Anhedonia

Like any thirteen-year-old boy whose father was a mythic and random presence, whose anger and generosity were dispensed with equal fervor and spontaneity, I longed to be with him. He taught me to play golf, and we would go out in the late afternoon when the shadows of big oaks lay upon the fairways like the first footprints of night. Often we were interrupted by someone in a golf cart coming out to tell my father he was needed to deliver a baby. I think that’s why to this day I don’t like golf carts.

“Anhedonia” is the term for a loss of pleasure in activities that were previously enjoyable, It can be a symptom of depression, but it’s a stand-alone condition too. No one is quite sure what causes it. For me, in the case of golf, I know what happened: Dad died when I was still a young man. Without his squinting approval when I hit a good shot, it just wasn’t as much fun.

Lately, I find myself experiencing a more generalized form of anhedonia. What has happened to bring that on? It is my fear that, like my father before it, my homeland is dying.

Our body politic is suffering multiple organ failures. Longstanding norms of governance are becoming necrotic. Flagrant exploitation of political position for personal gain is suddenly acceptable. People who have lived here peacefully for decades, who have raised families and paid their fair share of taxes to support the government, are being scooped up off the streets and deported. Our leaders have become swaggering bullies and opportunists.

When my father was dying, I slept in his hospital room for two weeks. I couldn’t save him, but I could be with him. Now that my country is sick, I want to comfort it, but I don’t know how. There is no bedside to sit by, no hand to hold, only the restless tossing and turning of people living in fear, feverishly calling out from the shadows.

My country doesn’t have cancer. The death of tolerance, of the burning quest for scientific knowledge, of the search for better ways to feed and house as many as possible, isn’t a certainty. Historically, our Congress and courts have been our immune system to fight rogue executives. This Congress either doesn’t fully understand the current threat, or, more likely, does and is happy to feed like a parasite on its weakened host. 

The lower courts are trying to protect our constitutional rights, but the Supreme Court is all-in on granting the executive virtually unchecked power to do as he pleases in hiring, firing, spending and mobilizing the army to enforce his will.

We are, for the time being, until elections stem the tide, if indeed they do, left to resort to homeopathic remedies of the oldest kind: protesting in the streets.

It is dangerous to be seen resisting this vengeful government, which is not quite to the stage of dragging villagers out of their homes and shooting them in front of their neighbors, but is dragging them out of their homes and jailing and deporting them, and investigating and perp-walking its political enemies.

In this moment, we only have each other. 

I went to the first No Kings rally, and I’m going to the one this Saturday. I have no illusions about what will come of that, but it seems to me we have no other choice but to let this government, and the world, know that what is going on here is not okay. Maybe someone who can make a difference—Congress, for instance—will notice and do something to help save the land of the free and home of the brave.

Or perhaps that’s too idealistic, too aspirational. Congress is made up of our elected representatives, so we can at least hope that if they sense that the tide of voter sentiment is surging strongly toward traditional views of what is appropriate, and what is not, in our democracy, they will act, if not out of common sense and decency, out of that most basic instinct of all organisms: survival.

Days Gone By

You know that thing on the old tv show Star Trek, where Spock put his hands on someone’s head and looked into his mind? The Vulcan Mind Meld, he called it. I had that with my son Cord when he was a boy. We would sit on a yellow slope of decomposing granite, resting on a hike in the San Gabriel foothills behind our house, and I knew what he was thinking. I don’t recall talking about stressful stuff—I can’t say I remember any particular conversation—just the ordinary things fathers and sons kick around, usually something right in the moment, a hawk overhead, a rattlesnake down a draw. But I knew what he thought and felt then. I knew him better than I knew myself. 

His younger brother and sister were too young in those days to go on hikes with me. Later, but not then, not for a few years. Cord was my first child, so there was the natural bonding between us of that, but the real bond, the one I thought was unbreakable, came in those dusty foothills we wandered together, just the two of us.

I still had time then to do that. I was working at a job where being there and working long hours were crucial to success, but I resisted. I guess I was cocky enough to think I could do it more efficiently than most, or that they would love me too much to let me go (which I found out later they almost did); my kids were young and I wanted to be with them, so they were the priority I chose. Don’t get me wrong, by normal standards, I was never at home, but by those of my super-charged workplace, I looked like a slacker.

Unfortunately, that choice didn’t last. Soon enough I got caught up in my own ambition. To get ahead, I started working insane hours. Years with my family flew by that way. I was a good dad, or that’s what I thought…when I was there, anyway. All that work took a toll on more than just me. When Cord was about to leave for his sophomore year in college, his mom and I got divorced. 

It was a tough time for my kids, of course. When they came home from college for breaks and summers, they stayed in their old home, with their mom. Holidays too. I didn’t get to see much of them. I understood. They felt their mom needed them.

I got remarried and had more children. I loved them all, new and old, but of course the new ones were living with me and the old ones were not. Resentments were inevitable, I now see, although I didn’t see that at the time. I tried to have family gatherings at big rented houses where we could all be together. Some of those worked out pretty well. I thought I was doing the best I could. I thought that, under the circumstances, everything was fine. Their mom and I didn’t have to be married for my first children and I to love each other, to be happy spending time together, even if not as much as when they were younger.

Then things blew up. Someone Cord loves and admires was offended by something I did. It doesn’t matter who it was. We all have people in our lives we are very close to and want to protect. Family members, colleagues, mentors, protegés. This person said some things that hurt me. I asked Cord to tell them to apologize. He refused. Then I asked him and the other person to let me apologize. They both refused. I was shocked.

Now, let me say, that summary lets me off the hook. I said some harsh things to Cord that I should not have. He shared them with the other person. Everyone got pretty dug in. I tried to retreat and patch things up, but apparently it was too late.

Cord and I are now estranged. I don’t think he wants to fix it. 

So what happened to Dad’s Vulcan Mind Meld? I think it’s still there. I think I know what he is thinking and feeling. Whether I think he is being reasonable or fair, or however you want to put it, I think I understand.

Cord retreats from conflict among those he loves. It’s his way of protecting himself, born in the years when he was off in college alone and his mom and dad split. Since then, seeing him has always been a bit of a challenge. I think I see now that he probably just didn’t want to see me that much. Being away from me must be an emotionally safe space for him.

I guess I can’t begrudge him that. Maybe I brought it on myself.

But the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. It’s too tough on me to keep trying to mend fences only to have them knocked back down. I suppose that from now on he will ride his range and I will ride mine. I think about him all the time, fondly, without the pain I felt when I was trying to fix things between us and getting nowhere. That rejection from someone I had cared so much about, from someone I had known better than anyone, was too hard to live with.

Perhaps we are both better off remembering those days up in the foothills with the bitter-sweet nostalgia that goes with thinking back on a happy time that is gone.