Dave ended every day at his desk in our basement on Choteau. He’d built it to his own dimensions—too big to ever leave the house—and painted it brown. A color Em and Amanda were quick to identify as Dave’s trademark “shit brown” that he applied to all his homemade bookshelves and tables.
There at his desk, Dave would cut a clean white 3 x 5 index card in half. Reach for a blue Flair pen. Only that pen, that color. Take the cap off with his teeth and think for a moment.
Before listing the next day’s errands and tasks. The ones important enough to remember among work routines, e.g.:
- Pick up chain saw
- 2 gallons linseed
- Call MCH (Montana Committee for the Humanities) re Glendive
- Check 1918 Billings directory
- Write Perry
- Card for G & D (George and Dorothy)
Then, when he came to bed, Dave brought the card up to his chest-of-drawers in our room.
And in the morning, tucked it into the left-hand pocket of his broadcloth shirt, along with the blue pen. Right after he’d selected and tied his choice of a silk tie and before he pulled a clean, folded white handkerchief from the top drawer for his left back corduroy pants pocket.
An unvarying order.
At work at the Historical Society, Dave would check the card often, cross off what he’d accomplished, note new tasks he needed to remember the next day. Add phones number he didn’t want to lose. Write down article ideas as they popped up while he helped library patrons. Outline crib notes for difficult calls.
Evenings, Dave would change into jeans and a chambray work shirt and transfer the card to that shirt. It made an excellent toothpick while Dave watched a basketball game or wrote.
Come midnight, Dave would be back at his desk, reaching for the next 2 ½ x 3 inch lined square to build the following day’s reminders. Same pen, same sequence.
Disciplines and routines framed so much of Dave’s life as I knew him.
- Articles read, margin notes made in that blue Flair pen.
- News stories clipped for the vertical files at the Society, date and source identified.
- Checkbook balanced without fail when the bank statement arrived.
- Speech notes revised for each new audience. And then decorated with highlighters marking pauses and emphases.
- Speeches rehearsed the first time and the fiftieth time.
- Shirts ironed before he considered laundry finished.
- A running list of supplies for the North Fork taped above his desk.
- At the North Fork, a summary left on the table of work done—dated by visit—along with what needed attention the next time.
- At Christmas 64 loaves of cranberry bread baked (8 pans times 8 bakes) and last year’s list of recipients updated for the current year—along with the preferred routes of delivery.
- A faithful 30 minutes every morning on the Nordic Track.
- Child support paid on exact days.
- Vacuuming completed on Sunday mornings.
- George and Dorothy’s house cleaned on Sunday afternoons.
- Medicine meticulously sorted into its plastic cubbies for the following day.
- Montana history packets by for school children carefully assembled by the dozens on Saturdays so that no kid would be disappointed.
Dave had known too many years that wavered out of control. Years that cost him degrees and marriages. Years, I believe, though I am now being an armchair psychologist, defined less by discipline and more by depression and Michelob Lite. It wasn’t that he didn’t try to employ his capacity for order, just that too many slightly lost or skewed days and details deflected his prodigious talent.
The Dave I knew applied his incredible discipline to writing hundreds of articles, publishing five books, speaking all around Montana, caring for his parents and his girls, maintaining our Helena home and The Land. The discipline that Dave brought to the small routines of his life, threw open the apertures of his mind to broader and deeper pursuits. Awarded him “found time” for projects that had struck fire in his heart. Oral histories with the conscientious objectors who maintained Glacier during the war, for instance.
By the time he died, the world had tipped its hat to Dave’s enormous contributions in awards alone: an honorary doctor of letters from the University of Montana, The Governor’s Humanities Awards, the H. G. Merriam Award for contributions to Montana literature, and the Montana Historical Society’s Educators’ Award.
Dave resisted those awards, demurred and dismissed his work as nothing very special. I’m not sure that he ever fully trusted in the depth of the changes he had made in his world and the work he’d accomplished. The whole, wide-ranging life he’d created.
Three of the five book dedications that Dave offered up were to his parents. And his first, in Christmastime in Montana, says much, “There can only be one choice here: This work is dedicated to my parents, Dorothy and George Walter—who never gave up on me.”
I’ve been hanging out with Dave as I write, his hologram made material in sharp-focused sensual memory. I could relive his modest note-card routine and know that he was master of so many days. That, in the end, he had not given up on himself.
Now, as then, I wish him peace–wherever his spirit resides—and a sure trust in the knowledge that he more than put his days to full and consequential use in his parents’ eyes . . . his children’s and mine and so many colleagues’ and friends.’ ©
