Which Story - about my life

Link to Youtube audio/slideshow : 10 minutes

Text:

Which story

Bert Haverkate-Ens

I used to know a young woman. She was a student, considering film, working as a barista in a coffee shop I liked. Our paths were sure to separate, but we talked now and then. It had been a slow night and it happened that I had told her some true things about myself. I had admitted to being a writer – though mostly for my own satisfaction. I had long kept to myself parts of my story that had been hard for me to live, so it was a coincidence, I suppose, when she said it might be interesting for someone to write about something like Bipolar Disorder from the inside.

I happen to have lived inside that disorder, but haven’t found the words to tell that story very well. A little came out in our conversation, and then she said this: Tell me a story about when you were young and happy.

I’m not entirely sure what she might have meant, but that's what I want, too – at least now and then. Just a story. Keep it simple like a fairy tale. Evil and boredom are always vanquished. Good prevails. Make the story more about the lives we want for ourselves. Why shouldn’t we imagine a little. What have we got to lose but our fears and our worries. Sometimes all we really want is a story about how we were happy.

I was happy when I was 29. I had joined MVS – Mennonite Voluntary Service. The unit – that was what we called it –  it was in my case about five young people, living together in a house, working at jobs that were intended to do good for other people. I worked in an arts and crafts room at a boys and girls club. It’s a long time ago now to wonder if I did any good for any of those kids. We made stuff together.

The house where I and my house mates lived was a little on the livable side of nearly shabby. We each had our own bedroom and we shared the common areas. Each of us had to cook one meal a week for everyone else. I was content - at least.

Now I should say that before coming out to Fresno, I had been in a mental hospital once already for mania and a diagnosis. I had known terrible depressions on and off. But now it seemed as if my life was coming together.

And then - like a knight in a shining suit of armor - she joined the unit. Dawn was the friend of one of my fellow VSers and she came, recently graduated from college, to teach English to Hmong refugees in a new program at the Mennonite church that was next door to the unit.

I suppose that I should probably admit that I have always been the kind of guy who easily falls in love. You can take that phrase however you wish and you’d likely be partly right and partly wrong. Unfortunately for me, all the girls and women I fell in love with had never fallen in love with me. So you might guess that I was only playing true to form by almost instantly falling in love with Dawn.

And I kept falling.

Now letting this kind of thing actually go anywhere in a MVS unit was considered a bad idea for reasons any adult could imagine. But there we were, taking walks to the donut shop together, staying up late to talk after the others had gone to bed. I still blame much of what followed on the back rubs she gave me late at night.

We were very discreet. Our behavior mostly harmless. But I can still remember going out into the back yard after lunch. It rarely rained in Fresno and there was an old mattress laying out. Dawn and I would often meet there before she had to get back to her students and me go off to my kids.

Was I happy? Nearly delirious. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. When our intention was finally announced, there was indeed some awkwardness in the unit. Dawn and I were joined in matrimony at the end of the year.

Tolstoy begins his novel ‘Anna Karenina’ with the words All happy families resemble one another, but each family is unhappy in its own way.’ Such happiness as I experienced in that year between the moment I met Dawn and the day we were married really is almost unremarkable. I have nearly told you all I can remember. We did have our bicycles stolen once, but perhaps that was after we had already gotten married. There just isn't much more that I could tell you. It's enough, I think, to tell you that we were young and happy.

To me, what is interesting is that we are still married - and happy - after nearly 28 years. There have been hard times in the middle. Four more hospitalizations. More terrible depressions. And there were good years – quite a few, actually - and then disruption. Along the way we moved to Lawrence, Kansas. Dawn got a job at KU teaching English to international students. I had managed some jobs - but not that well - until we finally decided I was best suited to be a househusband. Shortly after moving we had bought a house that needed some work. Without kids, we could live pretty well on Dawn’s paycheck. Her health insurance paid for the hospitalizations to pull down the manic episodes. Other writers have put words to depression, but I will not try to, except to say that I survived.

But this is a story in which evil is vanquished. Because of bipolar disorder, I did not live the life I might have lived, but who knows how taking other roads might have turned out. I would hope, for example, that I would nor have turned into some kind of apparently successful college professor mostly boring my students with the dead parts of human knowledge.

Instead I built a little garden pond in our back yard. I grew flowers and vegetables. I remodeled our bathroom. Dawn and I chose some wonderful handmade tiles - expensive for us. And so I designed the tile work to be mostly plain green tiles - but with those handmade tiles, three and a little more inches square, stacked five squares high in an exquisite band of greens and blues and gray-greens and other greens.

And my health has also seemed to stabilize. And so for me, now, the story keeps getting even more interesting. It’s true I have had my run of luck of both kinds. But the right woman fell in love with me. Of course we fight over stupid things. But those things are rooted in the different people we always were and always will be. Most of the different people who we are - we like very much. I like myself.

But this is a fairy tale, and here’s the magic key. Dawn and I made a pact on that cruddy mattress - to be together. And we have kept that pact. And there has been happiness. Not all due to our own efforts, to be  sure. I sometimes serve supper out on the brick patio I laid next to the fish pond. We look at the salmon clouds in the sky. We can agree that Rudy’s makes the best pizza sauce. She reaches for my hand when I tear up at sappy movies. I can make her laugh.

The night I walked into that coffee shop, Dawn was visiting her parents and I was in no hurry to get home. Time for an egg crème and to make some notes. The latter was a nearly impossible task. As I had walked across the Kaw River Bridge at sunset, I had noticed this rosy band of a blue-pink along the eastern horizon. I have seen this phenomenon before but never was satisfied that I had the words to describe it. And then other thoughts came rushing in. Maybe if I’d paid closer attention in Mr. Jantzen’s physics class. What about wavelengths of light? Patterns of diffusion? Sense was leaving me, but the beauty overwhelmed me. And then the crescent moon hooked me and I was ready for the frying pan.

As I walked on, the buildings on Mass Street blocked out that exquisite color. It was nearly dark when I walked into the coffee shop for an egg crème. I could, I suppose, manage to describe that chocolate soda. Better to savor life if you can find it.

I mostly stared out the window. She was wiping the counter for the fifth time. I looked at her looking at me, and then this what she said: Tell me a story about when you were young and happy.