By Dawn Downey
The desert wind whispered yes as it blew across Dad’s
brow. In the summer of 1964, he and three of his teenagers (my older sister
Michelle, younger brother Bill, and me) waited impatiently at the edge of the
Mojave. Our road trip interrupted, because our family cat was having kittens in
the back of the station wagon.
Five days earlier, at age forty-three, Dad closed up Bill’s Body
Shop, his car repair business. He waived goodbye to relatives and friends, and
drove away from Des Moines, leading a four-vehicle caravan down Route 66, off
to California in pursuit of dreams.
Only a high school graduate himself, Dad insisted his kids would
go to college. He had five children, number six on the way, and no means to
finance all that education. But he’d read the University of California was tuition-free
for the state’s residents. The fact that no job awaited him in the golden
state—he’d work that out later.
He drove the station wagon and pulled a U Haul trailer.
Michelle, who’d earned her driver’s license two weeks before, drove a second car.
She towed a VW Bug, which Dad planned to sell in California. Bill and I rode
shotgun.
A water pump or two broke along the way. An eighteen-wheeler
mangled the trailer hitch. And Dad and Michelle parted company for a while—he
following the arrow on a detour sign, she driving around the sign and heading
toward Canada. But the four of us ended up together at the edge of the Mojave.
While waiting to cross it in the cool of the night, we watched Cass birth her
kittens, while the sun painted the sky pale pink, then navy blue. As we fussed
over the cat and complained about the heat, Dad towered over us, as big as the
desert.
Early the next morning he delivered his brood—three kids and
five cats—to Pasadena. (The kids went on to college; the cats did not.)
Long before our cross-country trek, my father had outgrown his
life in Des Moines. Between pounding out fenders, he’d written his first novel
on a legal pad. A year after the move to California, the Santa Barbara News
Press hired him, on the strength of an article he submitted. He was their first
African American reporter. He walked into the interview straight from his job
as a mechanic at the local Ford dealership, his muscled six-foot frame stuffed
into a pair of blue coveralls.
While working at the paper, he typed his second novel during
lunch breaks, in the back of his camper.
He stretched the newspaper job from obituary writer into outdoor
columnist. Every week, he expanded Gone Fishin’ beyond the expected
descriptions of the best camping spots and the latest model boats. His readers
got to know his old Uncle Russell in Ottumwa, and his brother Al, a TV
weatherman in Des Moines. When Uncle Russell got sick, he received hundreds of
get-well cards from all across the country. I suspected then that Dad might be
more than just the guy who grounded me.
After a ten-year stint as newspaper columnist, he transformed
himself into freelance writer and then again into published author, with five
books to his credit. He supplemented his income by teaching memoir writing
through adult education. And that’s how he became a guru. Others taught; Dad
cheered, encouraged, cajoled, nudged, nagged, poked and mesmerized. One of his
students described the classroom experience as a cross between a quilting bee
and a revival meeting.
Repeaters were common. Many took his course five years in a row.
One returned fifteen times. On the rare occasions that illness kept him home,
Dad learned that his substitutes had been greeted with surly expressions and
sarcastic complaints. My father had groupies.
Over the thirty years he taught, he told his students to take
more risks and write to their edge. After he died, a group of loyalists
continued meeting, reserving an empty chair for him.
Decades later, I feel him pushing me too. Through divorce,
lay-offs and career changes, he's challenged me to take a risk. When I’m typing
against a deadline in the middle of the night, I catch sight of him standing at
the edge of the Mojave. And I remember Dad driving toward yes.
Dawn Downey, an essayist, finds inspiration in everyday situations.
She writes about topics ranging from her pursuit of the perfect purse* to her
search for the meaning of life--with jealousy, prejudice, guilt and inadequacy
thrown in for good measure. She views them through the lens of a spiritual path
that has wound through the teachings of the Buddha, around to non-duality, and
has stopped for a while at devotion—a kinder, gentler relationship with the
sweet goofiness that makes us human. She secretly wants to be a rock star, but
since she can't sing, settles for reading her stories at coffee shops, galleries
and book stores, anywhere there's a microphone and an audience. She lives in
Kansas City with her husband, aka groupie, roadie and driver. He spoils her
rotten. She reciprocates.
Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha, Tripping Over my Principles on the Road to Transformation.” www.dawndowney.com
Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha, Tripping Over my Principles on the Road to Transformation.” www.dawndowney.com
