It's Yesterday Once More....

Traces, faded, folded pencil sketch ca. 1974-1975

I was recently taking my usual afternoon ride with little Noah ("our" ritual), singing along with the radio (Noah is indulgent and sometimes even enthusiastic) and beginning to ponder just what I might do to mark the August 27th anniversary of my initial topic post on the blog (Blue Room, Hot Wheels, Purple Prose and the No. 4 Chili Cheeseburger..., although my first comment was published on August 15 in response to Nicki's inaugural post of August 13, Reflections on a Teacher at CHS). As Noah and I cruised the local drag (yes, I still do that), while I was contemplating possible "takes" ... the crystalline voice of Karen Carpenter (dead at 32 of anorexia nervosa) filled the car with the haunting words:

When I was young
I'd listen to the radio
Waitin' for my favorite songs
When they played I'd sing along
It made me smile.

Not only did those particular lyrics, that specific song, make me smile then, they conversely and concomitantly brought tears to my eyes, along with that breathtaking tug on my heart as so many years instantly fell away ... like those pages falling off calendars in old Hollywood movies to indicate the passage of time. So many different years, so many diverse images ... volatile times, kaleidoscopic places, memorable faces, a beloved twindred soul ... impossible to actually count or relate just how many memories (some good, some not so much) crowded my mind in the space of only a few moments....

I prudently had the presence of mind (and the opportunity) to swing into a convenient Sonic Drive-In just ahead, order a cherry limeade (another memory trigger) and then close my eyes and let the rest of the song work its wistful, beautiful, sometimes bittersweet magic.




Karen Carpenter (1950 - 1983) and her brother, Richard

Anyone who has read some of my blog posts, or who otherwise knows me well, apprehends that music has always been important in my life. Some of my most wonderful memories are bound in silken, sensuous chords or silvery, sussurous words, sometimes intricately woven, mellifluous, moving slowly like warm aural honey through the canyons of my mind ... soaring, close harmonies ... psychedelic screams or insensate mumbles symbiotically clashing with primitive percussion and ripped guitar riffs to savage the senses ... cry-in-your-beer but ultimately soothing and cathartic country ballads plaintively detailing love and loss, or the efforts by some Desperado to hide his Lyin' Eyes, or ...Make It Through the Night to another Tequila Sunrise with some Angel of the Morning, or to hang in just a little longer For the Good Times without thinking of What Might Have Been. (It is worth noting here that recent scientific studies have indicated that crying in response to sad songs is indeed therapeutic and should actually be encouraged as a means of feeling better, as many who have spent time drowning their sorrows and feeding the jukebox in some dark, smoky places can attest.)

I've always had a broad appreciation for sometimes startlingly different types of music ... I remember as a small child listening to Big Band music and the songs which were popular in World War II at home with my Daddy, who also introduced me to purported Peruvian/Inca exotica performed by Yma Sumac of the five-octave vocal range; hearing my mother (a wonderful pianist) play from her sheet music and sing; and watching Your Hit Parade every week with either my parents or grandparents, and with my brother Scott. But I must note that it is often our old music ... oldies, if you will ... the music that was being born and growing to maturity at the same time I was beginning to sense the inchoate yet questing nature of my own soul ... which moves me most.

And there was so much coool music those years after the advent of Elvis in the mid-'50s (see The Times of Our Lives: August 16, 1977 ... Elvis ... and Heartbreak Hotel ..., published August 15, 2008) ... Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Flamingos, the Marcels, the Five Satins, the Mystics, the Platters, the Crests (an unusually integrated group for that time, consisting of one Italian, two blacks and a Puerto Rican, who nailed the classic 16 Candles), the great Roy Orbison, the super-great Ray Charles and so many others.

Those were such happy times
And not so long ago
How I wondered where they'd gone
But they're back again
Just like a long lost friend
All the songs I loved so well.



Statue in Ray Charles Plaza, Albany Georgia

I remember Carl Lee and Truett Ball (both CHS Class of 1962) and later Jerry Huddleston (Class of '64) when they DJ'd at 1510 KCTX Radio in Childress ... as I recall, their shift was 3:00 p.m. until sign-off (which was dependent on when the sun set ... when so many of us then changed the dials to 1520 KOMA in Oklahoma City) ... and I remember singing along with the girls (or often just by myself) in the car to Patsy Cline, the Shirelles, the Drifters, the Ronettes, Jackie Wilson and Jerry Butler and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and Peter, Paul and Mary and the Beach Boys ... feeling an absolutely spiritual connection and uplift whenever I heard Ferrante & Teicher's powerful instrumental Theme from Exodus ... sighing softly along with ethereal instrumentals like A Summer Place (Percy Faith and Orchestra), Wonderland by Night (Bert Kaempfert and Orchestra), Moon River (Henry Mancini and Orchestra), Stranger on the Shore (Acker Bilk) and Sleepwalk (Santo and Johnny) ... and groovin' and movin' to Green Onions (Booker T. and the MG's), Midnight in Moscow (Kenny Ball and the Jazzmen), Washington Square (the Village Stompers), Rebel Rouser (Duane Eddy), Wipe Out (the Surfaris), Walk, Don't Run (the Ventures), Misirlou (Dick Dale and the Del Tones) and the truly cooooool Pipeline (done by the Chantays, only one of any number of one-hit wonders).

Every Sha-la-la-la
Every Wo-o-wo-o
Still shines.
Every shing-a-ling-a-ling
That they're startin' to sing's
So fine.

I have such vivid (and verbatim!) memories of so many old songs ... from grade school and Junior High School, from my years at CHS and in college, through all the intervening years and the intermittent tears ... the genuinely warm glow spreading throughout the body, or the quick stab to the heart, when a particularly strong mnemonic suddenly sparks a half-forgotten or half-buried moment or a day in the life. Memory ... the kind that lights the corners of [the] mind ... is a true gift, though not unlike the gift of rain in that whether it is ultimately good or bad depends on how it is used or deployed. When coupled with the honest assessment of your actual feelings and thoughts, proper use of these keys may help determine your future path, and may help clear obstacles you may encounter otherwise.

Bearing in mind the strong, killer karmic injunction not to cause pain to the innocent, I nevertheless think failing and/or refusing to quietly look at and discreetly examine the past is a profligate waste of the gift, perhaps even a thwart to destiny ... and further begs the question(s): If you don't remember who you truly were at some certain significant time(s) of your life ... what you really felt ... if it has been colored or distorted by outside influences ... then how do know who you really are now??? How do you contemplate who you may be(come) in the future???

I remember the love songs that meant (and still mean) so much to me ... I remember all the words and the melodies ... I remember all the ephemera detailed by the Classics IV ... the Faded photographs, covered now with lines and creases/Tickets torn in half, memories in bits and pieces/... souvenirs of days together/... pages from an old love letter ... so many things gone now in ritual cleansing flames or in the natural attrition of almost half a century encompassing moves and spring cleaning ... and still there remain old totems and anonymous traces like a ballpoint pen, an empty cigarette pack, champagne corks, pressed flowers, hotel receipts, matchbooks ... things that when I stumble across them, I smile to think that I kept such innocuous things, which mean absolutely nothing to anyone but me ... but to throw them out would be somehow to throw away or devalue the memory. And that I will never do. I am reminded that if we cannot or will not remember, we cannot know ... we struggle to learn ... we impede our own progress....

When they get to the part
Where he's breaking her heart
It can really make me cry
Just like before
It's yesterday once more.

[Sidebar: I've always loved the 1966 song Elusive Butterfly, by folksinger/songwriter Bob Lind (another one-hit wonder), which as someone once said to me was the closest thing to pure poetry I ever heard set to music. ... "You might wake up some morning ..." and it goes on from there, making as concrete as is humanly possible all those intangible, surreal (yet so very real) moments of stasis in the midst of constant flux that we call love.... Sidebar Addendum: I almost wrecked the car the other day (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but not much) when the female afternoon drive-time DJ on the usually wonderful Platinum 96.7 station here played the gorgeous, evocative Grammy-winning Misty (recorded by Texas-born Johnny Mathis and released in 1959), and then went on to state oh so erroneously that the song was specifically written for the movie Play Misty for Me, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood (his directorial debut), released in 1971 ... a twelve-year gap. Jeez! Do a little research, for god's sake!!! I cringe to think of the people who will now tell other people that the song was written for the movie.... And I hate disinformation, even in such small matters.... Grrrrrr.... But I digress....]



Cairns Birdwing, the largest butterfly in Australia

I think (and have ventured to say on the blog) that memory ... revisiting times and places and things and people who were once (and may still be) important to us ... is vital as we continue to grow and learn in this life. If we cannot "tap into" the person we were at age 16, or 25, or 34, or 43 ... then how in the world do we comprehend not only whether we have changed, but the extent and nature of the change ... whether the change has been good or bad for us and our ultimate spiritual growth ... instructive or stunting in the development of our lives and our souls ... a comfortably-padded and well-accoutred prison or a true liberation allowing us to be all that we can be? I know some people will immediately think "Oh, but you can't live in the past" ... and of course that is true. It is dead and gone ... but not forgotten ... and I am certainly not proposing that anyone try to dwell in that ghost town, to the exclusion of the present and the future. But ... but ... I believe remembrance and true, unclouded examination is as necessary for our eternal, living souls as air and water and food are for our temporary, temporal bodies....

Lookin' back on how it was
In years gone by
And the good times that I had
Makes today seem rather sad
So much has changed.

One of the greatest things (in my mind, at least) about the blog is that in addition to contemporary topics and catch-ups and reunions ... here in this small space in the vast ethereal universe ... it is ... it can be ... it has been ... yesterday, once more. The blog provides an impetus, if not an imperative, for us to return to a place and time, now vanished except in memory (I am reminded of Margaret Mitchell's halcyon fever-dream of the Old South), to revisit things that happened to us then and in the years thereafter, and to analyze them ... both the beautiful and the painful ... in the light of the knowledge we have gained in our life journeys since then. It provides a place for us to reach out to each other, when a saving hand might be welcome, or necessary, or easy to to proffer.

I had an e-mail exchange with Clemi Higley Blackburn shortly before her shockingly swift and untimely death this past February. Despite an estrangement between us, I had e-mailed her to verify some information for my December 31, 2007 post Bobcat Treasure: Jade ... Candles ... and Auld Lang Syne..., and Clemi graciously answered my e-mail and those questions she could. Always looking (with Nicki) for "new voices" on the blog, I wrote again to Clemi, asking if she might be interested in doing a topic post for us, and she e'ed back that she didn't have a clue what she'd write about even if she was interested in undertaking such a project. And so I answered: "Oh, just whatever might be of general interest, or some happy memories you have from school, or something like that." And I felt a literal, physical pain when she wrote back: "I don't have any happy memories from high school, so wouldn't be able to write anything that would be of interest to your readers."

I was absolutely stunned. No happy memories from high school??? Zip, zilch, nada? I had some pretty ugly, painful memories of my own from those days ... as did many of us. But to say you had absolutely no happy memories? That you had not managed to separate and salvage the good from the bad??? Clemi and I were not good friends in school, but we did take dance lessons together for some years, and we worked on The Corral together my Junior and her Senior year, and I was frequently at her house visiting with her mother Carol during my last year of high school (and after) ... and I know that there were happy memories that she might have found there, if she had chosen to access them ... had made the effort to look ... if someone might have reached her ... if she had been able to consign the bad memories to the black hole where terrible memories should go. But as it was, less than two months before she died, Clemi said and remembered she had no happy memories of high school after 45 or so years. And that made me cry ... then and soon thereafter, when I heard of her death.

It was songs of love
That I would sing to then
And I'd memorize each word
Those old melodies
Still sound so good to me
As they melt the years away.



Spider lily and butterfly

The blog gifts us with visions and memories of yesterday, once more. It is a place to come together to share our lives and our thoughts and our acquired wisdom and compassion ... to reach out to each other in these years when love and friendship may be more important than ever. The blog gives each of us the opportunity to reconstitute the complex, layered individual essence of our past, present and future ... it helps us perfect the essential "blending" of the florals and woods and ambergris and spices acquired as we've walked through this life ... to meld the strong but fleeting "top notes" (aromas which are apparent immediately upon application of a perfume but dissipate soon thereafter) with the "middle notes" (the "heart" or "core" scent which begins to emerge as the top notes fade), and the more subtle but deep and rich "base notes" (formulated to emerge as the middle notes begin to fade, but also to pair with and sustain the middle notes to engender the lingering signature of the essence) ... our quintessence, if you will.

All my best memories
Come back clearly to me
Some can even make me cry
Just like before
It's yesterday once more.

I have been privileged to be Nicki's partner on the blog during this past year and I thank her so much for her invitation, for her trust in me and for her support. I have enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you, have been delighted by your comments, and I look forward to the future with anticipation. And, even if some of us don't always agree, I believe we may continue with an adult respect for diverse opinions. I am humbled and so stoked by some of the wonderful thoughts and insights many of you have shared, whether or not it was for publication on the blog. I remain hopeful that more of you will find your own "voices" here, either in topic posts or comments. And I am fortunate and truly blessed to have been able to "reconnect" after so many long years....

And as ever, I so hope that we each are able to take something from here ... to cherish the good things, and consign the "bad things" to the darkness, to build and plan for days to come ... that we may continue for a long time to share our past and present lives, our commonalities of history and circumstance, and our dreams for the future.

Thank you for all ... for everything ... for oh so much ... you have given me ... and for the eternal, immortal connection....

)O(

The Times of Our Lives: 1968 ... the Times ... and We ... Were a-Changin' ....

1968 ... five years from our Senior year and our graduation from CHS. A significant year for our country and our generation ... although I'm sure very few if any of us expected it to be so startlingly significant when we joyfully kissed and celebrated as the calendar turned relentlessly from December 31, 1967 to January 1....

Some of us were in college ... some had graduated and started careers ... some had gone straight to work from high school ... some were married and raising families by then ... some had been divorced ... and some were serving our country in the military, as a volunteer or a draftee. Some of us were still trying to decide what we wanted to be when we "grew up".... A dark cloud called "Vietnam" ... seemingly small and far away on the horizon when we walked the stage for the last time at CHS ... was looming larger in our minds and lives, and for our country as a whole.

By 1968, there were more than 500,000 U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam. We had already lost our first former classmate to premature death ... Clifton Stewart, dead on November 21, 1966 ... though many of us were likely unaware of this particular grim milestone when it passed. And ... having legally "come of age" (21 then) ... we were about to cast our first votes to determine who would be President of the United States ... a significant ritual solemnizing our entry and participation in the "adult" world.

The music we had grown up and graduated with had morphed into the "British Invasion" and the glory years of Motown, psychedelic and "pop" rock, folk music and songs of protest ... of the undeclared but still real and deadly war in Vietnam, of inequality between races and classes of people, of anger and rebellion against the "society" which had nurtured and perhaps conversely stunted us during our "formative" years. As Bob Dylan sang in 1964:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone ...
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone ....

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past ...

For the times they are a-changin'.

We could not help but realize that the times were changing, and that we were changing as well ... had indeed changed from the adolescents we had been in May 1963 ... when our ideas and beliefs had been as much the progeny of our parents as we were. Perhaps even by 1968 some of us had not fallen far from the parental and communal tree of life we had known in Childress ... but as must happen to everyone when they leave the shelter of the nest, we were finding that sometimes the "verities" we had once taken for granted no longer fit the world in which we lived and the lives we were constructing. Benjamin Franklin posited: In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. But with all his wisdom, Franklin missed acknowledging the imperative for change which is likewise certain and inexorable, just like death and the turn of the calendar. Taxes at least are "negotiable" ... or malleable, in the hands of a creative accountant....

In November of our graduation year, our world and our psyches had been rocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ... an unthinkable, unspeakable act for which we, and the country, were totally unprepared ... which even today remains writ large in our memories, the seminal event for the cataclysmic changes which would mark the rest of the decade. (See my post The Times of Our Lives: November 22, 1963 ... the day of the bells ..., published January 11, 2008.) The swearing-in of President Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One ... impossible for me to remember and visualize without also seeing the image of Jacqueline Kennedy standing there in her ruined pink suit (surely a metaphor for our now bloodied generation), grief-stricken and stunned from the horrors she had witnessed and experienced a few hours earlier ... also inaugurated times of change and a revision of the old social orders. The time when segregation would be tolerated de facto if no longer de jure, as it was when we were at CHS, was passing into history. Those who had been disenfranchised and denied because of race or poverty were being given their voting rights at last, despite rabid resistance which remained in some parts of the country. In 1968, in some states, people of different races were still not permitted to marry, despite the 1967 Supreme Court ruling striking down such racist laws.

As a society, of which we were now voter registration card-carrying members, many of us were finding we could no longer ignore and tolerate the manifest injustices that had been perpetrated against an entire race, against women, and against the poor and other minority classes of our fellow citizens. Some of us no doubt embraced these changes as long overdue, while others resisted such "disruptions" ... the beginning of a schism in what had been a fairly homogeneous mindset for the majority of the country in the years following World War II. Activist movements to effect change were becoming more common, more strident, more demanding of sweeping and immediate transformations in tenets and lifestyles we had largely theretofore taken for granted.

For some of us, knee-length or longer (often homemade) dresses and skirts, and "comfortable" Levis worn under our Dad's shirts with socks and penny loafers, had given way to the miniskirts, baby-doll dresses, knee-high or white mid-calf "go-go" boots and hip-huggers of London "mod gear" ... Carnaby Street and Mary Quant ... accoutered by huge lined and mascaraed eyes, flowing manes or chicly sculpted short tresses, and pale pouty lips. We moved beyond Buddy Holly and Patsy Cline, both dead before we graduated in 1963, and discarded our earlier fealty to Elvis until he reinvented himself in black leather for his 1968 Comeback Special.

We grooved to the music of the Beatles (which was itself in metamorphosis) and the Stones (self-styled "Satanic Majesties"), listened to Aretha Franklin demand just a little R-e-s-p-e-c-t, Heard It Through the Grapevine with Marvin Gaye, thrilled to the soaring harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas, and took inspiration from Steppenwolf, who averred that they, and we, were Born to Be Wild. For those who preferred country music, it is worth noting that it was in 1968 that Johnny Cash cut his legendary live album At Folsom Prison, while Tammy Wynette sang openly of D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and Jeannie C. Riley "socked it to the Harper Valley PTA." Changing times indeed....

Many of the guys, even in Childress, grew their hair longer and donned bell-bottoms, patterned shirts and Edwardian jackets. Some, although inevitably evolving in attitude and outlook, never abandoned their mode of dress from high school, as evidenced by my occasional glimpses of them when we visited Childress and chose to spend an evening in Hollis dancing at Fuzzy's or The Sand Bar ... or at the 19th hole of the Childress Country Club (CCC), where we could now order a drink along with our parents. Another breach in the formerly mystic bastion of adulthood.... The jukebox there was a melange of music types and styles, running the gamut from Glen Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix and The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde by Merle Haggard and the Strangers, to Simon and Garfunkle and Buffalo Springfield (the forerunner of the group that would become Crosby, Stills & Nash, eventually adding Young, and later sing about Guinnevere of the golden hair, a free spirit who drew pentagrams late at night while no one watched, but couldn't see the man who longed for her) ... but still no Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, apparently still a few searing chords and a primal scream or two too far out man for the CCC.

As 1968 began, the societal rupture and upheaval we were about to experience had been in prolonged gestation, although a rending, difficult birth was imminent. We marked many notable events in January ... the flowering of the "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia, brutally crushed by the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies in August; the television debut of the irreverent Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which arguably changed the face and style of comedy; the seizure of the USS Pueblo by North Korea on January 23; the beginnings of the Battle of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, both generating widespread and increasingly heated debate of our involvement in an undeclared war in Southeast Asia, which ultimately by the time of its tragic denouement in April 1975 would cost in excess of 58,000 American lives ... mostly young lives ... mostly lives of our generation. I remember hearing at about that time that Travis Simmons, two years ahead of us at CHS, had been killed in Vietnam ... and I knew others who served there, honorably and well, who were forever indelibly marked by their service. I have often thought that as long as there is one of our generation alive, that war will never truly end.

Frederick Hart sculpture, a part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

On February 1, a photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong suspect in Saigon (it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969) would serve as a further catalyst for a re-evaluation of our presence in Vietnam, a conflict which had been escalating steadily and was touching more and more American lives and families with tragedy. On March 12, President Johnson won a narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary over "peace" candidate Eugene McCarthy, reflecting burgeoning dissatisfaction and disagreement over the War, and on March 16, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy (brother of the murdered JFK) entered the Democratic Presidential race, promising to end U.S. participation in an event which was increasingly perceived as a quagmire for our armed forces and our country. Also on March 16, American troops killed Vietnamese villagers at My Lai, although the details of the incident would take a long time to unfold. On March 31, President Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election, and would not run if nominated, thus becoming the most visible, if still living, casualty of the war until that time.

And then on April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Assassinated ... once again, that terrible, dreadful word ... that almost unthinkable act ... a shock to so many of us, no matter what we may have thought personally of Dr. King or the civil rights movement. The arbiter of equality and non-violent change, dispatched so swiftly and irrevocably in the sharp, violent crack of a rifle shot. After the pain of the John F. Kennedy assassination, many of us had taken comfort in thinking that Kennedy's murder was merely an obscene anomaly in our "enlightened" day and age ... and yet, somehow it had happened again. Grief and disbelief ... followed by fear and fury after several days of violent riots in major American cities, one coming unnervingly close to the White House, and a shootout between Black Panthers and police in Oakland, California. What was happening to our country ... our world ... our sense of values? Some of us felt lost, adrift, bereft of the core beliefs we had held for so long. On April 11, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, eased in its passage through the sometimes intractable Washington bureaucracy by Dr. King's death.

On June 5, Senator and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles by a(nother) lone gunman, and the mind again reeled as we faced the fact that there were certain people, certain segments of our society, who thought it perfectly acceptable, even reasonable, to murder someone with whom they disagreed, as Ku Klux Klan members had done to three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. James Earl Ray was arrested in London on June 8 for the murder of Dr. King, an event almost lost in the horror and shock over the latest Kennedy death.

Buried in the back pages of our newspapers, and likely only remarked by a few news commentators, if any, it was noted that on July 11 an obscure man named Saddam Hussein had led a coup d'etat in a Middle Eastern country, thereby first achieving ultimately corrupting power by becoming Vice Chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Council.

In August, Richard Nixon was nominated as the Presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and chose Spiro Agnew as his Vice Presidential running mate. Amid unprecedented violent clashes between police and anti-war protesters in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie were nominated by the Democrats. Humphrey-Muskie would go down to a narrow defeat in November, and Nixon-Agnew would be re-elected by a landslide in 1972. Segregationist candidate George Wallace proved disturbingly popular among some segments of society, and became the last third party candidate to win an entire state's electoral votes. Both Nixon and Agnew would later resign from their offices in disgrace (Agnew in 1973 and Nixon in 1974), becoming the only Presidential and Vice Presidential team in U.S. history to do so. The resignations, and Nixon's and Agnew's earlier vitriolic attacks on the news media investigating them, were inarguably, I believe, major contributing factors to our present-day cynicism and disillusion with politics.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall by night, Washington, D.C.

In September, more than 150 women in Atlantic City protested the Miss America Pageant as being exploitative of women. Bras were burned, a thousand jokes were launched and the groundwork was laid for Rush Limbaugh's later rants against "Femi-Nazis" ... while most women quietly and outside the movement went on with the business of trying to obtain equal pay for equal work ... a goal still not realized. On October 7, NASA launched Apollo 7, the first of the manned Apollo missions, and there was a resurgence of pride in American accomplishments. At the games of the XIX Olympiad in Mexico City, the medal ceremonies of October 16 were marked and marred by the raised-fist Black Power salutes of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos. On October 24, the Department of Defense announced that about 24,000 U.S. troops would be sent back to Vietnam for involuntary tours of duty. In social notes, on October 20 Jackie, the beloved, iconic widow of President Kennedy, married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on the island of Skorpios, putting a final dissonant coda to the end of Camelot. And on October 31, months after John McCain's plane was shot down and he became a Prisoner of War in Hanoi, President Johnson declared that he had ordered a complete cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam, effective the next day.

On November 14, the formerly exclusively male bastion of Yale University announced that it would become coeducational, to genteel and sometimes misogynistic consternation. (Many alumni of Texas A & M became apoplectic when the school went fully coed in 1970. My late father-in-law was one of them, and thereafter never donated a dime to the school, despite his earlier years of great pride in being an Aggie.) NBC's switchboard was swamped on November 17 when the network cut off the remaining 65 seconds (in "official time") of the Oakland Raiders-New York Jets football game in order to broadcast Heidi. The Raiders came from behind and scored two touchdowns, making the most of those precious seconds and enraging football fans across the country, causing NBC and the other networks to reevaluate their positions on cutting away from sports events to begin regular programming on time. On November 22, five years to the day after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Beatles released their eponymous ninth album, which would become known as The White Album, containing such music as Back in the U.S.S.R., Revolution and Helter Skelter ... taken as inspiration by a lunatic, homicidal, self-styled guru named Charles Manson, who would direct the terrifying murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others in Los Angeles in August 1969.

On December 24, Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit and U.S. astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders became the first humans to see the dark side of the moon, and the entirety of the earth, as prelude to the launch of Apollo 11 and the moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin July 20, 1969. Armstrong's "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" fulfilled President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon (and effectively winning the space race with the Soviets) before the end of the 1960s.

Whether you supported or opposed the Vietnam War, or like many came to oppose the war after initially supporting it ... whether you wore a peace symbol or a uniform, or both, or neither ... whether you believed the diverse movements toward civil rights for our fellow citizens were overdue in coming, or should have arrived "in due course" with calm, barely perceptible change ... whether you believed it was the right and duty of U.S. citizens to oppose policies of our government which they believed immoral or unjust, or felt that our government should be supported fully and completely, no matter what ... whether you loved our country but recognized its inequities and the necessity for change, or espoused that we should all love America without question or leave it ... whether you lived in a small town where change sometimes comes glacially, or in a larger city more roiled and affected by the tempests of the times ... the events of 1968 could not have failed to affect your life and your vision of the world today. As Dylan prophetically sang, our "present" in those days has now become our past, yet the reverberations and consequences of that year still resonate today, and will continue to influence our lives and those of our children and grandchildren, for many years to come.

It is said, although not documented as to authenticity, that the Chinese (in the throes of their horrific "Cultural Revolution" in 1968) have a saying that is both a proverb and the first part of a threefold curse of increasing severity: "May you live in interesting times." (The other two parts are "May you come to the attention of those in authority" and "May you find what you are looking for.") The times of our lives of the Class of 1963 have indeed been interesting ... and whether ultimately a blessing or a curse, or more realistically, a mixed bag (in the parlance of those days), they are nevertheless an ineluctable part of our history, our present and our future.

And, on a personal note (borrowing some lines from the singer Donovan): In those "chilly hours ... of uncertainty" of 1968, when it sometimes seemed the leaves were draped by tears of rain, between the pain of great loss and sustaining hope for the future, I made my own, life-altering and -affirming choice when I put out my hand to catch the wind and married Yahn (see my entry posted on the "Show and Tell" linked blog on January 29, 2008), who gave me true solace and refuge in the warm hold of a loving mind. We will celebrate our 40th anniversary at the end of May.

)O(

As You Like It: Le Holiday ... Ours (Bears) ... and Face to Fang ....

The main pool at the Acapulco Princess. There is a swim-up bar behind the waterfall. Photo by Yahn Smith

Obviously still in French mode after my recent sojourn with les girls in Paris ... and what a lovely mode it was.... Nevertheless ... been there, done that (again) ... now on to other things. Poor Yahn. Over the many years we've been traveling together, we would no sooner get home, drop our bags, and then drop ourselves into bed for a looong rest ... than I would be up and planning our next escape. Before our first trip to Paris, I told myself that if I never got to see anyplace but Paris, I would die happy. Well ... I didn't exactly lie ... but I truly failed to reckon with just how badly the travel bug would bite.... I hesitate to use the word "addiction" ... but I suppose as addictions go, it's one of the more benign. I could have picked worse....

If anyone saw my two brief (error-ridden) blog comments made in Paris, then you know that we had an "exciting" landing at Charles De Gaulle Airport. As to the "error ridden" part: Don't get me started on the difficulties of the French keyboard ... it's not the qwerty we're used to ... the q and the a are reversed, the w is on the bottom row under the q (which is where the a should be), the m is where the colon and semicolon should be, and among other challenges, there are various key combinations to strike to make certain punctuation marks, including the aforesaid colon and semicolon, as well as the @, and others. Jeez Louise!!!! Strictly hunt and peck ... then hunt for the controlling key.... Even Mrs. Denny would have been at a loss.... But I digress....

On final approach to CDG, our plane suddenly pulled up just before touchdown, heading back into the wild blue yonder (my Daddy the pilot drilled me in the Air Force hymn from a young age) and pouring on the gas in a steep climb. Flying with Daddy when I was a child, and my air travel in later years, told me immediately that something untoward was happening. We made a wiiiiiiiiide circle over the airport, and finally came back on another approach ... landed and bounced ... and then saw all the emergency vehicles arrayed on either side of us ... fire engines, ambulances, paramedic vans, etc. It seems the light on the control panel which indicates the landing gear is properly locked failed to register. So ... there was no certainty that the wheels wouldn't collapse when we touched ground. (It was also not a good time to remember that I was once told by a commercial airline pilot that a landing is nothing but a controlled crash....) We had to disembark via stairs onto the tarmac, rather than via the usual jetway, and then were bused into the Customs terminal.

I must say that after our landing experience, it was NOT comforting to hear yesterday that American Airlines, the carrier we flew, pulled 300 (300!!!) or so of its planes from service for "maintenance issues", canceling many flights in the process. So ... right after being thankful that AA didn't kill us on landing, I am glad we were not stranded in Paris (although there are worse places) when AA scrubbed those 300+ flights.

When we planned this trip, I broke a long-standing rule to NEVER again fly an American air carrier ... ANY of them ... if there was a decent foreign alternative. Unfortunately, American carriers simply cannot hold a candle to foreign airlines such as Cathay Pacific, Air France, Singapore, Thai, etc. As with all rules, I make an exception to that one in the case of Aeroflot or Egypt Air (when they serve dinner, you know what happens to old camels who can no longer carry tourists around the Pyramids). Indeed, our AA flight to Paris had been delayed leaving Dallas for "maintenance problems" as the pilot announced, and all during the flight my reading light and others in the cabin failed to operate, which meant I couldn't read on the flight .... NOT a good thing. IMHO, it is basically a good rule of thumb to do everything possible to fly on a good foreign airline in your travels, if at all possible. But again I digress....

When we booked our trip, we arranged for transfers via van from and back to the airport, and by the time we cleared Customs after all the delay, I feared (justly it seems) that our driver had given up on us ... so I chased down a really cute little French guy at baggage claim, and using my fractured French in counterpoint to his fractured English, managed to persuade him to use his cell phone to call the company which had arranged our transfers. Sure enough, our driver had left and was just exiting the airport when his company called and sent him back for les travel-frazzled girls. And so, at last we left the airport and ventured into Paris itself. But ... more on that (and pictures!) in a few days. Today the topic is other vacations ... specifically, summer vacations during the late '50s, early to mid-'60s....

Our private plunge pool at sunrise in our villa overlooking Jimbaran Bay, the Four Seasons Resort, Bali Indonesia. Photo by Yahn Smith

A looooong time ago when I was at CHS (not quite early Jurassic, but getting close), and experiencing my heretofore acknowledged teenage angst and the stifling sense of ennui I felt within the confines of Childress County ... I made a sweeping vow (as teenagers and those who have flown American air carriers are wont to do) that one day I would get as far away as possible from from that dusty little town. And I've done my best to live up to my promise. Happily, in later years I rediscovered the treasures to be found in that particular corner of Texas ... lifelong friendships and relationships, commonality of experience, shared memories ... but we are talking now of a teenaged mind ... questing, questioning, dismissive of authority (now that I think of it, still got all of those)....

The poet Sylvia Plath (a taco or two shy of a combo platter in many ways, but a brilliant talent before she turned on the gas and put her head in the oven) articulated such feelings in her poem Ennui when she wrote:

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

Ah ... The Lady or the Tiger ... one of my favorite stories ... first read in Brownie Kimbrough's class at Childress Junior High School. I remember we had some spirited discussions in class about it ... the guys were all sure the tiger came out of the door, and the more romantically inclined girls just knew it was the lady.... Despite my deep-seated romanticism, I could never quite make up my mind ... still can't ... depends entirely on my mindset when I ponder the question, and perhaps my pervasive Libra tendencies to see and weigh all sides of an argument ... which can get a bit tedious as Yahn will tell you, particularly when we're just trying to pick a place to go to dinner.... But once more I digress....

I remember I always looked forward to summer vacation ... getting away from the everyday, the quotidian, all things Childress.... We nearly always went to Denver in the summer, to visit Daddy's family. And there was soooo much to do there ... the Denver Zoo and Museum of Natural History (two of the best in the country, IMHO) ... Elitch's and Lakeside amusement parks (those roller coasters ... the old, rickety wooden kind!!!), exotic things like the Lotus Room (there wasn't even a semblance of a Chinese restaurant in Childress then) and the Fuji-En (Japanese, with tatami rooms ... where I persuaded Daddy to buy my first set of chopsticks so I would know how to properly eat with them when someday I made it to Asia) ... so many wonders....

The summer of 1960 (between my freshman and sophomore years at CHS) we actually branched out with my aunt and uncle and their two daughters and went from Denver to Yellowstone National Park ... they slept in a tent and Daddy, Scott and I took the little Airstream camper ... for which I was extremely grateful the first night as you could hear bears rustling around the campsite. The rangers (and the signs all over the park) warned ... repeatedly and in dire terms ... of the dangers of feeding the bears, or not securing your food ... and yet there were always those who just refused to heed the warnings. I remember one day we had gone to see the Fountain Paint Pots, and when we walked back to the car we found the parking area cordoned off by rangers ... some fool had left a picnic lunch in his car, and left the windows down ... and somehow a bear (resourceful critters, like their "cousins" cats) had managed to climb into the car and was chowing down (and excreting) lustily ... rendering the car uninhabitable, even once the bear was permitted to amble lazily on his way.

At Yellowstone (which I remember as having the best vanilla ice cream in the world, later acquaintance with Blue Bell notwithstanding), I was absolutely fascinated with the college kids (called "savages") who worked there during the summer. I thought that would be such a cooool summer job ... but missed out on that particular aspiration, although our dear Clara (Robinson Meek, of course) did achieve it. And BTW, Clara ... I am sure we would all be interested in your stories about that ... if we can persuade you to write them ...?

Of course, the 1960 film Where the Boys Are, a story of college girls (and guys!!!) on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, was the uber adolescent female vacation fantasy. It starred Dolores Hart before she became a nun, George Hamilton when he was only medium well done, Yvette Mimieux at her loveliest and most vulnerable before she owned a sweatshop in Haiti, Connie Francis, who also sang the killer title song, and others, and I know my friends and I were certainly inspired by it. Then in 1962, the film Rome Adventure (Troy Donahue, Suzanne Pleshette, Angie Dickinson) proved the genesis of my vow to someday spend a magical summer in The Eternal City. (Another vow ... with all that vowing, perhaps Dolores Hart is not the only one who should have entered a religious order ... grin.) By the time I did make it to Italy, I was well beyond teenaged, and I only got two weeks, but the magic of Roma, Napoli, Pompeii, Sorrento and bella bella Venezia (one of my very favorite places) was just as strong as I'd imagined so many years earlier. And BTW, Troy Donahue and others of the 1960s "heartthrob" persuasion were never really my cuppa beef tea when I was younger. JoAnn had Paul Newman, but I went for dark, sensitive, brooding types ... the recently mentioned George Maharis of Route 66 springs most readily to mind; or the bald, sensitive, brooding Yul Brynner (never cared for him when they slapped a wig on him); or the variously toupee'd or bald (doesn't matter), sensitive, brooding, utterly magnificent Sean Connery. And so I married a blond, sensitive, brooding type.... Go figure....

In 1988, our 25th year after graduation from CHS, I prevailed upon a very popular DJ friend of mine in Houston to make a special tape (now expanded and transferred to a set of three CDs) for a "slumber party" Linda Kay was hosting for the gang in honor of the occasion. The rock bottom criterion I set for myself while compiling the music was that it all had to be popular music from our junior high and high school years, containing nothing after the summer of 1963. I was also pleased that the music I selected did not repeat any single artist, difficult to do with some performers like Elvis, Roy Orbison, the Four Seasons, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, et al. Those who know me well (and who have heard the tape or CDs) were not surprised that the very first song on the set is Where the Boys Are ... and the beautiful Al Di La from Rome Adventure (sung meltingly in Italian by Emilio Pericoli) which speaks of a love beyond all others, a love "beyond the beyond", is also on the CD set. And ... the Theme from Exodus (Ferrante and Teicher), which I named as my favorite song in my Senior Profile in The Corral, is also there ... and remains the song I would pick if stranded on a desert island with only one song I could hear for the rest of my life. Some things deserve constancy, despite the imperative for change.... But again I digress....

Balinese rice workers near Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Photo by Yahn Smith

If you are a regular reader of the blog (and why wouldn't you be?), you know I recently inaugurated a continuing (albeit finite) series featuring my humor column As You Like It, which I wrote for two years for The Corral at CHS, and during the summer of 1962 for The Childress Index. So, as I continue decompression after le holiday in La Belle France, I've decided to share with you a column I did on the subject of summer vacations during my Index summer. As I have previously promised and averred (difficult though it may be), I have not changed one embarrassing, cringe-inducing word of the column as it originally was published (shortly after Gutenberg's marvelous invention ... grin), and only hope again that you will deal with me kindly in regarding this modest effort. Of course, I do hope you enjoy it ... and that perhaps it brings back some memories of your own vacations ... which BTW, we would be delighted to publish under 'Cat Tracks, or as "comments" to this post. That is a hint ... not to say a heartfelt plea....

As You Like It
by Jennifer Johnston

Aloha! Thought you got rid of me, didn't you? Oh well, smile -- you can't win them all ... snarf, snarf.

Now that summer vacation is actually here, you are probably spending your time doing the things you dreamed about during the school year -- mopping, dusting, hanging out clothes, making beds, washing windows and cooking meals for Momsie, or working your fingers to the bone for some slave-driving boss -- no offense, Mr. Higley. But -- BUT -- if you are one of the lucky ones -- one whose parents have several assorted maids, three cars, etc., and who has no desire for the material things in life -- you will spend your summer vacation doing various things which we all love and enjoy.

This column is dedicated to those people (like me) who must spend their summer in an office or under a clothes line. In it, I shall attempt to present a mental picture to those of you who cannot enjoy loafing and would like to see how the other eighth lives.

Picture yourself, far away from civilization -- beautiful thought, eh wot -- lounging around around a camping area, enjoying the beauties of nature in some mountainous wooded section. No one around for hundreds of miles -- all right, maybe two or three trailer spaces over -- but anyway, back to the topic. There you sit, at peace with the world, until you suddenly hear a buzzing around your ear -- and you discover you're camped three feet from a stagnant stream. Yes, dear people -- mosquitoes -- but this is a problem easily overcome. All you have to do is reach for the insect repellent. So what if you forgot it? You can always stay inside the trailer, or stand in the line of smoke from the campfire.

So the next day, you go into town and buy some mosquito repellent. Your worries are over -- until a bear smells your food -- you didn't know you were having company for supper, did you? And of course, no mountain vacation would be complete without a swim in a cool, clear mountain lake. The fact that the lake runs into a waterfall doesn't bother you at all. Mainly because you don't know that the lake runs into a waterfall. By the time you find out -- it's too late for you to be bothered about much of anything.

Now let your mind wander to the seashore. Can't you just see yourself, basking in the hot sun on the hot sand? Loafing -- to put it bluntly. You're so comfortable that you don't want to move. So you drift off to sleep. Of course the fact that you will probably wake up three hours later with a third-degree sunburn doesn't bother you -- until three hours later, anyway.

But, undaunted, you make your way into the cool, blue shark-infested water. Although you have been warned of several dangers you might encounter, you swim on -- nothing can happen to you -- you're just on vacation. Well, you're right -- nothing can happen to you -- unless you get caught in the undertow, washed up on the rocks, or meet a shark face to fang.

For those of you who stay home during the summer, but do not have jobs to do, you can always spend your time going swimming, and going bowling, and going swimming, and going to the show, and going swimming, and if you are still in a mood to continue with this, you're on your own.

Well, I'm running out of ideas, so I shall let you rest your eyes -- and stomachs. Snarf, snarf.

Purcell Castle, County Tipperary, Ireland Photo by Yahn Smith

)O(