And they would have thumped us. But I knew one of them. He was a dishwasher at the hotel. His name was Gary Sandy – roadname: Wolf.
“Hi, Gary,” I said. “I finally bought a bike.” And it was okay. Gary was always decent to me.
And so was Digger, the Sergeant at Arms of the Ghost Riders in the early Eighties when I had my shop on Standard Street. He would ride in at ten in the evening, and we’d listen to the radio and talk while I worked. Pascal and Anissa, who was a tiny baby, would be asleep in my van backed up to the shop door. Digger was going away for murder, and he wanted me to restore his bagger for his boy. I would have, but I irritated the Hells Angels and became T-Bear non grata to the clubs. I’m lucky I’m not dead. In fact, I’m not sure why I’m not dead. I’m going to ask somebody this summer when I’m back in Spokaloo.
Motorcycles were all about manliness when I was young and stupider. But even though I didn’t verbalize it – or realize it, for heaven’s sake -- my bike was about independence, too. And that is a positive quality of manliness. I paid for it myself, it got me to and from work, I kept it clean and it was evidence of my respect for myself, even though I spoke and showed that respect in so clumsy a way; it took me out in the world alone. Sometimes with friends, of course, but mostly alone, because none of my friends were touched by bikes as I was.
Tune in next month to learn how the T-Bear (from the bowels of his lair) becomes acquainted with an impact driver when the little Yammi goes down for the count, graduates to a Honda 250 Scrambler and is attacked by a woodpecker in his vain quest for manliness.
When last we left Davis, the T-Bear (handle with care!), was swirling down the pavement of James Ave. on his right elbow, having experienced what pilots of controlled projectiles refer to as sudden decompression when the badly weather-checked front tire of his ’59 BSA 350 went one direction and the front rim went another. The T-Bear and his venerable mount were slapped to the pavement as though by the hand of a wrathful god. Both suffered abrasions. It was shocking … and the T-Bear was awed. Was the hapless scribbler being paid back for blasphemies in these very pages? Probably.
But enough of me referring to myself in the third-person, like a rich,
unenlightened wide receiver. It’s me again, the T-Bear, himself sharing with Static readers a view from his dotage. And what is that view? It’s looking back, of course. What else are we able to do in our dotage?
I do nothing but smile when I look back on my life with motorcycles. I did plenty of things related to the business of motorcycles I can’t smile about. Paying too much for bikes, selling bikes on time and never getting paid, refusing to trade a bike for cocaine and going to gun play with white punks in Spokane. Guess who was better armed? Yes,
it was the T-Bear (approach with care, oh ye of small caliber). I have way too many weapons for a mentally ill guy. You may refer to me not as Mr. Saturday Night Special, but Mr. Three-Inch Magnum.
Speaking of things diminutive, I do have one instance of motorcycle riding that isn’t a pleasant memory. But this is the only one! Pascal is five, and we’re out on a ’69 500 Triumph we have ignited for the first time since I finally got it fixed. This, of course, should be a clue to disaster. So with the Boog on behind I’m riding down Division, Spokane’s busiest street, when flames shoot out from the battery carrier, which is beneath my seat in the proximity of my dear friend Mr. Tiny – I’m not referring to Pascal here. Mr. Tiny and I don’t go out on the town as much anymore, but back in the Eighties
we were a couple of real scamps.
Coincidence of coincidences, I pull off where my dad and grandfather owned Thompson-Davis Richfield, a service station, in the Fifties. I get the sidestand down and the Boog and I bail off. Pascal, the smart one, gets distance, and I try to put the fire out with my T-shirt. That doesn’t work, so I run into the tire store to get a fire extinguisher. Meanwhile the flames reach the single carb.
How much do you know about the Amal concentric? Are you aware that the concentric has a device called a tickler that helps you start the engine when it’s cold? It functions as an enricher, pumping more gas into the fuel mix. The tickler is outside the carb, though, the plunger part, that is. So you pump this inch-long metal stem, and it allows gas into the mixing chamber, as well as out the stem hole and all over the carburetor. It’s not a lot of gas, but when your bike’s on fire, it’s enough. When I got back with the extinguisher, the bike was fully involved, as they say. When it cooled off, we pushed it home.
A number of my colleagues in the English Dept. think motorcycles are a metaphorical penis extension. This is an accurate appraisal of Jim Peterson in Parks and Rec, and another writer/rider Bob Clark down at Hickory Tech, but not for the T-Bear (shaped like a pear). I tried to trade a motorcycle for an actual penis extension one time. I’d sold a ’73 850 Norton Interstate to a urologist, and I offered him a ‘65 Triumph Mountain Cub for a Super Six Shooter, pretty much the Ducati Monster of … of … penile prostheses, plus the … mounting. He said huge displacement was a passing fad and that good mileage was what the wise driver was looking for as we headed toward the new millennium. I faced the new century as nature made me: fat, crazy and unencumbered with … relationships.
When did I first encumber myself with a motorcycle and did it make me feel more manly?
I was sixteen and running room service at the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane. Yeah, yeah, I know: just like Louden Swain in Vision Quest. They call fiction imaginative writing, Davis. When are you going to actually make something up for a change? I don’t know; I guess I’m just not very imaginative.
I was making good money at the hotel. A couple of older guys working there owned 350 Jawa motocross bikes, my boss rode a Greeves Challenger, our center on the football team rode a Matchless 500 single, a couple guys on the wrestling team had little Hondas. I wanted an 80 cc Yamaha. Seems like a toy motorcycle now, but it was big enough for me then, and it was a thing of the truest beauty. My folks wouldn’t let me buy it with my own money, so I moved out. I bought the bike and lived in a motel for two days. Then I went back home and nobody said anything.
When you’re an adolescent – of any age – motorcycles are to a great degree about manliness. And if you’re stupid and adolescent, they’re all about manliness. That’s a false manliness, of course. But there are certain guys you would be desperately sorry if you said that to. You hardly ever see 1%ers around anymore. These are the ultimately hardcore bikers with the greasy jeans and the denim jackets with cut-off sleeves and often wearing colors, a club patch on the back But there were a lot of 1%ers when I was a kid starting out on my little Yammi. They carried chains and knives that showed and .32s that didn’t. And they hated Japanese bikes.
Tom Sears, Fritz McGinnis, Dudly Mizogouchi – each of whom went on to wrestle Division I -- and I were riding out at Seven Mile one evening after school when four of these outlaws thundered past us from behind. At that time virtually all of them rode black Big Twins – mostly panheads, a few knuckles, even some 45s; the shovel wouldn’t come out till we graduated -- and virtually all their bikes were black. I can’t count the times I heard guys say “Motorcycles are black! They yelled at us and flipped us off. Sears, a genuinely tough guy and a fighter, responded in kind. Except for Tom, we were like characters from Winnie the Pooh on our tiny colorful Jap toys. So they came back. And they would have thumped us. But I knew one of them. He was a dishwasher at the hotel. His name was Gary Sandy – roadname: Wolf.
“Hi, Gary,” I said. “I finally bought a bike.” And it was okay. Gary was always decent to me.
And so was Digger, the Sergeant at Arms of the Ghost Riders in the early Eighties when I had my shop on Standard Street. He would ride in at ten in the evening, and we’d listen to the radio and talk while I worked. Pascal and Anissa, who was a tiny baby, would be asleep in my van backed up to the shop door. Digger was going away for murder, and he wanted me to restore his bagger for his boy. I would have, but I irritated the Hells Angels and became T-Bear non grata to the clubs. I’m lucky I’m not dead. In fact, I’m not sure why I’m not dead. I’m going to ask somebody this summer when I’m back in Spokaloo.
Motorcycles were all about manliness when I was young and stupider. But even though I didn’t verbalize it – or realize it, for heaven’s sake -- my bike was about independence, too. And that is a positive quality of manliness. I paid for it myself, it got me to and from work, I kept it clean and it was evidence of my respect for myself, even though I spoke and showed that respect in so clumsy a way; it took me out in the world alone. Sometimes with friends, of course, but mostly alone, because none of my friends were touched by bikes as I was.
Tune in next month to learn how the T-Bear (from the bowels of his lair) becomes acquainted with an impact driver when the little Yammi goes down for the count, graduates to a Honda 250 Scrambler and is attacked by a woodpecker in his vain quest for manliness.
A Massacre
July 2006
Isn’t one of the most fundamental qualities about decent behavior that those of us capable of keeping us from harm protect those who aren’t?
What looks like the massacre by our Marines in Iraq and concern about how the stress of so many tours in a guerilla war can change even the most decent human being is what prompts these memories. I don’t know fear to a degree anything like a combat soldier, but I do know fear and I try to learn from it. Fear, I think, is one of the forces that shapes us; I know it’s shaped me.
I’ve told few people these related stories. My kids know, and Bob Clark, Jim Peterson and Frank Embry, the guys I play poker with, veterans all, Clark and Peterson combat veterans, know them, too.
I broke my ankle in the last wrestling match of my junior year at Shadle High in Spokane. It was the toughest match of my short career, against a great athlete but not so great a wrestler named Dick Clute, the guy I based Shute on in Vision Quest. I missed all of in-door baseball and three weeks of outdoor practice, and by the time I could run I’d lost the spot at third. This was a big hurt for me.
I quit school and volunteered for the draft. My parents were so busy they barely noticed. It was the second time I’d quit school and moved out. The first time was because they wouldn’t let me buy a motorcycle with my savings.
The Army recruiters put me through a bunch of tests; they guaranteed me language school in Monterey and other enticing things I don‘t remember. I was afraid when I stepped up into the bus that would take a load of recruits to the induction center in Seattle. I was afraid when we arrived. I looked forward to the physical challenge of basic, but I was afraid of how the instructors would treat me. The foundation of the pyramid of fear was Vietnam; I knew I’d be terrified from the time I stepped off the plane until the moment I got killed or stepped off the plane again in the States. I was afraid of snakes, centipedes and flesh-eating microbes; I was afraid of the other recruits, whose number had multiplied from all over the Northwest, and who were mostly of different races and socio-economic groups. I was tough in physical conflicts with rules, which is to say I was tough in games, but I was afraid to paralysis of combat outside that civilized structure. There were guys in this group who could beat me to death. At the tip of this pyramid of fear was the fear of being humiliated.
I passed the physical. After a while rows of us stood before an officer who would administer the oath and invite us to step over a strip of tape on the floor into military service. At the end of the line behind me I saw a guy I recognized from a tournament in Moses Lake. He was a monster. I was wrestling at 178, two weights up. I’d been afraid of him; in fact, I’d been afraid of even being seen on the mat with him since he made me look like such a wimp. I beat him by a fluke. He tried to pancake me at the whistle, but when I was in the air I got a half on him and changed our position and balance so he wasn’t able to flip me. When we landed I was perpendicular to him rather than parallel; he was on his back and I was on his chest. I tipped up on my toes to center my weight, and the ref slapped the mat. It was an eight-second pin. And a pure fluke.
It doesn’t matter how strong we are, what great shape we’re in, whether we’re rich or white or well trained, whether we love Jesus or believe Jesus loves us: some little guy or girl can gut us if they’re smart or lucky enough. So often it’s our arrogance that does us in.
Arrogance is an invitation to the fundamental justice in the universe to
extinguish us. This, not ignorance or twisted hearts is the reason for the disasters of the Bush administration. Arrogance – along with ignorance and some twisted hearts – was the reason for our disaster in Vietnam.
This big, strong, good-looking kid, who would stand up to anything when the time came, was crying in his mother’s arms.
I repeated the oath, but then I stepped back through the boys with more guts than I, grabbed my bag, walked to I-90 and hitched home. I watched the war on TV. In 1968 my draft lottery number was 212. I wouldn’t have had the guts to go to Canada, and I wouldn’t have had one one-hundredth of the guts to go to jail.
In 1976 I was going to school in the South Bay. Mariette, Pascal’s Mom, and I found an apartment in Oakland. The first week a Gypsy man in the apartment behind us stabbed his dog; the second week Black Panther Party members shot it out with each other six blocks away. I was afraid of the crush of all the different colors of people and the sense that violence would erupt at any time. Not could erupt; would. We moved south to Mountain View, a couple miles from school. This was years before Silicon Valley, of course, so rent was within reach.
One night I woke to the worst screams I’ve heard in real life or the movies. The voice in my head said, A woman is being stabbed. Imagine being stabbed again and again and again. What you’re screaming about in these moments isn’t pain; it’s the thumps of the blows, the sound of your flesh parting, the knowledge of where this is headed and your embrace of the fear of it all. That’s what made me jump out of bed – naked as the day I was born, but with fewer brain cells (Mr. Tiny has grown steadily smaller since that day) – grab my .9mm, chamber a round, tell Mariette to call the police and run out the door. Let me make this clear: I had a powerful weapon and still I was terrified. Gun against a knife: where’s the terror? The terror is in what could happen. The terror is of the kind of guy who could stab someone. That’s no kind of guy I’ve ever known.
The second I get out the door the screaming stops. Above the pool is a rectangle of pale blue light; the rest of the world is dark. I’m leveling the gun at nothing. Then the screaming starts again. I step past the pool house and stand on the walkway to the parking lot. In the light filtering down through the trees from the pole, between two cars, a man is hitting a woman with the heal of his hand as though he’s holding a knife.
I yelled “Stop!” The guy looked at me. I raised the gun to one o’clock and pulled the trigger. Fire shot out the barrel like a rocket into space. The guy took off and the girl crumpled. I was hyperventilating.
Mariette met us at the door. She helped the woman inside where she folded down onto the floor and leaned against one of our St. Vincent de Paul chairs. Her face was bloody but she hadn’t been stabbed. Two white cops walked through the open door. I held the gun in the air, dropped the clip and ejected the shell from the chamber. I’d forgotten I was naked until they told me to put my clothes on.
I sat across the room and saw that the woman had been way more traumatized by a naked white guy with a gun wagging his willy above her head than by the beating.
One of the cops came by the next day and told us the assailant was a former boyfriend who had gotten out of jail the afternoon before. I asked if he thought the guy’s friends in the apartment across the pool, next to the woman who was hurt, would come after me. He said he doubted it.
I stayed scared for days. I told the story over and over to anyone who would listen. I was afraid to fall asleep. I carried my gun everywhere. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but scared people are dangerous, and I was terrifled. I waited for the guys in the apartment across the pool to jump me.
When I couldn’t wait any longer I knocked on their door. I introduced myself and said I was the guy who held a gun on their friend and I needed to know what they thought about that. They said they wished I’d shot him; he wasn’t their friend. They were guys like me, but a different color, less educated and out of work. We would have been more alike except for the forces of chance.
The woman never said a word to me or Mariette, and I don’t blame her.
In 1984 I was running a tiny restoration shop in my garage on Standard Street in a high-crime area of Spokane six blocks north of the beautiful Victorian homes around Gonzaga U. My Dad owned the house and let me live there after he’d had to evict the renters. It was summer so Pascal was staying with me. He was five and Nissie was one. Pascal had good friends and a great time there. The kids might have known they were poor, but they didn’t seem to care. I had a .357 and a Smith riot gun, which is a short-barreled pump shotgun. I never carried the .357; I just kept it in the house and brought it with me to the shop when I worked late and set it in the top drawer of my toolbox.
A beautiful late-sixties custom Sporster sat on the lawn for sale along with two exquisite big twins. One day two white guys in their mid-twenties stopped in a Camero and looked at the Sportster. They wanted it but didn’t have the money.
That night at 3:30 they called and asked if I’d trade the Sportster for cocaine. I said no. They called back and said they were coming to kill me.
I was scared, but because Pascal and Anissa were there, plus friends from California visiting with their new baby, and because I didn’t know how close these guys lived and how soon they’d show up – if they showed up at all, which was doubtful – I couldn’t pack everyone up and leave. Janet got the kids in the cast-iron bathtub and David called 911. I unzipped the riot gun from its case, thumbed back the safety and chambered a round. I loaded one more three-inch magnum shell.
With the three-inch magnum .00 buck rounds this weapon was so fierce it scared me to shoot it. I owned it because it was so fierce. The report and burst of flame were …. Let me say it this way: the Smith wasn’t a smart weapon, but on a man-to-man scale its effect was shocking and awesome. Shooting this in the direction of someone unfamiliar with weapons would make them evacuate their bowels. One round would blow a door off its hinges. A number of rounds would seem like doomsday.
I’d practiced with it so if I ever had to use it I wouldn’t be too shocked and awed to act. Milk jugs filled with gravel, of course, don’t shoot back, nor are they suicide bombers, nor do they plant roadside explosives, nor can they shoulder an RPG. The list of things milk jugs don’t do goes on and on.
I walked out the door and David locked it. I walked across the grass and into Dakota street where I’d seen the Camero pull up under the streetlight on the east corner. I carried the Smith in two hands at my waist. I stopped thirty yards from the Camero. Even excellent shots have to practice a long time with a pistol to hit anything beyond a few yards. It didn’t occur to me that these punks might have good weapons or be good with them. A huge mistake, of course. I know it sounds funny, and I don’t want to romanticize this world, but people with good weapons and the commitment to use them don’t act like these guys acted.
I was scared, but this was different. If I let these guys in the house they could hurt my children and peopled whose only affront to life had been their decision to visit me. I had no choice in this: I meet them in the street or they come to my door. I didn’t choose to feel fatalistic; it was the only way to feel.
Behind the Camero on the corner of Dakota and Nevada was a lumberyard. Nothing but stacks of wood to hurt. I took a breath and tried to act like a courageous man. As quick as I could I shouldered the Smith and fired a round over the Camero’s roof, then another. Fire and two deafening cracks like the fist of doom banging down on the neighborhood. Then I lowered the gun to the level of their windshield and moved forward. I had four rounds left.
But I didn’t need them. I don’t know if it was my doing or if it was the police cruiser wailing up Standard and sliding onto Dakota that moved the guys in the Camero to smoke their tires in reverse and run for it. I held the shotgun high in the air, but still the cops drew down on me. They didn’t relax until I put the gun on the ground and we talked.
I think of these tiny moments of violence in my life, of how deeply they frightened me and how long that fear stayed with me, and I try to imagine what it’s like to be in mortal danger twenty-four hours a day for a year, two years, three. Add to that general stress the trauma of your dearest friends being killed. It takes truly superior men and women to maintain their human decency under those conditions. I’d like to imagine myself as such a man, but I’m not able to.
Isn’t one of the most fundamental qualities about decent behavior that those of us capable of keeping us from harm protect those who aren’t?
What looks like the massacre by our Marines in Iraq and concern about how the stress of so many tours in a guerilla war can change even the most decent human being is what prompts these memories. I don’t know fear to a degree anything like a combat soldier, but I do know fear and I try to learn from it. Fear, I think, is one of the forces that shapes us; I know it’s shaped me.
I’ve told few people these related stories. My kids know, and Bob Clark, Jim Peterson and Frank Embry, the guys I play poker with, veterans all, Clark and Peterson combat veterans, know them, too.
I broke my ankle in the last wrestling match of my junior year at Shadle High in Spokane. It was the toughest match of my short career, against a great athlete but not so great a wrestler named Dick Clute, the guy I based Shute on in Vision Quest. I missed all of in-door baseball and three weeks of outdoor practice, and by the time I could run I’d lost the spot at third. This was a big hurt for me.
I quit school and volunteered for the draft. My parents were so busy they barely noticed. It was the second time I’d quit school and moved out. The first time was because they wouldn’t let me buy a motorcycle with my savings.
The Army recruiters put me through a bunch of tests; they guaranteed me language school in Monterey and other enticing things I don‘t remember. I was afraid when I stepped up into the bus that would take a load of recruits to the induction center in Seattle. I was afraid when we arrived. I looked forward to the physical challenge of basic, but I was afraid of how the instructors would treat me. The foundation of the pyramid of fear was Vietnam; I knew I’d be terrified from the time I stepped off the plane until the moment I got killed or stepped off the plane again in the States. I was afraid of snakes, centipedes and flesh-eating microbes; I was afraid of the other recruits, whose number had multiplied from all over the Northwest, and who were mostly of different races and socio-economic groups. I was tough in physical conflicts with rules, which is to say I was tough in games, but I was afraid to paralysis of combat outside that civilized structure. There were guys in this group who could beat me to death. At the tip of this pyramid of fear was the fear of being humiliated.
I passed the physical. After a while rows of us stood before an officer who would administer the oath and invite us to step over a strip of tape on the floor into military service. At the end of the line behind me I saw a guy I recognized from a tournament in Moses Lake. He was a monster. I was wrestling at 178, two weights up. I’d been afraid of him; in fact, I’d been afraid of even being seen on the mat with him since he made me look like such a wimp. I beat him by a fluke. He tried to pancake me at the whistle, but when I was in the air I got a half on him and changed our position and balance so he wasn’t able to flip me. When we landed I was perpendicular to him rather than parallel; he was on his back and I was on his chest. I tipped up on my toes to center my weight, and the ref slapped the mat. It was an eight-second pin. And a pure fluke.
It doesn’t matter how strong we are, what great shape we’re in, whether we’re rich or white or well trained, whether we love Jesus or believe Jesus loves us: some little guy or girl can gut us if they’re smart or lucky enough. So often it’s our arrogance that does us in.
Arrogance is an invitation to the fundamental justice in the universe to
extinguish us. This, not ignorance or twisted hearts is the reason for the disasters of the Bush administration. Arrogance – along with ignorance and some twisted hearts – was the reason for our disaster in Vietnam.
This big, strong, good-looking kid, who would stand up to anything when the time came, was crying in his mother’s arms.
I repeated the oath, but then I stepped back through the boys with more guts than I, grabbed my bag, walked to I-90 and hitched home. I watched the war on TV. In 1968 my draft lottery number was 212. I wouldn’t have had the guts to go to Canada, and I wouldn’t have had one one-hundredth of the guts to go to jail.
In 1976 I was going to school in the South Bay. Mariette, Pascal’s Mom, and I found an apartment in Oakland. The first week a Gypsy man in the apartment behind us stabbed his dog; the second week Black Panther Party members shot it out with each other six blocks away. I was afraid of the crush of all the different colors of people and the sense that violence would erupt at any time. Not could erupt; would. We moved south to Mountain View, a couple miles from school. This was years before Silicon Valley, of course, so rent was within reach.
One night I woke to the worst screams I’ve heard in real life or the movies. The voice in my head said, A woman is being stabbed. Imagine being stabbed again and again and again. What you’re screaming about in these moments isn’t pain; it’s the thumps of the blows, the sound of your flesh parting, the knowledge of where this is headed and your embrace of the fear of it all. That’s what made me jump out of bed – naked as the day I was born, but with fewer brain cells (Mr. Tiny has grown steadily smaller since that day) – grab my .9mm, chamber a round, tell Mariette to call the police and run out the door. Let me make this clear: I had a powerful weapon and still I was terrified. Gun against a knife: where’s the terror? The terror is in what could happen. The terror is of the kind of guy who could stab someone. That’s no kind of guy I’ve ever known.
The second I get out the door the screaming stops. Above the pool is a rectangle of pale blue light; the rest of the world is dark. I’m leveling the gun at nothing. Then the screaming starts again. I step past the pool house and stand on the walkway to the parking lot. In the light filtering down through the trees from the pole, between two cars, a man is hitting a woman with the heal of his hand as though he’s holding a knife.
I yelled “Stop!” The guy looked at me. I raised the gun to one o’clock and pulled the trigger. Fire shot out the barrel like a rocket into space. The guy took off and the girl crumpled. I was hyperventilating.
Mariette met us at the door. She helped the woman inside where she folded down onto the floor and leaned against one of our St. Vincent de Paul chairs. Her face was bloody but she hadn’t been stabbed. Two white cops walked through the open door. I held the gun in the air, dropped the clip and ejected the shell from the chamber. I’d forgotten I was naked until they told me to put my clothes on.
I sat across the room and saw that the woman had been way more traumatized by a naked white guy with a gun wagging his willy above her head than by the beating.
One of the cops came by the next day and told us the assailant was a former boyfriend who had gotten out of jail the afternoon before. I asked if he thought the guy’s friends in the apartment across the pool, next to the woman who was hurt, would come after me. He said he doubted it.
I stayed scared for days. I told the story over and over to anyone who would listen. I was afraid to fall asleep. I carried my gun everywhere. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but scared people are dangerous, and I was terrifled. I waited for the guys in the apartment across the pool to jump me.
When I couldn’t wait any longer I knocked on their door. I introduced myself and said I was the guy who held a gun on their friend and I needed to know what they thought about that. They said they wished I’d shot him; he wasn’t their friend. They were guys like me, but a different color, less educated and out of work. We would have been more alike except for the forces of chance.
The woman never said a word to me or Mariette, and I don’t blame her.
In 1984 I was running a tiny restoration shop in my garage on Standard Street in a high-crime area of Spokane six blocks north of the beautiful Victorian homes around Gonzaga U. My Dad owned the house and let me live there after he’d had to evict the renters. It was summer so Pascal was staying with me. He was five and Nissie was one. Pascal had good friends and a great time there. The kids might have known they were poor, but they didn’t seem to care. I had a .357 and a Smith riot gun, which is a short-barreled pump shotgun. I never carried the .357; I just kept it in the house and brought it with me to the shop when I worked late and set it in the top drawer of my toolbox.
A beautiful late-sixties custom Sporster sat on the lawn for sale along with two exquisite big twins. One day two white guys in their mid-twenties stopped in a Camero and looked at the Sportster. They wanted it but didn’t have the money.
That night at 3:30 they called and asked if I’d trade the Sportster for cocaine. I said no. They called back and said they were coming to kill me.
I was scared, but because Pascal and Anissa were there, plus friends from California visiting with their new baby, and because I didn’t know how close these guys lived and how soon they’d show up – if they showed up at all, which was doubtful – I couldn’t pack everyone up and leave. Janet got the kids in the cast-iron bathtub and David called 911. I unzipped the riot gun from its case, thumbed back the safety and chambered a round. I loaded one more three-inch magnum shell.
With the three-inch magnum .00 buck rounds this weapon was so fierce it scared me to shoot it. I owned it because it was so fierce. The report and burst of flame were …. Let me say it this way: the Smith wasn’t a smart weapon, but on a man-to-man scale its effect was shocking and awesome. Shooting this in the direction of someone unfamiliar with weapons would make them evacuate their bowels. One round would blow a door off its hinges. A number of rounds would seem like doomsday.
I’d practiced with it so if I ever had to use it I wouldn’t be too shocked and awed to act. Milk jugs filled with gravel, of course, don’t shoot back, nor are they suicide bombers, nor do they plant roadside explosives, nor can they shoulder an RPG. The list of things milk jugs don’t do goes on and on.
I walked out the door and David locked it. I walked across the grass and into Dakota street where I’d seen the Camero pull up under the streetlight on the east corner. I carried the Smith in two hands at my waist. I stopped thirty yards from the Camero. Even excellent shots have to practice a long time with a pistol to hit anything beyond a few yards. It didn’t occur to me that these punks might have good weapons or be good with them. A huge mistake, of course. I know it sounds funny, and I don’t want to romanticize this world, but people with good weapons and the commitment to use them don’t act like these guys acted.
I was scared, but this was different. If I let these guys in the house they could hurt my children and peopled whose only affront to life had been their decision to visit me. I had no choice in this: I meet them in the street or they come to my door. I didn’t choose to feel fatalistic; it was the only way to feel.
Behind the Camero on the corner of Dakota and Nevada was a lumberyard. Nothing but stacks of wood to hurt. I took a breath and tried to act like a courageous man. As quick as I could I shouldered the Smith and fired a round over the Camero’s roof, then another. Fire and two deafening cracks like the fist of doom banging down on the neighborhood. Then I lowered the gun to the level of their windshield and moved forward. I had four rounds left.
But I didn’t need them. I don’t know if it was my doing or if it was the police cruiser wailing up Standard and sliding onto Dakota that moved the guys in the Camero to smoke their tires in reverse and run for it. I held the shotgun high in the air, but still the cops drew down on me. They didn’t relax until I put the gun on the ground and we talked.
I think of these tiny moments of violence in my life, of how deeply they frightened me and how long that fear stayed with me, and I try to imagine what it’s like to be in mortal danger twenty-four hours a day for a year, two years, three. Add to that general stress the trauma of your dearest friends being killed. It takes truly superior men and women to maintain their human decency under those conditions. I’d like to imagine myself as such a man, but I’m not able to.
Terms of Endearment
December 2006
Every word of this is true. I recall these events now at the inspirational nudge of Static editor Joe Tougas, in whose wisdom the entire Static crew seeks the light in this December issue.
Once upon a time, before Tougas lived in the house up the block at the top of James Avenue, when Becky (known these days as the Former Mrs.) ... when Becky Davis and I were married and raising Nikki, Josh and Snickers’ pups, there lived in that modest white stucco house clinging to the crumbling crest of the ravine like the American middle-class clutching by our bloody fingernails to our disintegrating economic status ... there lived in that house a Bangladeshi Muslim who was Chair of the Agronomy Department at MSU. His name was Mohammed Patil. He’d come whistling down the sidewalk on his way to catch the bus, swinging the old-fashioned leather briefcase his father had bought in London when he was a student and given to Mo when Mo moved to the States, and I’d be sitting on the porch reading, and I’d hollar, “Yo, Mo!”
And he’d stop and poke his head through a thin spot in our hedge and reply, “Is that Teresa Dave-Ass on his porch daveno reee-ding like one little girrr-l!”
In a moment of weakness induced by Mo’s post-Simpson’s martinis I had revealed how the kids in elementary school teased me about my name.
Before you call me a bigot and admonish me for not allowing this man the dignity of his name, let me say that we grew to be friends watching The Simpsons. He didn’t specify the show when he invited me over to meet his favorite TV character. He told me he’d blend me up a chutney squishee. I didn’t know what chutney was, let along something called a chutney squishee. All I watched on TV were the animal shows. Mo’s favorite character was Apu, the Indian from India, who runs the Kwik-E-Mart.
I know what you’re thinking: “How is it that a cultivated fellow like Dr. Mo Patil, a guy with not one but two Ph.Ds – Agronomy and Hydrology – would tolerate, let alone enjoy, a cultural stereotype like Apu?” The answer is that Mo didn’t have a gram of pretense or political correctness in him. I suppose the answer could also be that Mo was Muslim and Apu is Hindu. I prefer to believe that Mo’s expansive heart had room for a good laugh on everybody. What Mo’s heart did not have, however, was room for dogs. This was the only character flaw I observed Mo to suffer. So, of course, I went right for it.
Snickers had given birth to six pups that winter, and they were now knee-high – except for Norton the runt, who looked more like an opossum than a dog and barked like a seal – and they were ready to give away. Snickers is a Siberian Husky-Golden Retriever mix, and the puppies father was a Golden; the pups themselves were beautiful, wonderful American mutts, except for the one little oxygen-deprived, always-last-to-the-tit mutant Norton, with whom I identified most closely.
I would gather my attack pups around me on the porch and wait for Mo. I’d hear his door open and close, then the leather soles of his wingtips on the sidewalk.
“All right, muttskis,” I’d say. “We are the old world colonial power, and that guy up there is a wog dipped in ham juice. GO GET ‘IM! And off they’d go a hikin’ -- as my Dear Old Mater, Lucille Bernice, used to say -- Yodi with his grown-up bark leading the pack, and Norton chugging along behind, arping, wondering what his brothers and sisters were up to at such a pace. Norty’s right hip never worked correctly; he had to throw his leg out in a wide arc to get up any steam. And he had terrible balance. He’d walk along the edge of the porch and fall off into the bushes. That could have been his lousy eyesight, too.
You figure an animal possesses all kinds of animal litheness and cunning and communion with nature. But nature shortchanged the Nort: he was flompy and guileless. With each example I observed of nature’s gifts withheld from the SkurBear, the more I loved him.
His brothers and sisters had received their names first, mostly from Nikki: Yodi, Coda, Bolshoi, Walter, Custer. Josh named Nort after our old British motorcycle: he was Norton Commando Davis. That was his name, but you know how it goes with the names of creatures and people we love: Josh began calling him Nortskur; one of us shortened that to the Skur, it evolved to NortskurBear, Skurbear, Skurberry.
We found good homes for Coda, Bolshoi, Walter and Custer, and Yodi found a home with the Everywhere Spirit whom our friend Jim Petersen said must have needed a good dog on the other side.
Mo expressed his condolences about Yodi, and we knew he was sincere. But he was also glorifying in the absence of our gang of muttskis gamboling at his heels twice daily for a solid block, nipping his pant cuffs and breaking off their milkteeth in those little round holes in his shoes.
I was teaching the young Nortberry to catch biscuits when Mo walked down the sidewalk one stunning evening in April. Every tree and plant was budded out, and the earth was redolent, as the poet says, with the assurance of new life and continuing possibility. I sat on the porch couch, and Norton sat in front of me a number of degrees off-kilter because of his bad hip. He was ringed by biscuits whole and in pieces, and a film of light brown biscuit dust clung to his darkly mottled carmel coat. Mo walked up the steps and extended his hand at the moment I tossed yet another. So far I had not motivated Nort to open his mouth, or even move his snoot, let alone catch a bisky: this one landed on his head and stayed there.
Mo and I shook hands as we always did. He looked down with heightened disdain at my poor addled Skurberry with the biscuit on his head. Norty’s little black eyes were always slightly crossed; they almost seemed to acknowledge a presence above them. I grabbed the biscuit, Mo sat down, then Norty worked his way to all-fours, climbed onto the couch and lay his head in my lap. I held the biscuit under his nose; he opened his mouth and I shoved it in. He pondered a moment – or seemed to – then he chomped away with vigor and determination. I smiled pridefully.
“Yo,” I said, “Mo. What are you doing flouncing down my sidewalk on this beautiful Minnesota evening?”
He replied in his Apu voice; I knew that I and my Skurberry were in for a battle of wits where we’d be hopelessly outnumbered. “It is you who is the big flouncer, Miss Teresa Dave-Ass, here on her porch daveno with her creature of indeterminate specie.”
“I abide no blaspheming of My Dear Skurberry,” I replied. I rubbed Norton under his ear. He chomped away. A drool spot the diameter of a soupbowl had appeared on the crotch of my overalls. Biscuit chunks adorned it like mini-croutons.
“I have come to reveal to you the origin of this... Mo looked down at Norton as though my happily chomping Skur were something floating by in the yearly Ganges flood. “... this dog,” he said in his professorial voice. Then he switched back to Apu: “After which I am offering to blend you up one aubergine ... one egg plant squishee.”
I told Mo to reveal away, and I gave Nort another bisky and settled back.
“When God made Adam, Mo said, “the devil was furious because God looked upon Adam as His finest creation. God had made the devil of fire, and Adam of earth. The devil claimed that fire was a superior material, and that he was, therefore, superior to Adam. The harder the devil pressed his claim, the more his hatred for Adam grew. One day the devil and Adam were arguing, and he spit on Adam, right in the center of his belly. God was outraged to see the best of his handiwork defaced in this way. He reached down, pinched away the piece of flesh and threw it on the ground. An indentation remained in Adam’s belly and in the bellies of all of Adam’s offspring where God removed the flesh the devil had defiled. It looks like a little button.”
I nodded. I like a good belly-button myth as well as the next guy. “I thought you said this was a dog story.”
Mo stood. He glanced down at Norty and didn’t crack a smile. Then he turned his eyes back to me. “God looked at the little piece of flesh on the ground and did not want even one such small piece to go to waste,” Mo said. “And so out of this profaned scrap of flesh God made the dog, whose duty it would be to clean up scraps forever.”
He turned and walked down the steps. He didn’t turn back when he spoke in his Apu voice: “Come visit the Kwik-E-Mart later, and I am blending you up one mongoose squishee and one roadkill squishee in a to-go cup for your friend.”
“We’ll be there!” I yelled after him.
Wonderful, I thought. Brilliant. All my poor Skurberry needs is a vicious dose of anti-dog myth from the bowels of the Koran to squash his self-esteem forever. I looked down. Nort’s narrow black eyes perched over his dry and cracking parody of a dog nose like an out-of-office response that said NO ONE HOME ... EVER. How could I tell if my dear SkurBear had been undone by this attack of species bigotry. The only time Norty had ever taken on a different expression was when he had a baby raccoon in his mouth, and then he looked confused and vacant. He was awake, which was all you could ever discern of his relationship to his environment. My dear friend Norton was a vessel of indeterminate content in whom I invested more love than I knew I possessed. I rubbed under his ear and told him the true story of how his ancestors came to be.
“Skurbear,” I said, “everybody thinks Adam was a guy full of confidence because he was God’s favorite creation. But he wasn’t as confident as everybody thinks. The truth is that Adam was lonely in the enormous new world all around him. Plus, the devil picked on him all the time. And plus again, the devil glowed ferocious with flames and brilliant shiny shimmers of heat, because he was made of fire, and Adam was made of the brown earth. The truth was that even though the devil was bad, he was beautiful, and Adam didn’t feel beautiful. Plus, he was lonely in the enormous new world.
“Once the devil saw that Adam felt inferior his hatred for him grew. One day he was bullying Adam and his contempt boiled over. He spit on Adam – as all the stories tell – right in the center of his belly.
“But here’s where all the stories get it wrong.
“The devil’s spit was volcanic, and it burned that hole in Adam’s belly. Why didn’t God blow on it to cool it off? Because God wasn’t around right then, that’s why. And the devil knew it. That’s something else the other stories get wrong: God isn’t always around.
“When God came back he found Adam sitting on a smooth round rock staring into the fiery sunset. Adam was feeling that everything in the world was brighter and stronger than he was. This wasn’t true, but that’s how Adam felt. God looked into Adam’s heart and saw all of this.
“God walked with Adam far from the devil’s radiance and roar. God reached into Adam’s heart and excised a little piece. He pointed to a patch of earth where flecks of gold lay on the surface like tiny leaves. My son, God said, I am going to make a new creature who will always love you. God scraped up a palm full of earth and mixed it with the piece of Adam’s heart. He wrung his hands together and molded the heart-earth into a ball the color of dark carmel. He rolled the ball out on the ground. It sprouted four legs, a tail, pointed ears, a bright, curious face radiant of love, and a noble snoot. The dog ran up to Adam and licked his foot where Adam had stepped in something nasty. It tickled, and in a few licks Adam’s foot was clean.. Adam smiled. The dog smiled. God smiled. And Adam had a friend forever.”
Norty and I sat as the evening faded and cooled into night, then we trundled up the block for gin and vermouth squishees with our friend.
Every word of this is true. I recall these events now at the inspirational nudge of Static editor Joe Tougas, in whose wisdom the entire Static crew seeks the light in this December issue.
Once upon a time, before Tougas lived in the house up the block at the top of James Avenue, when Becky (known these days as the Former Mrs.) ... when Becky Davis and I were married and raising Nikki, Josh and Snickers’ pups, there lived in that modest white stucco house clinging to the crumbling crest of the ravine like the American middle-class clutching by our bloody fingernails to our disintegrating economic status ... there lived in that house a Bangladeshi Muslim who was Chair of the Agronomy Department at MSU. His name was Mohammed Patil. He’d come whistling down the sidewalk on his way to catch the bus, swinging the old-fashioned leather briefcase his father had bought in London when he was a student and given to Mo when Mo moved to the States, and I’d be sitting on the porch reading, and I’d hollar, “Yo, Mo!”
And he’d stop and poke his head through a thin spot in our hedge and reply, “Is that Teresa Dave-Ass on his porch daveno reee-ding like one little girrr-l!”
In a moment of weakness induced by Mo’s post-Simpson’s martinis I had revealed how the kids in elementary school teased me about my name.
Before you call me a bigot and admonish me for not allowing this man the dignity of his name, let me say that we grew to be friends watching The Simpsons. He didn’t specify the show when he invited me over to meet his favorite TV character. He told me he’d blend me up a chutney squishee. I didn’t know what chutney was, let along something called a chutney squishee. All I watched on TV were the animal shows. Mo’s favorite character was Apu, the Indian from India, who runs the Kwik-E-Mart.
I know what you’re thinking: “How is it that a cultivated fellow like Dr. Mo Patil, a guy with not one but two Ph.Ds – Agronomy and Hydrology – would tolerate, let alone enjoy, a cultural stereotype like Apu?” The answer is that Mo didn’t have a gram of pretense or political correctness in him. I suppose the answer could also be that Mo was Muslim and Apu is Hindu. I prefer to believe that Mo’s expansive heart had room for a good laugh on everybody. What Mo’s heart did not have, however, was room for dogs. This was the only character flaw I observed Mo to suffer. So, of course, I went right for it.
Snickers had given birth to six pups that winter, and they were now knee-high – except for Norton the runt, who looked more like an opossum than a dog and barked like a seal – and they were ready to give away. Snickers is a Siberian Husky-Golden Retriever mix, and the puppies father was a Golden; the pups themselves were beautiful, wonderful American mutts, except for the one little oxygen-deprived, always-last-to-the-tit mutant Norton, with whom I identified most closely.
I would gather my attack pups around me on the porch and wait for Mo. I’d hear his door open and close, then the leather soles of his wingtips on the sidewalk.
“All right, muttskis,” I’d say. “We are the old world colonial power, and that guy up there is a wog dipped in ham juice. GO GET ‘IM! And off they’d go a hikin’ -- as my Dear Old Mater, Lucille Bernice, used to say -- Yodi with his grown-up bark leading the pack, and Norton chugging along behind, arping, wondering what his brothers and sisters were up to at such a pace. Norty’s right hip never worked correctly; he had to throw his leg out in a wide arc to get up any steam. And he had terrible balance. He’d walk along the edge of the porch and fall off into the bushes. That could have been his lousy eyesight, too.
You figure an animal possesses all kinds of animal litheness and cunning and communion with nature. But nature shortchanged the Nort: he was flompy and guileless. With each example I observed of nature’s gifts withheld from the SkurBear, the more I loved him.
His brothers and sisters had received their names first, mostly from Nikki: Yodi, Coda, Bolshoi, Walter, Custer. Josh named Nort after our old British motorcycle: he was Norton Commando Davis. That was his name, but you know how it goes with the names of creatures and people we love: Josh began calling him Nortskur; one of us shortened that to the Skur, it evolved to NortskurBear, Skurbear, Skurberry.
We found good homes for Coda, Bolshoi, Walter and Custer, and Yodi found a home with the Everywhere Spirit whom our friend Jim Petersen said must have needed a good dog on the other side.
Mo expressed his condolences about Yodi, and we knew he was sincere. But he was also glorifying in the absence of our gang of muttskis gamboling at his heels twice daily for a solid block, nipping his pant cuffs and breaking off their milkteeth in those little round holes in his shoes.
I was teaching the young Nortberry to catch biscuits when Mo walked down the sidewalk one stunning evening in April. Every tree and plant was budded out, and the earth was redolent, as the poet says, with the assurance of new life and continuing possibility. I sat on the porch couch, and Norton sat in front of me a number of degrees off-kilter because of his bad hip. He was ringed by biscuits whole and in pieces, and a film of light brown biscuit dust clung to his darkly mottled carmel coat. Mo walked up the steps and extended his hand at the moment I tossed yet another. So far I had not motivated Nort to open his mouth, or even move his snoot, let alone catch a bisky: this one landed on his head and stayed there.
Mo and I shook hands as we always did. He looked down with heightened disdain at my poor addled Skurberry with the biscuit on his head. Norty’s little black eyes were always slightly crossed; they almost seemed to acknowledge a presence above them. I grabbed the biscuit, Mo sat down, then Norty worked his way to all-fours, climbed onto the couch and lay his head in my lap. I held the biscuit under his nose; he opened his mouth and I shoved it in. He pondered a moment – or seemed to – then he chomped away with vigor and determination. I smiled pridefully.
“Yo,” I said, “Mo. What are you doing flouncing down my sidewalk on this beautiful Minnesota evening?”
He replied in his Apu voice; I knew that I and my Skurberry were in for a battle of wits where we’d be hopelessly outnumbered. “It is you who is the big flouncer, Miss Teresa Dave-Ass, here on her porch daveno with her creature of indeterminate specie.”
“I abide no blaspheming of My Dear Skurberry,” I replied. I rubbed Norton under his ear. He chomped away. A drool spot the diameter of a soupbowl had appeared on the crotch of my overalls. Biscuit chunks adorned it like mini-croutons.
“I have come to reveal to you the origin of this... Mo looked down at Norton as though my happily chomping Skur were something floating by in the yearly Ganges flood. “... this dog,” he said in his professorial voice. Then he switched back to Apu: “After which I am offering to blend you up one aubergine ... one egg plant squishee.”
I told Mo to reveal away, and I gave Nort another bisky and settled back.
“When God made Adam, Mo said, “the devil was furious because God looked upon Adam as His finest creation. God had made the devil of fire, and Adam of earth. The devil claimed that fire was a superior material, and that he was, therefore, superior to Adam. The harder the devil pressed his claim, the more his hatred for Adam grew. One day the devil and Adam were arguing, and he spit on Adam, right in the center of his belly. God was outraged to see the best of his handiwork defaced in this way. He reached down, pinched away the piece of flesh and threw it on the ground. An indentation remained in Adam’s belly and in the bellies of all of Adam’s offspring where God removed the flesh the devil had defiled. It looks like a little button.”
I nodded. I like a good belly-button myth as well as the next guy. “I thought you said this was a dog story.”
Mo stood. He glanced down at Norty and didn’t crack a smile. Then he turned his eyes back to me. “God looked at the little piece of flesh on the ground and did not want even one such small piece to go to waste,” Mo said. “And so out of this profaned scrap of flesh God made the dog, whose duty it would be to clean up scraps forever.”
He turned and walked down the steps. He didn’t turn back when he spoke in his Apu voice: “Come visit the Kwik-E-Mart later, and I am blending you up one mongoose squishee and one roadkill squishee in a to-go cup for your friend.”
“We’ll be there!” I yelled after him.
Wonderful, I thought. Brilliant. All my poor Skurberry needs is a vicious dose of anti-dog myth from the bowels of the Koran to squash his self-esteem forever. I looked down. Nort’s narrow black eyes perched over his dry and cracking parody of a dog nose like an out-of-office response that said NO ONE HOME ... EVER. How could I tell if my dear SkurBear had been undone by this attack of species bigotry. The only time Norty had ever taken on a different expression was when he had a baby raccoon in his mouth, and then he looked confused and vacant. He was awake, which was all you could ever discern of his relationship to his environment. My dear friend Norton was a vessel of indeterminate content in whom I invested more love than I knew I possessed. I rubbed under his ear and told him the true story of how his ancestors came to be.
“Skurbear,” I said, “everybody thinks Adam was a guy full of confidence because he was God’s favorite creation. But he wasn’t as confident as everybody thinks. The truth is that Adam was lonely in the enormous new world all around him. Plus, the devil picked on him all the time. And plus again, the devil glowed ferocious with flames and brilliant shiny shimmers of heat, because he was made of fire, and Adam was made of the brown earth. The truth was that even though the devil was bad, he was beautiful, and Adam didn’t feel beautiful. Plus, he was lonely in the enormous new world.
“Once the devil saw that Adam felt inferior his hatred for him grew. One day he was bullying Adam and his contempt boiled over. He spit on Adam – as all the stories tell – right in the center of his belly.
“But here’s where all the stories get it wrong.
“The devil’s spit was volcanic, and it burned that hole in Adam’s belly. Why didn’t God blow on it to cool it off? Because God wasn’t around right then, that’s why. And the devil knew it. That’s something else the other stories get wrong: God isn’t always around.
“When God came back he found Adam sitting on a smooth round rock staring into the fiery sunset. Adam was feeling that everything in the world was brighter and stronger than he was. This wasn’t true, but that’s how Adam felt. God looked into Adam’s heart and saw all of this.
“God walked with Adam far from the devil’s radiance and roar. God reached into Adam’s heart and excised a little piece. He pointed to a patch of earth where flecks of gold lay on the surface like tiny leaves. My son, God said, I am going to make a new creature who will always love you. God scraped up a palm full of earth and mixed it with the piece of Adam’s heart. He wrung his hands together and molded the heart-earth into a ball the color of dark carmel. He rolled the ball out on the ground. It sprouted four legs, a tail, pointed ears, a bright, curious face radiant of love, and a noble snoot. The dog ran up to Adam and licked his foot where Adam had stepped in something nasty. It tickled, and in a few licks Adam’s foot was clean.. Adam smiled. The dog smiled. God smiled. And Adam had a friend forever.”
Norty and I sat as the evening faded and cooled into night, then we trundled up the block for gin and vermouth squishees with our friend.
Part of the Cosmos
January 2007
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.
I go outside late on a freezing winter night – like tonight – and I see that place and those people in my mind. They’re all gone; and I’m older now than my folks were then. But the same stars are still up in that cold, black, beautiful sky.
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.
I go outside late on a freezing winter night – like tonight – and I see that place and those people in my mind. They’re all gone; and I’m older now than my folks were then. But the same stars are still up in that cold, black, beautiful sky.
Lincoln's Melancholy:
How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness
February 2007
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.
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.
Walking with Dogs, Thinking of Dad
March 2007
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.
[1] Particle physicists are thinking in this vein more and more, and these are people smarter, better educated and capable of thought way deeper than mine.
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.
[1] Particle physicists are thinking in this vein more and more, and these are people smarter, better educated and capable of thought way deeper than mine.
George Bush and the Old Testament God:
Not just Apples and Oranges
April 2007
It scares me and it breaks my heart to consider the thoughtlessness that so many of us practice. And I do mean practice, because we work at it. We work at it, mostly, by our near worship of two things: 1. tradition and 2. belief.
Tradition – now let’s think about this, please – tradition is pretty much cliche, isn’t it? Tradition consists of practices – and beliefs – that have been around a long time and seem to be good, or at least not harmful. For example, the cliche That’s like comparing apples and oranges. Everybody knows you can’t compare apples and oranges – right? We hear it all the time. It’s familiar – an old friend – like Thanksgiving dinner. And since we hear it all the time many of us believe it. And like so many of the things so many of us believe, it isn’t true. We’d see the inaccuracy in this careless statement if we thought beyond the cliche. Of course we can compare apples and oranges: both are fruit, both grow on trees, each has a roundish shape, both contain seeds, both give us tasty and nutritious juice. Smarter people than your faithful Static columnist can probably reel off a page of comparisons. But you get it – right? We believe this inaccurate statement about the world because we don’t pay attention. Sure, it’s a little thing. Why should we demand of such a little thing that it be accurate?
My view is that we live in the world, and so to move through the world safely and get the things we need and want – to care for our kids, of course, and be positive examples to them, to inspire them to do and to be better than we are – to do these things in the world we need to pay attention to the world. And this takes thoughtfulness ... thoughtfulness about everything. We all hear how business gurus admonish their faithful to “think outside the box.” All of us need to think outside the box, but most of us live inside the box, and we’re happy there, and we feel safe. And you know what else we feel? We feel virtuous. This nearly un-hinges me.
I’m getting to George Bush and the Old Testament God, I promise. Just give me a minute here while I try to keep hinged.
I love the world. I believe in the world, as opposed to things other-worldly. What would you call someone who believes as I do – besides a commie, that is? Okay, it’s liberal now; it was commie when I was growing up. An existentialist is what I am. No, I’m not some skinny French dink with a copy of L’Etre et le Neant, smoking a brown cigarette, in line for a Jerry Lewis revival. I believe in the value of existence over essence. I believe in spirit, all right. I believe plenty in spirit. But it’s the human spirit I believe in. And because I believe in the things of the world and in the best qualities of the human character, I believe in using the best of my humanity to make myself the best human I can be in the time I’ve got, which is why I pay attention to the world and to words.
I’ve paid attention to George Bush. I listened in the debate when the woman asked him if he ever made a mistake, and the man did not have a clue what she was talking about. People who believe – especially if some of their beliefs are in the divinity of Jesus – and double-especially if they have that personal relationship with Him – aren’t capable of making mistakes, I guess. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because their pal Jesus forgives them everything if they just believe in Him. Boy, there’s a cheap ticket out of accountability and to the hereafter! And besides, what does the world matter anyway? What matters is what comes after this -- right? Tell that to the souls of the Americans killed in Iraq. Tell their wives and their husbands and their kids and their parents that we’re just passing through. We’ll all see those dear souls we love in the hereafter.
Make no mistake: we went into Iraq because George Bush and his clean-cut cabal wanted to. They’d been waiting years to get their hands on a fighting force to do it. And they lied and twisted every piece of intelligence they could to justify it. If you think we’re in Iraq to protect American freedoms you’re the most thoughtless organism in the universe. If we wanted to help people and establish democracy somewhere, why didn’t we do it in Haiti?
The quality that thoughtless people most admire in George Bush is that he believes. He believes fervently. He is an ardent (you hear the cliches – right?) believer ... in all his beliefs. And that includes Jesus and the Iraq war and ... and cutting brush, I suppose. And, man, I believe in cutting brush myself. I love cutting brush and chopping wood. What these thoughtless George Bush worshipers don’t consider is that a person’s beliefs need to be accurate to be worthy of respect. They need to be grounded in accuracy about the world. And this man’s beliefs – and the beliefs of his friends – are not. These people’s beliefs are grounded in fundamentalist Christian, wealthy arrogance. Bush isn’t especially smart, but his pals are smart. It’s their arrogance that will be their – and our – undoing. There is nothing more dangerous on this earth than a true believer whose beliefs aren’t accurate. Okay, okay, all true believers are dangerous. I’ve read the books, too.
Sheriff Bull Conner believed. Lester Maddox believed. George Wallace believed, and then he un-believed and believed in something else when he got shot. Nancy Regan did not believe in stem cell research, but then when her husband died of a disease that might be cured by stem cell research, she was so overcome with belief that she departed from the beliefs of her president. Among the things these people believed were tradition and family values. Republicans say they believe in “states’ rights”, but when it looked like Washington State would vote in assisted suicide, Republicans quit believing in states’ rights for Washington. It’s not just hypocrisy; it’s a soul-less, ethical sliminess I wish I were smart enough to think of the word for. John Wilkes Booth believed, and his belief brought him to kill maybe the greatest American who ever lived.
Okay, I’ve got myself pulled together. I’m hinged tighter than a Bob Jones freshman. More sticks on the fire; the dogs are asleep, a retrospective Dylan compilation from my son the Joshman on the box and now it’s time to go head-to-head with the God of the Israelites.
I want to make a point about belief. I assume that the fifty-plus percent of my fellow Americans who say they talk to God and that He talks back believe He is a good god. These are the same people who believe George Bush is an exemplary human being and a good president. What do I say? I say pay attention to the words.
Let’s look at The Book of Job. Granted, this is the Old Testament God rather than the New, who is said to possess a more loving character. Still, I bet that every Christian who believes in the literal truth of the Good Book contends that the Old Testament God is an exemplary God, as infallible as the Pope and every bit as fine a god as George Bush is a president. Remember, now, that these people say they believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God and that all of those words are literally true.
All the sons of God have come together to present themselves before the Lord; the gathering includes Satan, who has taken time off from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. And God says to Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil?”
And Satan replies that it's easy for Job to be perfect and upright because God has “...made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side. Put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath,” Satan says, “and he will curse thee to thy face.”
God is baiting Satan here. We see the divine smugness dawn over His face. He has just tossed Job into an arena where He and Satan will beat him around to see how he takes it. God says to Satan, "Behold, all that he hath is in thy power.” God allows Satan to do anything to Job but kill him.
Pretty soon the Sabeans steal all Job's oxen and asses and kill his ox- and ass tenders. Fire falls out of heaven and burns up his sheep and shepherds. The Chaldeans steal his camels and kill his camel tenders. A great wind from the wilderness smites the four corners of his eldest son's house and kills all Job's kids, who are having dinner there. Job's reaction to these events is to pull out some of his hair, then shave his head and fall down on the ground and worship.
In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.
The sons of God get together with Him again. And God says to Satan that Job still “holdeth fast to his integrity ....” And He goes on to say “although thou movedst me against him.”
This is a lie. Anyone who reads well enough to understand the message on a bread bag sees that God waved Job in Satan's face like a red flag in front of a bull. He admits He's responsible for Job's destruction, then He gloats over Job retaining his integrity. Remember now, this is a god some of us worship.
When Satan smites Job with the infamous boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown, Job's wife tells him, “Curse God, and die.” But Job says, “What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?”
Job doesn't lose his integrity, but he gets desperate. “Let the day perish wherein I was born,” he says. “Why died I not from the womb? There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary be at rest.”
Job's friends Bildad, Zophar and Eliphaz come to comfort him, but he's covered with boils to such a degree that they can't recognize him. Like the Rev. Pat Robertson, they believe that earthly affliction is the result of divine reproof; unlike Robertson, however B,Z & E didn’t have their own TV network. “Who ever perished being innocent?” Eliphaz the Temanite, asks Job.
Job’s suffering, and the consideration of suffering that the debate with his friends has demanded, changes Job’s thinking about the world. Here’s the conclusion he comes to:
He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.
If the scourge slay suddenly,
he will laugh at the trial of the innocent.
The earth is given into the hand of the wicked.
Then Job speaks to God: “Thine hands made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me.”
Zophar the Naamathite tells Job that God isn't giving him the punishment his sinfulness deserves. The irony here is crushing: we saw God make the deal with Satan.
Zophar tells Job to quit searching for God, that submitting is the way to find Him.
But Job doesn't want to submit. “I desire to reason with God,” he says. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”
“Miserable comforters are ye all,” Job says. He’s got more to say, and he asks them to pay attention.
Wherefore do the wicked live,
become old, yea, are mighty in power?
They spend their days in wealth
and in a moment go down to the grave.
One dieth in his full strength,
being wholly at ease and quiet.
His breasts are full of milk,
and his bones are moistened with marrow
And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul
and never eateth with pleasure.
They shall lie down alike in the dust,
and the worms shall cover them.
Job refuses to desert God just because he's finally discovered how He really works. And he's not going to back down from belief in himself either: “Till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.”
God comes down hidden in a whirlwind to join the disputation. He's probably so ashamed of what He did that He can't look Job in the face. God is full of bluster. He's offended that Job would dare to “darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge.” He tries to impress Job with His work in geology, and He asks Job questions that none of us could answer in the affirmative. Listen to the majesty of the King James English:
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades
or loose the bands of Orion?
Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season?
or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?
Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?
canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?
Of course Job can't do these things. Of course God – read Nature here -- is awesome in his power. But that doesn't excuse him from the unjust exercise of that power.
But He’s got Job buffaloed. “Behold, I am vile,” Job says. “What shall I answer thee?”
The poor guy has lost his grip. Just because he can't "loose the bands of Orion" doesn't make him vile. Vile is giving your most righteous servant into the hands of Satan. That's what vile is. Maybe God realizes this, because he calls a halt to the atrocity.
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency;
and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Look on everyone that is proud, and bring him low;
and tread down the wicked in their place.
The common impression is that The Book of Job ends positively. No thoughtful reader, however, can be left with such an impression. Consider how Job remains duped about God’s character and how he’s fooled about himself:
I have heard of thee by hearing of the ear;
but now mine eye seeth thee:
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent
in dust and ashes.
Job doesn't have anything to repent.
The common impression is that it's a vast stroke of magnanimity that God restores to Job twice as much as he had before He visited this atrocity upon him. Job gets fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels and a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she-asses. And he gets seven sons and three daughters.
What about his children who were crushed when the wind from the wilderness leveled the house? Is Job supposed to forget those kids he loved who are never going to breathe the air with him again? God is responsible for the deaths of Job's children. People who die can’t be replaced.
The Book of Job shows the thoughtful reader a man who deserves our admiration and our pity, and a God who deserves our contempt.
I know what you thoughtful Static readers are thinking: Davis, you don’t take this stuff literally. It’s a story for god’s sake! It’s a story about the Mystery of Life, about the inexplicability – not just of “why bad things happen to good people,” but why things happen at all.
Oi! Don’t yell at me, you bunch of secular humanist, liberal dupes of Al Franken. I can read, and I read the words one-by-one. And I believe.
It scares me and it breaks my heart to consider the thoughtlessness that so many of us practice. And I do mean practice, because we work at it. We work at it, mostly, by our near worship of two things: 1. tradition and 2. belief.
Tradition – now let’s think about this, please – tradition is pretty much cliche, isn’t it? Tradition consists of practices – and beliefs – that have been around a long time and seem to be good, or at least not harmful. For example, the cliche That’s like comparing apples and oranges. Everybody knows you can’t compare apples and oranges – right? We hear it all the time. It’s familiar – an old friend – like Thanksgiving dinner. And since we hear it all the time many of us believe it. And like so many of the things so many of us believe, it isn’t true. We’d see the inaccuracy in this careless statement if we thought beyond the cliche. Of course we can compare apples and oranges: both are fruit, both grow on trees, each has a roundish shape, both contain seeds, both give us tasty and nutritious juice. Smarter people than your faithful Static columnist can probably reel off a page of comparisons. But you get it – right? We believe this inaccurate statement about the world because we don’t pay attention. Sure, it’s a little thing. Why should we demand of such a little thing that it be accurate?
My view is that we live in the world, and so to move through the world safely and get the things we need and want – to care for our kids, of course, and be positive examples to them, to inspire them to do and to be better than we are – to do these things in the world we need to pay attention to the world. And this takes thoughtfulness ... thoughtfulness about everything. We all hear how business gurus admonish their faithful to “think outside the box.” All of us need to think outside the box, but most of us live inside the box, and we’re happy there, and we feel safe. And you know what else we feel? We feel virtuous. This nearly un-hinges me.
I’m getting to George Bush and the Old Testament God, I promise. Just give me a minute here while I try to keep hinged.
I love the world. I believe in the world, as opposed to things other-worldly. What would you call someone who believes as I do – besides a commie, that is? Okay, it’s liberal now; it was commie when I was growing up. An existentialist is what I am. No, I’m not some skinny French dink with a copy of L’Etre et le Neant, smoking a brown cigarette, in line for a Jerry Lewis revival. I believe in the value of existence over essence. I believe in spirit, all right. I believe plenty in spirit. But it’s the human spirit I believe in. And because I believe in the things of the world and in the best qualities of the human character, I believe in using the best of my humanity to make myself the best human I can be in the time I’ve got, which is why I pay attention to the world and to words.
I’ve paid attention to George Bush. I listened in the debate when the woman asked him if he ever made a mistake, and the man did not have a clue what she was talking about. People who believe – especially if some of their beliefs are in the divinity of Jesus – and double-especially if they have that personal relationship with Him – aren’t capable of making mistakes, I guess. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because their pal Jesus forgives them everything if they just believe in Him. Boy, there’s a cheap ticket out of accountability and to the hereafter! And besides, what does the world matter anyway? What matters is what comes after this -- right? Tell that to the souls of the Americans killed in Iraq. Tell their wives and their husbands and their kids and their parents that we’re just passing through. We’ll all see those dear souls we love in the hereafter.
Make no mistake: we went into Iraq because George Bush and his clean-cut cabal wanted to. They’d been waiting years to get their hands on a fighting force to do it. And they lied and twisted every piece of intelligence they could to justify it. If you think we’re in Iraq to protect American freedoms you’re the most thoughtless organism in the universe. If we wanted to help people and establish democracy somewhere, why didn’t we do it in Haiti?
The quality that thoughtless people most admire in George Bush is that he believes. He believes fervently. He is an ardent (you hear the cliches – right?) believer ... in all his beliefs. And that includes Jesus and the Iraq war and ... and cutting brush, I suppose. And, man, I believe in cutting brush myself. I love cutting brush and chopping wood. What these thoughtless George Bush worshipers don’t consider is that a person’s beliefs need to be accurate to be worthy of respect. They need to be grounded in accuracy about the world. And this man’s beliefs – and the beliefs of his friends – are not. These people’s beliefs are grounded in fundamentalist Christian, wealthy arrogance. Bush isn’t especially smart, but his pals are smart. It’s their arrogance that will be their – and our – undoing. There is nothing more dangerous on this earth than a true believer whose beliefs aren’t accurate. Okay, okay, all true believers are dangerous. I’ve read the books, too.
Sheriff Bull Conner believed. Lester Maddox believed. George Wallace believed, and then he un-believed and believed in something else when he got shot. Nancy Regan did not believe in stem cell research, but then when her husband died of a disease that might be cured by stem cell research, she was so overcome with belief that she departed from the beliefs of her president. Among the things these people believed were tradition and family values. Republicans say they believe in “states’ rights”, but when it looked like Washington State would vote in assisted suicide, Republicans quit believing in states’ rights for Washington. It’s not just hypocrisy; it’s a soul-less, ethical sliminess I wish I were smart enough to think of the word for. John Wilkes Booth believed, and his belief brought him to kill maybe the greatest American who ever lived.
Okay, I’ve got myself pulled together. I’m hinged tighter than a Bob Jones freshman. More sticks on the fire; the dogs are asleep, a retrospective Dylan compilation from my son the Joshman on the box and now it’s time to go head-to-head with the God of the Israelites.
I want to make a point about belief. I assume that the fifty-plus percent of my fellow Americans who say they talk to God and that He talks back believe He is a good god. These are the same people who believe George Bush is an exemplary human being and a good president. What do I say? I say pay attention to the words.
Let’s look at The Book of Job. Granted, this is the Old Testament God rather than the New, who is said to possess a more loving character. Still, I bet that every Christian who believes in the literal truth of the Good Book contends that the Old Testament God is an exemplary God, as infallible as the Pope and every bit as fine a god as George Bush is a president. Remember, now, that these people say they believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God and that all of those words are literally true.
All the sons of God have come together to present themselves before the Lord; the gathering includes Satan, who has taken time off from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. And God says to Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil?”
And Satan replies that it's easy for Job to be perfect and upright because God has “...made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side. Put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath,” Satan says, “and he will curse thee to thy face.”
God is baiting Satan here. We see the divine smugness dawn over His face. He has just tossed Job into an arena where He and Satan will beat him around to see how he takes it. God says to Satan, "Behold, all that he hath is in thy power.” God allows Satan to do anything to Job but kill him.
Pretty soon the Sabeans steal all Job's oxen and asses and kill his ox- and ass tenders. Fire falls out of heaven and burns up his sheep and shepherds. The Chaldeans steal his camels and kill his camel tenders. A great wind from the wilderness smites the four corners of his eldest son's house and kills all Job's kids, who are having dinner there. Job's reaction to these events is to pull out some of his hair, then shave his head and fall down on the ground and worship.
In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.
The sons of God get together with Him again. And God says to Satan that Job still “holdeth fast to his integrity ....” And He goes on to say “although thou movedst me against him.”
This is a lie. Anyone who reads well enough to understand the message on a bread bag sees that God waved Job in Satan's face like a red flag in front of a bull. He admits He's responsible for Job's destruction, then He gloats over Job retaining his integrity. Remember now, this is a god some of us worship.
When Satan smites Job with the infamous boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown, Job's wife tells him, “Curse God, and die.” But Job says, “What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?”
Job doesn't lose his integrity, but he gets desperate. “Let the day perish wherein I was born,” he says. “Why died I not from the womb? There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary be at rest.”
Job's friends Bildad, Zophar and Eliphaz come to comfort him, but he's covered with boils to such a degree that they can't recognize him. Like the Rev. Pat Robertson, they believe that earthly affliction is the result of divine reproof; unlike Robertson, however B,Z & E didn’t have their own TV network. “Who ever perished being innocent?” Eliphaz the Temanite, asks Job.
Job’s suffering, and the consideration of suffering that the debate with his friends has demanded, changes Job’s thinking about the world. Here’s the conclusion he comes to:
He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.
If the scourge slay suddenly,
he will laugh at the trial of the innocent.
The earth is given into the hand of the wicked.
Then Job speaks to God: “Thine hands made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me.”
Zophar the Naamathite tells Job that God isn't giving him the punishment his sinfulness deserves. The irony here is crushing: we saw God make the deal with Satan.
Zophar tells Job to quit searching for God, that submitting is the way to find Him.
But Job doesn't want to submit. “I desire to reason with God,” he says. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”
“Miserable comforters are ye all,” Job says. He’s got more to say, and he asks them to pay attention.
Wherefore do the wicked live,
become old, yea, are mighty in power?
They spend their days in wealth
and in a moment go down to the grave.
One dieth in his full strength,
being wholly at ease and quiet.
His breasts are full of milk,
and his bones are moistened with marrow
And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul
and never eateth with pleasure.
They shall lie down alike in the dust,
and the worms shall cover them.
Job refuses to desert God just because he's finally discovered how He really works. And he's not going to back down from belief in himself either: “Till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.”
God comes down hidden in a whirlwind to join the disputation. He's probably so ashamed of what He did that He can't look Job in the face. God is full of bluster. He's offended that Job would dare to “darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge.” He tries to impress Job with His work in geology, and He asks Job questions that none of us could answer in the affirmative. Listen to the majesty of the King James English:
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades
or loose the bands of Orion?
Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season?
or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?
Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?
canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?
Of course Job can't do these things. Of course God – read Nature here -- is awesome in his power. But that doesn't excuse him from the unjust exercise of that power.
But He’s got Job buffaloed. “Behold, I am vile,” Job says. “What shall I answer thee?”
The poor guy has lost his grip. Just because he can't "loose the bands of Orion" doesn't make him vile. Vile is giving your most righteous servant into the hands of Satan. That's what vile is. Maybe God realizes this, because he calls a halt to the atrocity.
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency;
and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Look on everyone that is proud, and bring him low;
and tread down the wicked in their place.
The common impression is that The Book of Job ends positively. No thoughtful reader, however, can be left with such an impression. Consider how Job remains duped about God’s character and how he’s fooled about himself:
I have heard of thee by hearing of the ear;
but now mine eye seeth thee:
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent
in dust and ashes.
Job doesn't have anything to repent.
The common impression is that it's a vast stroke of magnanimity that God restores to Job twice as much as he had before He visited this atrocity upon him. Job gets fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels and a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she-asses. And he gets seven sons and three daughters.
What about his children who were crushed when the wind from the wilderness leveled the house? Is Job supposed to forget those kids he loved who are never going to breathe the air with him again? God is responsible for the deaths of Job's children. People who die can’t be replaced.
The Book of Job shows the thoughtful reader a man who deserves our admiration and our pity, and a God who deserves our contempt.
I know what you thoughtful Static readers are thinking: Davis, you don’t take this stuff literally. It’s a story for god’s sake! It’s a story about the Mystery of Life, about the inexplicability – not just of “why bad things happen to good people,” but why things happen at all.
Oi! Don’t yell at me, you bunch of secular humanist, liberal dupes of Al Franken. I can read, and I read the words one-by-one. And I believe.