Life and Life Only

Dan Mason entered the world in 1974, the same year that Bob Dylan reunited with The Band for the first time since their blistering tour of England in 1966. They opened up at the old Chicago Stadium on January 3rd. Tickets for the two-night stand sold out in less than a half-hour. A fortunate twenty-four-year-old, Don Mason, Dan’s father, managed to score tickets. During this seminal tour, Bob regularly performed the song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, and scowled the lines, “But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have/To stand naked.” Later that year, President Richard Nixon, embroiled in the Watergate scandal, announced he would resign rather than face impeachment. Dan was born into the chaos of the 1970s. In addition to Watergate, America witnessed the Saigon airlift on television—an episode that became the country’s final image of the scar that would not heal. America discovered that free love led to a multitude of divorces. Gas prices rose, and the country endured a brutal recession. The Iran hostage crisis and the subsequent bungled rescue attempt horrified the nation. All of this occurred before Dan could sufficiently color between the lines. Don and his wife Emma accepted the challenge of starting a life together and raising a family during this turbulent decade. Don met Emma McBride at Northern Illinois University. They bumped into each other in line at the bookstore when they were buying their books for the fall semester of their junior year. She was in line ahead of him, and according to Don’s version of the story, the incident was not an accident. Dan always recalled his father’s hardy laugh whenever he told the story. “Excuse me,” Don said to her, somewhat abruptly. “It’s okay. You must be in a hurry,” Emma said. “Not really, but if you leave the store too quickly, I will be in a hurry to catch up with you. Wait for me. I’ll carry your books back for you—to make up for my indiscretion.” Don impressed Emma as supremely confident. He possessed humor and charm and had a certain presence about him. Emma was taken by him at their initial encounter, but in one very unique way, they could not have been more opposite. Outwardly gregarious, Don exuded a type of robust fortitude. He retained the south-side Chicago toughness of his ancestors, but on the inside, he was not as comfortable with himself or as confident as he wanted others to think. He wanted to emerge on top in any encounter, and, early in his childhood, basketball became his vehicle to channel this need. Emma, on the other hand, was meek and somewhat shy in social settings. She would often reach for the right word in conversation and feel like she hadn’t expressed herself as she intended. Emma was not naïve. In the bookstore encounter, as in most situations, she knew the score. She matched Don equally in street smarts, but Emma possessed a great gift. She did not feel the need to have to continually prove herself. She could keep her composure and let life’s disappointments go before they built up to destroy her. However, on the inside, she was pure and elemental and became the rock and the center around which their family would be built. When she became pregnant with Dan, she took a deep breath and considered the world around her and decided that under no circumstances would she let any of it impact her family. They would not become a casualty of the times. Emma developed a bitter resolve to insulate them from all the utter nonsense that engulfed them. In so doing, though a woman of few faults, she missed many opportunities to let her humanity crack through that thick shell. A wealthy town, Barrington, Illinois, rests along the old Northwest Highway, Route 14, about thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago. Don’s great-great grandfather had migrated to Chicago, and his offspring had worked in the steel mills, stockyards, and packing houses on the south side—wherever they could find work. His children and grandchildren had gradually moved farther away from the city as their circumstances had improved—a common occurrence in most families—and eventually, Don settled in Barrington with Emma. Don and Emma graduated from college in 1971. Don got a job as a math teacher and freshman basketball coach at Barrington High School and rented an apartment in town. Don enjoyed a solid high school basketball career. He could shoot but possessed average ball-handling skills. He grew to be exactly six-feet tall. Even back then, he was too slow to guard anybody and too small to play shooting guard in any major program. His heart, desire, and work ethic were not enough to overcome his lack of size, speed, and quickness. Rather than play college basketball at a small school, he went to Northern. From the outset, he intended to become a high school teacher and, eventually, a head basketball coach. Ultimately, he aspired to be a college basketball coach. Prior to getting married, Don had converted to Catholicism to keep the peace. Emma lived in McHenry with her parents that first year out of school. She worked as a nurse at Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington. McHenry, a blue collar town about twenty-five minutes northwest of the affluent suburb of Barrington, contrasted sharply with the community she would soon call home. Emma’s Catholicism did not prevent her from making excuses to stay with Don in Barrington as often as she could manage, during bad weather or at times when she worked late. Technically, she would join him permanently in June of 1972, following their wedding at St. Patrick’s Church in McHenry. Dan inherited the confusion of the times in his very constitution, and he would never quite make sense of it. Dan developed a restless soul and became easily agitated. He felt a deep need to accomplish things to prove to the world it couldn’t conquer him. His parents fueled the fire. They expected success and drove him to it. He developed the belief that he could never let them down. When he had something on his mind, he rarely felt confident sharing it with them, for fear of that look of dismay that either or both often shot his way. Finally, Dan just stopped volunteering information. He didn’t know his parents were doing their best to do what they thought was right, and they didn’t know what the proper parental thing might be any more than they understood how their expectations impacted Dan’s perception of his place in the world. They were shooting in the dark. While the Masons did the best they could to provide a solid foundation for their future lives together, Gerald Ford, who had pardoned Nixon, stood no chance for re-election, and Jimmy Carter, the Governor of Georgia, became president of the United States. The hostage crisis and massive inflation doomed his presidency, and, with the help of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Ronald Reagan became the country’s fourth president in seven years. People were scared. Dan was Don and Emma’s beloved oldest son, and they took comfort in his achievements. If Dan excelled, then everything must be all right, despite what the evening news might be telling them. Throughout all of the unrest, Bob Dylan continued to record and perform. In 1975, Dylan released Blood on the Tracks, containing, among other songs, “Tangled up in Blue”, “Simple Twist of Fate”, and “If You See Her, Say Hello”. In 1976, he released Desire, his first number-one album. In 1979, he released Slow Train Coming, the first of his three religious albums.