The old man was wrong, but maybe he was also right.  

He believed, after couple of decades working optimistically toward progressive social change, that hope for change was for suckers.  Our deepest fears, prejudices and hatreds, he concluded bitterly (as he’d suspected all along), were beyond reason, will and the most ardent desire for change.  

We fought this back and forth for years and I won’t recount the tedious exchanges I’ve already set out on this blahg and elsewhere.   He was wrong, clearly, things do change, as do people and their reactions and ideas.  He was right, though, that on a fundamental emotional level most people are set, blessed or doomed, by their genetics and programming.  

“That’s a depressive line of thinking, son,” a kinder, wiser father might say.  

“Maybe so, pops, but I’m looking at your own life, my life.  I’m granting you a measure of correctness against the position I argued for so many years, that people can, and do, change for the better, if they work hard enough at it,” I would reply.  

“Would, should, could,” said the kinder, wiser father wistfully.  “When you’re dead you’ll hear how poignant all those words really are.”  

It won’t take that long.  I recall the state the old man used to get into when he misplaced the change from his pocket.  He’d be beside himself, cursing, unable to get over his anger at himself, over the 43 cents he couldn’t find.   He’d received the change at the dry cleaners a few hours earlier, taken it out of his pocket when he changed his pants, goddamn it, and if I didn’t put it on the dresser where I always put it, what the fuck did I do with it?!  Goddamn it!!  He’d be inconsolable as he stomped around the house in a rage at himself, looking on all the end tables, the kitchen table, the bathroom sink, in the basement, upstairs again.

 “Losing 43 cents was the same to him as his favorite dog, or one of us, being hit by a car,” my sister pointed out correctly.   The loss of control of any kind was a lightning rod that electrified him right back into the center of his worst fears.  

“Easy for you to say,” he said.  

I suddenly think of the wallet I lost on the circle around the retirement village my parents lived in for their final years.  The wallet had dropped out of my cargo shorts pocket on to the road as I spoke to Sekhnet on the cell phone carrying the bicycle upstairs at 2 a.m.   I didn’t notice it was missing until the next morning when I went to get dressed and take a drive to visit friends.  No license.  No wallet.  Several days of desperate hope, checking with the security office over and over, until piecing together that the angry redneck security guard I’d disrespected a week or two earlier, and who’d been on duty that night, had found the wallet, had a good laugh seeing my photo in it, harvested several hundred dollars from it and tossed the rest in a garbage can somewhere.  Three or four years ago.  Randomly, the image comes up and punches me hard in the face, the stupidity of carrying my wallet in those baggy pants for a late night aerobic session, of not checking for the wallet when I came in, etc.  

“Depressive thinking, son,” the compassionate skeleton of my difficult father said softly.  I need to get screened for depression, though I haven’t much hope that anyone can help with it, certainly not a drug, beyond the placebo I already take.  I’ve made an e-inquiry with my health insurance provider and a robot wrote back telling me how to find a doctor with a specialty in mental health care on their website, no referral or paperwork required.

It’s a depressing thought, finding a doctor to screen me for depression, even though the Affordable Health Care Act apparently covers me for it.  The doctor is most likely to prescribe a drug shown to be better, on a certain blind test, than the placebo that was 84% as effective as the patent drug overall.  You can read a wonderful scholarly article that lays out the whole psycho-pharmaceutical industrial complex here. 

“Do you sleep more than usual?” the doctor will ask.  

“No,” I will say, and I have the data to back it up on my fitbit profile on the computer.  The average of  seven hours is steady going back two years.

“Are you exercising less?”  

“No,” the five to six miles I walk a day is pretty steady across the time I’ve worn the tiny pedometer.

“Have you had a change in your eating habits and weight?” the doctor will ask.

“No,” I will say.    

“Do you ever think of suicide?” the doctor will ask.  

“Not as an option for me, no,” I will say.  

“Why is that?” the doctor will ask.  “If my life was like the one you describe yours as I would honestly have to at least consider it as an option.  Why do you think you close your mind to even considering that?”

The doctor I go to might not necessarily be quite that moronic going through the checklist of diagnostic symptoms, but these would be among the questions asked to screen me for depression.   The thought of reading the list of two hundred names of unknown doctors to pick the one I might consult with, hoping for a doctor of great insight, is like buying a lottery ticket.  

“Better not to help yourself at all?” asks the skeleton who raised not a bony finger to help himself, before he fell into that predictable long-term state.  

All of the time honored, proven ways of beating back depression, vigorous exercise, cleaning your place, making and keeping to daily to do lists, require an energy and optimistic sense the depressed person is often hard pressed to muster.

Sunday afternoon, chilly, the short days of winter creeping up.   Outside Sekhnet’s plants shiver under the flapping plastic covers she’s tucked around them.  The clocks have been turned back.  The only sound is the ratlike tapping on these metallic keys, clack, clack, clack-clack.  The clicking is a comforting sound a person could almost dance to.  There is a certain music in it, I have to say.  I say it.   Having said it, what now?