Remembering Doug Dawson

“There’s nothing you can hold for very long.” ~Robert Hunter

I first encountered Wallace Douglas Dawson III a few months before we were formally introduced. We were the same age, on the same track—media arts—and so it happened that we shared one of the non-core classes all college students are expected to take: a modicum of this & that over on the humanities campus, in this case Philosophy 110: Introduction to Logic.

Few were in this class because they were truly interested in expanding their field of consciousness with regard to the study and application of Boolean logic, and certainly not taught by an erudite but nebbishy Canadian gent whose name escapes my recollection. As such, this scholar managed a rowdy group of restless underclassmen, early in the school day and nobody wanting to be there; some of the demonstrative, even disrespectful behavior belied the university environment, bordered on a high school classroom on a warm spring afternoon in May.

One of the wiseacres, a blonde dude with a loud, wry voice carrying a touch of self-awareness, just enough to let his comrades know he was doing schtick, but maybe not the prof himself: Doug Dawson, as much of a memorable character as I would ever meet, managed at least once a class to ask a partially ridiculous question that somehow also made sense. We were snickering at his act, but the professor usually was able to parlay the question into the lesson. After a while he seemed to understand that Doug was pulling his leg, but what can you do when someone is obviously smart enough to get the tennis ball back over the intellectual net? It wasn’t high school, after all. Doug in this guise was an obvious bullshitter, but always with a touch of also being on the level. In any case, after a few months I didn’t remember much of anything about the class except that loudmouth in the front with the questions. That character. Dawson.

The Writer’s Posse

A year in the lives of two young human beings often offers the opportunity for enormous growth, and while I would face decades of gradual seasoning in many areas of life, by the time I got to my core media classes—scriptwriting, filmmaking, animation and other creative arts endeavors—I was ready to settle down and knock out the 4.0 my ambition demanded.

It wasn’t long before I fell in with a main crew of other likeminded, hard-partying night-hounds all suffering the various literary ambitions and depredations of the young and not-so-young. This included Larry Campbell and Doug Dawson, the three of us taken under the wing of our writing mentor, Dr. Franklin Ashley, playwright and scriptwriter among other accomplishments. We had epic adventures; he dared us to be the best writers we could, to learn and live and grow. Hell, he took us to New York that next spring. Epic.

I have written all this into Reconstruction of the Fables, my as-yet unpublished media arts/1980s college memoir-ish re-imagination of my own past. Maybe I’ll put it out this year.

No rush. Doug read the thing a few years ago. I let out a breath after he pronounced it honest and worthy. We had lost Larry years before, you see, so this was tender territory. I needn’t have worried. Doug said the novel was a hoot. “Levon Kunkle, yeah.” Doug, nodding and riffing on what he did and didn’t like about the character I’d based on Larry, as well as a few others I’ve known. Including Doug himself. “Cool cat.”

The reason I may or may not publish the book is that Doug was the main person I needed to read the manuscript to make sure I did the subject justice—not only for myself, but everyone from back then who informed the various characters. His judgement of it as A-Ok gave me so much relief that it’s hard to imagine a better review.

Grateful for the Dead

But forget media arts—the most lasting and crucial aspect of my friendship with Doug ended up not being in creative work, rather our (eventual) mutual fandom of the Grateful Dead. Doug, persistent and erudite in his descriptions of why this ‘ancient’ 60s dinosaur band deserved such a fervent and devotional fanbase. I had bigger fish to fry, enjoyed music and doing the various psychic emollients that seemed to come with the territory, the weed-and-shrooms part of the rock & roll pharmacopeia. For the most part. Harder stuff, too, but that never interested me.

We had both seen the band for the first time on a misty, cool Halloween night in 1985 there on the campus of the University of South Carolina. Busy with school and then with a life interruption courtesy a personal tragedy, I didn’t see them again for a few years. In the interim, Doug and a couple of others would keep insisting that I get back to the shows, gave me tapes, and in no time a new Deadhead was hatched, one who would go on to make his fandom of the group a life’s-work art project as well as an entrepreneurial career. In some ways, I owe my whole adult living at our store Loose Lucy’s to Doug—if he hadn’t kept on pressing me to get hip to the Dead scene, I might have missed my chance at so many dreams coming true. Bless him for that gift.

Memorial to a Friend

I won’t go into the various travails my old friend faced in his life. He struggled; I have struggled. Enough to say that he amazed all his friends and the scant family he had left in the world with his resilience and return from a ludicrous number of epic health crises. I don’t know if anyone was counting, or if we actually got to nine, but dang it, last fall he finally ran out of lives. May he rest easy. His body had been through quite a ride. Him having put it down, thereby freeing his spirit, isn’t all bad news. But, God knows I and others will miss him.

A group of friends, a few mutual and who in some cases hadn’t seen each other in decades, banded together to remember Doug by planting a Japanese Maple in his memory, there on that college campus where so many of our precious post-adolescent memories, epic tales and adventures in youthful passion and creative exuberance, occurred.

We chose a brisk, damp morning for the planting there in A. C. Moore park along Blossom Street, along sidewalks all of us treaded many times. Doug would continue to walk those streets more than any of us; putting the tree here would allow anyone who remembered him the chance to reflect on the blessings and travails of life in an environment of rich life, a lily-choked pond of fish, huge magnolias, a fecund oasis there in the hard and gritty urban environment. We took turns turning the earth, planting the tree, filling the loam, reflecting on the moment and telling a few stories. We played some Dead tunes on a bluetooth speaker.

We slowly peeled away, all of us with our own life-threads to get back to—like any funeral. You all know the drill. Life goes on. It will be a little less colorful around Columbia SC without Doug Dawson, but on it will trudge. Blessings up to him and right here to his surviving loved ones.