I, like you, am flawed.  I’m not terribly interested in comparing or contrasting.  In fairness to myself, I will say that I’m a better man at 50 than at 15, or 20, or 25.  Still flawed, but substantially better.  It occurred to me today - New Year’s Day, two days before my 50^th birthday – that I have only given my word formally, as vows or oathes, four times in my life.  And that, whatever my other personal failings, somehow, for reasons both simple and not, I have kept those promises. 

Even though my first marriage felt like a karmic amends treadmill throughout its eight years and I was actually relieved when she openly broke her vows, I never did, openly or otherwise.  Keeping the same vows to Laurie these past twenty years has been infinitely easier. 

Before I made either of those promises, I made promises entering the United States Navy.  When I graduated from Hospital Corpsman School, age 20, I took the Hospitalman’s Oath, loosely based on the Hippocratic Oath with some much less poetic additions regarding stealing or misusing drugs.  But the first formal promise I ever made, was repeated in a bland white room with folding chairs and a chrome stand displaying the Stars and Stripes. I was 19.  The words “support and defend the constitution of the United States of America, from enemies foreign and domestic” have never left me. 

These past two month have been difficult for me.  Friends have voiced their concern.  Laurie has been patient, in part because she is sympathetic and because she loves me.  I am prone to clinical depression, but this is not that.  The medication I have taken for nearly a decade now is still working, I know what depression feels like and this is something else.  My friend Jamie identified and labeled it – mourning.  I’ve been in a grieving process. 

I had not grieved after my first marriage because, in fact, I was free from something I had known for years was bad.  I did grieve then for my young daughters who would grow up conflicted and unsettled, the way children of divorce almost always do, but knew that even they would be better off on balance.  And they have been.

It is that very first oath that has caused me such turmoil and sense of loss since November 8th.  That oath was not made to an old piece of parchment or to a disembodied idealistic notion of law, justice and democracy.  It was made before a naval officer acting as proxy for the people of this nation.  And now, some 30 years later, a large portion of this nation’s people have voted – openly or otherwise – for demagoguery, divisiveness, deceit, even open contempt for law, justice and democracy.  Frankly, I felt gut-punched.

Today, New Year’s Day 2017, I slept very late after drinking heavily with mostly like-minded friends well into the first hours of the year.  I woke with a mild headache, but also the beginnings of what might be that final stage of grief, acceptance. 

I have not renounced that oath of 30 years ago, if anything, I find myself renewed to it.  I feel wounded and betrayed by much of my fellow citizenry, but not defeated or even terribly pessimistic.  Things will change.  Many of us who could have done more are now awake and ashamed.  We will do more.  Reach out more.  Stand up more.  At least I will, as an artist, as a veteran, a citizen, a human being.

I don’t know what that will look like.  I don’t have a plan, other than to show up.  When given an opportunity, I intend to show up.