The Depression Pandemic

Post-Pandemic Puzzle

Alright already with all the epidemic chatter, time to zero on our post-pandemic woes.

I was a child of the 1950s, still am. As such, I have firsthand experience with what followed our last great nationwide malady.

In a word, it has to do with depression.

Yup, depression. It’s the elephant on my back, the monkey in my room.

It stalks me night and day. Other times, too.

I got it from my dad. He was a maniac depressant. Or depressive. And yes, maniac.

Unlike lepers, lispers, lunatics, and other misfits who hide what ails them, my dad spoke openly of his depression. He all but bragged about it. And it was his excuse for everything. He called it the depression. You know, like the mumps, the plague, the clap.

Not only did my dad live through the depression, but he worried about it constantly, predicted its return. Any day now, he insisted. With a vengeance. A failed prophet he became. At least in his time.

So bad was my dad’s depression that it warped my development.

My father forever paced our house, flashlight in hand, switching off needlessly lit lamps, cranking down the thermostat to just above freezing, squinting at the water meter, counting toilet paper plies, and, oh, for sure, scolding whoever squeezed the Colgate other than from the bottom of its tube.

Lots of carping went on about there not being a money tree in our backyard.

When I, my teeth clattering, complained about the icicles hanging from our living room rafters, my father’s refrain was always the same “You should’ve grown up with the depression.”

I heard so much about depression I got my older sister to read to me about it from the water-damaged “D” volume of our secondhand World Book Encyclopedia. My dad was mentally ill. Some guy, a famous Australian psychic, Siegfried Fraud, said so. Only he called it repression, some mumbo jumbo about sex and mothers. I think he also tamed tigers in Las Vegas.

My dad treated his depression every night with doses of Ten High and other bottom-shelf bourbons. He was a doctor. At least he said he was. So, I figured it was medicine.

Each night, after he and my mom downed some of this rotgut, my dad would re-ignite a half-smoked Lucky Strike, tiptoe across the pitch-black room, juice up the radio as if electricity were free, and seem to enjoy life.

Once his blue mood lifted, my dad, for kicks, would put the booze-filled jelly-jar glass that he drank from under the nose of our always-hungry dog. Buck’s lips would snarl and wriggle in a convulsive sort of way. “Ick!” he seemed to say. Then he would dash outside to go about his nighttime rounds in the alley that ran behind our house, foraging for grub. One day I gave Buck a whiff of Black Label Johnny Walker and he lapped the stuff up.

I must digress here to say that our dog Buck, despite being a canine, also was down in the dumps. Literally. One night he went missing. We found him the next morning stuck, headfirst, in our next-door neighbor’s garbage can. (I’m not making this up. Or anything else.)

We had but one bathroom in our house. In it was an ancient bathtub. It had lion-like claws on its bottom. We weren’t allowed to fill it with more than an inch of tepid water. And no, we did not have a shower. Every weekend, my dad and I snuck into the downtown YMCA and wallowed in a steam room, then took hot showers. Strange naked men joined us. My otherwise waste-not-want-not dad looked the other way and taught me to leave dropped bars of soap where they fell. I stared in awe. Anyway, that was my treat for finding my way home from school through snowstorms every day. Several miles I had to walk, always against the wind.

We were so poor we did not own a vacation home, not for winter or summer. In the northern plains where we lived, just south of the Arctic Circle, it was cold thirteen months a year. We were practically Canadians – who themselves were almost Eskimos. It’s still that way up there. And we belonged to only one country club. That’s how poor we were. No wonder my dad was in a funk.

Alas, I again digress. Back to depression. Or the depression.

Many of my parents’ relatives also grew up depressed. They talked at family gatherings about how Roosevelt cured them. Or, as they said, “brought them out” of depression. Good ol’ President Frank got the Doctor Foochies of the day to come up with a vaccine. The salt vaccine they called it. Who knew? The cure to the depression malady was right in plain sight on everyone’s kitchen table. My dad, who had been away in Europe saluting General Dwight D. Ike rebelled at this talk, said war brought the country out of depression. He contended that war cured everything, at least for those on the winning side.

I was born a month after my dad got home from his two-year gig in the big battle. He never quite took to me. To frowning friends, my mom bragged about how much I looked like my dad, whose parents emigrated here from Cairo. I was Nordic blond and blue-eyed.

Despite my parents' gloomy moods and just-as-dismal looks of our always-dimly-lit home, I muddled through, not coming face to face with my own depression until I started junior high school.

My English teacher wrote on my report card, “Robby doesn’t read good.” The chain-smoking school nurse said I suffered from disalexa.

It’s true. My 18-year-old seventh-grade classmate, Alexa, from the north – “other” – side of the Great Northern tracks that ran through our town, was my girlfriend. We kissed and canoodled a lot. In a land where every other girl had scraggly dishwater-colored hair, she stood out to me, was exotic, looked to me like one of those cantina dancers with notable cleavages in cowboy movies. Pitch black hair she had, dark skin, and awesomely large breasts, the sort of things I could relate to. She was Romanian, said her great- or great-great-grandfather was Julius Caesar. Or maybe it was Caesar Romero. Whatever. Life for her and her folks probably would have been better if they had stayed in Rome.

Regardless of my stunted reading skills, I wasn’t about to dis, as the nurse suggested, or otherwise give up my sweetheart. In short order, though, she dissed me when I stopped going to temple with her. The place did nothing for me. Everything was in Latin. Nobody knew what the rabbi was mumbling about. Neither did they seem to know the front end of the prayer book from the back—crazy place.

So, when my main squeeze dumped me, I figured that was the start of what would become a litany of “Dearest Bob…” brush-offs. And, I can now say with a good bit of blindsight, it was. My moods' bleakness grew ever darker as the years and my futile stabs at romance passed by.

What saved me was memorizing a good bit of the alphabet and being able to put words together, and, indeed, to become a prodigal reader. I was awarded a “participation” diploma from my high school. From there, I embarked on a five-decade career in the seasonal roadside fireworks and Christmas tree sales industry, slowly advancing to several decreasingly responsible positions. When I retired, depression was no longer on my mind.

Then last summer, the dreaded disease revisited me.

From lollygagging with my golden retrievers, I developed an unbearable itchy skin condition. So, the vet gave me some Fido anti-inflammation medicine, and I took the pills with abandon. Not only did the itching cease, but the levels of my mood and physical prowess went through the roof. Never had I felt so good, quickly realizing that the past six decades of my life had been lived in dark despair.

What the sometimes-sober animal doctor doled out to me, you may have guessed, was a steroid, the kind that can get pro athletes canned. You know, like when the ump swirls around, points to the dugout and yells to the quarterback, “You’re outta here.” I love when that happens. Anyway, I felt atop of the world, conquered golf with a smile on my face like never ever and was just downright pleasant to be around.

When the meds expired, I asked for more from a people doctor. “No way,” he said, and so I resigned myself to a U-turn to my same old you. As I was readying to leave the exam room, his nurse poked her head in. “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” she whispered, “but go to Nogales.” My spirits lifted.

I’ve not made that long drive yet but am downright effluent at the prospect of regaining a sunny disposition and, along with our weekend-warrior Federal Reservist troops, ensuring we come out on the winning side of the inevitable upcoming war with the depression.