USNA

Back at Annapolis, where I graduated a long, long time ago, we called the daze between Christmas and spring break 'the dark ages.' Pouring through the single-paned windows of Bancroft Hall, chilling your bones on the banks of the Severn River, the cold hard winds of February carried nothing but gloom and despair. Larry, a goofy kid who lived across the hall from me, tried to kill himself the first winter I was there. Vic actually succeeded the following year, giving in to the misery of too much discipline, too much testosterone, and too little sunlight.

Twenty-five years later, my own father killed himself during the dreariness of the Dark Ages. Left alone in their little brick house after my mother's quiet passing, he must have found too little to live for in the skeleton trees and brown grass that surrounded his tidy home. Depression runs deep in my DNA.