Enter the Church

I don't remember exactly when I met Bobby, but he was the polar opposite of Kevin in many ways. He belonged to the Junior ROTC. He regularly attended church and he didn't hang out on Tuesday nights.

I think it had something to do with folk music; that and proximity. Bobby and I attended the same school. Oh, yeah, he had a car, an old Ford Fairlane. For a while the summer between Junior and Senior year I vacillated between Kevin and Bobby.

After the incident of the ring, I wasn't sure what to do. It was during a time in the summer I had definitely left Kevin for Bobby, but remained friends with Kevin's cousin, that she introduced me to the joys of small item shoplifting. The next night I had a date with Bobby. The date was to go to choir practice at his church. I guess they were letting anyone in the choir, because I could not sing my way out of an open window. I had to stand next to Mary Ellen Pooters, who had a clear alto voice and try to match her notes.

After the practice, I was excited to show Bobby my new treasure. So in the parking lot of the church, I proudly displayed my finger with the purloined ring on it. I did not expect his reaction.

Bobby grabbed my hand in what was not an admiring gesture. Instead he pulled the ring off my hand and threw it out the window.

"Oh, you are such a prig!" I yelled, stomping off to walk home. He didn't follow me, so I decided it was a sign I should go back to Kevin and a life of pizza and matinees.

Of course, I couldn't go back to church, and so had to avoid Mary Ellen Pooters at school as well as all the other church kids.

Kevin's mom was none too pleased we were seeing each other again, and I started having unexpected pangs of what I interpreted to be guilt over my behavior.

Two weeks later I was skulking around the back door to the church when choir practice let out and threw myself at Bobby. He said this was it, no more shoplifting, no more Kevin.

And I had to join the youth group and start down the road to accepting Jesus Christ as my personal saviour. Burt that's another story.

Back to the Future

Allow me a digression. Last night Terry Gross of Fresh Air, NPR's saucy interview show, featured former Weather Underground member Bill Ayres, the same Bill Ayres Obama was accused of"palling around" with by the right during his campaign.

In my last post, I mentioned my minor pilfering as a teenager and later radical activist, as a protest against the capitalist system.

Even while protesting and marching and pilfering, no one in my crowd thought of breaking things or placing mini-bombs in strategic locations to make our point. We turned up at military coffee houses to let the soldiers know the anti-war folks were good people, and to offer them a choice. We had discussion groups and printed newspapers to get the whole story out.

Yes, we broke laws, we harbored fugitives from the Draft; we defied police barricades and locked arms and went limp in passive resistance. But we were dismayed at the actions of the Weathermen, because we feared that they would harm the movement as people misunderstood their actions and lumped all anti-war activists together as violent.

But violence was all around us. Police rioted and clobbered peaceful protesters of every stripe in an effort to maintain the power structure we were so very set on upsetting. When a group of radical youth (even more youthful than we, all in our mature twenties - these kids were, well, kids) went berzerker the day after the bombing of Cambodia, tearing up the streets and throwing rocks, breaking windows, yelling obscenities at police and generally fighting back in outrage, I wrote a piece on Violence in the paper I worked for in Cambridge, The Old Mole, trying to show that the true violence in our society was not the outbursts of pent up frustration of a generation, but the systematic violence of poverty, disenfranchisement, racism, imperialism and War, that led to messy outcomes on City streets.

William Ayres, in measured tones, explained to Terry Gross, why he could not in any sense of rationality be called a domestic terrorist, as McCain and his daffy running mate, Sarah Palin insisted. "Were we young and stupid?" he asked, "Yes, we were. We committed vandalism, we never meant to and never did harm any person. We meant to and we did harm property; property symbolic of the power structure, the war machine. We felt desperate times called for desperate measures." (I paraphrase; total recall is not my strong suit.)

And when asked if he would apologize, he turned the question around, "I will be glad," he said "to sit down with the Generals and the politicians and the ones who made the bombs and the ones who did the killing in Vietnam, and discuss what we all did that might have been inappropriate."

Everything in context. He regrets that the anti-war movement did not do more to stop the killing and the madness. And so do I. I only wish I knew then or even now what that "more" might have been.

Instead, many of us burned out, dropped out, took up communal farming or knitting or threw up our hands and joined the capitalists. While others went into public service. And then there was the women's movement. But, as I said when I started this, I digress. And more to come later.

A Life of Crime

There was one popular department store in the town, Russell's; it had a department that sold the clothes the cool kids wore. Not the "in crowd" with their Peter Pan Colors, but the uncool cool kids, with our bell bottoms and mini-skirts and flowered wide sleeved blouses.

In the jewelery department, there was a display of enameled flower rings, made of metal. Denise, who was the ultimate in blase, led me directly there and deftly pocketed two or three. "Now you try." She said. I looked around. I felt my heart going pit a pat. I was about to become a criminal! I never gave a thought to what my mother would think. What my friends in the "college" crowd would think. What I might think if I was thinking.

I didn't think, I just slipped a daisy ring in bright yellow and orange onto my finger and slipped the finger, hand and all, into my jacket pocket. (Pea coat, very cool.) Then Denise and I sampled perfumes as we scoped out whether any security types appeared to be watching us.

Looking back, I am amazed at how easy it was, how unguilty I felt. How thrilled to have a little trinket I didn't have to pay for.

Amoral at such a young age. In later years, I would join bands of radical youth openly protesting the capitalist system by pilfering items from toilet paper from the student union to steaks from high end markets. We justified our actions as redistribution of wealth. As a teenager, I was just having fun with the cool kids.

In and Out of the "In" Crowd

At the new school, in the small former mill town outside Boston where my mom had grown up, I met Rosemary and Sally and Sheryl who called themselves “college” with a long “e”and said I was one of them. They wore plaid skirts with knee socks and Peter Pan collars. Their hair was in neat flips. I was honored to be considered one of them. I even wrote to Franny that I was now in the “In” crowd. I was that proud.

But they were boring after the theater and the journalism of Kalamazoo and I drifted away from them. Then I met Denise Lawson who was kind of a bad girl. She had red hair and wore slouchy sweaters and skirts that were so short she kept getting called into the girls’ dean’s office. Miss Pepperil was straight out of Dickens. She’d make surprise raids on the classrooms and have the girls kneel on the floor and rap the knuckles of those whose skirts did not fall all the way to floor in the kneeling position. Then she’d trot them down to her office where they sat gossiping and doing their nails while the rest of us labored over algebra and U.S. History.

Denise had a cousin named Kevin. He went to another school in a neighboring town, but he didn’t drive and had to have his mother take him everywhere. He wasn’t allowed to drive with the other kids.

Kevin was cute and just enough of a rebel to spike my interest. When mom wasn’t around, he’d cut class and hitchhike to meet me in the bleachers of the football field. He didn’t play sports; he didn’t hang with the cool kids. Just my type.

Our spot was A J’s Pizza named for Andy and Joan, the owners. A J’s was where all the uncool kids went. The pizza was fine and Andy was counselor to us all. He flipped his dough up in the air the old fashioned way and dispensed advice with the pepperoni.

When I say we were uncool, I mean we were really cool, in the way that teenagers were cool when they were too young to be full fledged Beatniks, and the hippies were yet to be. We were star crossed lovers with nowhere to go but A J’s in the evenings and the balcony of the town’s only movie theater on Saturday afternoons.

Tuesday was the night for hanging out downtown. The stores stayed open late and all the kids, in groups of “college,” outlaws, uncool wannabe hipsters and everyone left over did the stroll down Main Street, eyeing each other and ending up at places like AJ’s and his chief rival, Sam’s across the street. Only the college and the left over kids went to Sam’s though. His lights were bright and his pizza was definitely second rate.

It was one Tuesday night when Kevin was grounded or his mom just didn’t feel like chauffeuring him around, that Denise taught me how to shoplift.

Leaving Kalamazoo

When Kennedy was shot I was in Mr. Frechetta’s social studies class and the announcement came over the intercom, and kids were running into the hall, with their hands over their mouths and crying and holding onto each other and no one knew what to do. Pretty soon it was clear school couldn’t continue, kids were weeping and looking dazed and it was a major group trauma; the group was the whole world it turned out and everyone went home to watch it on TV.

I saw Oswald get shot on TV, Jack Ruby walked right to him and blam pulled the trigger and Oswald got a look like he just ate something that tasted really really bad and collapsed.

And then there wasn’t any school because of the funeral and John John saluting in his short pants and Jackie in her veil. And before that Johnson taking the oath in the plane.

Suddenly it was summer and not only had we moved across town we were moving across the country to Methuen Mass, where my grandmother lived. It was 1964 and the Beatles. And the Rolling Stones and I fell down on the floor at my grandmothers house when Mick Jagger came on the Ed Sullivan Show and swooned. I never screamed like the younger Beatle fans, but I swooned in front of the TV. My aunt lived with my grandmother and she didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

The new school was another brick building but not so old as the one I almost had to go to in Kalamazoo (Did I tell you I grew up in Kalamazoo Michigan, halfway between Detroit and Chicago; how Midwestern can you get?). But there wasn’t a pool, and not much of a paper and no theatre and certainly no glass walls and pods.

Moving up to High School 1963

In Junior High, I had a friend Franny Moore, whose mother had come from southern Ohio and was the only person I knew then who drank iced tea. She wore her hair in pin curls and laughed too loud. She was inelegantly inappropriate in the way that made me think that only white trash must drink iced tea and so I would always refuse it when she offered. To this day, I have not gotten over that image and still find it surprising that so many cultured people drink it! I still think of Franny Moore's mom Edith, yelling to someone at the back door “If you're white, all right. If you’re black, get back.” And it was a black mailman bringing her a package.

Franny was no more popular than I was, and we both longed to be. Marita, my first best friend from kindergarten, thought were both frivolous. But then Marita and I had a serious falling out over a large grasshopper that I chased from the sidewalk (where it was fair game) to her front steps (where she claimed it as hers) the summer before 6th grade.

Then came high school and, just like that, the in crowd was out. With me anyway. I discovered “The Theatre,” our high school group was called the Thespians, and I discovered the Newspaper, and I discovered Don Hamm, who was news editor of the paper and also in the Thespians. I discovered art and drama and journalism. I met kids with cars who went to Chicken Charlie’s after theatre practice. I did the props. Don acted. I discovered kissing, first a guy from Franny's church on a hayride (yucky), then Don Hamm (yummy). Then I really got into it and was kissing the boyfriend of another girl in Thespians. Whoops.

Then very sad times when John Kennedy was shot and after that my parents broke up, no surprise, as they did not have a happy marriage, that was plain for all to see. It wasn’t something you talked about though, so no one did. One day the house was posted for sale and my mom and sister and I moved across town to a small apartment on the bottom floor of a two flat. This was in the winter and I almost had to transfer to this big brick inner city school, which terrified me. My school Loy Norrix was featured in Life magazine the year it was built, only a few years before I started there. It was all glass, and pods and had all the mod cons you could imagine. Plus my friends and Thespians and the Newspaper.

Dancing with the Republicans

It was 1960 and John Kennedy was on the stump. My mother was for Kennedy. My father was for Nixon. I dressed up in a Nixon sign for Halloween and my friend Marita Slobovitch wore a polling booth, a big cardboard box. We had a friend, Harold, who dressed as Uncle Sam and we three posed for pictures. I still have one. Boy were we dorky!

Then Kennedy won, and my mother was happy and my father didn’t really care. And I decided I was for Kennedy after all.

Then it was January, 1961 and I stayed home with my friend Debbie, with cerebral palsy who lived with her grandmother on the other side of the golf course, we stayed home and watched the inauguration on tv at my house with my mother. We ate snacks on metal tv trays.

Debbie lived near this golf course where we went out and hit golf balls around that we found with clubs her grandfather had. She lived in the same part of town as my little crush Jimmy Bodkins, whose big brother Dwight was my real crush, but he was older and unattainable and also a bad boy, so I walked to school with Jimmy who had red hair and was two years younger than me. That was when I was 11. when I was twelve, I think that was the year they moved away to live with their mother and slept on the floor on blankets, they didn’t have beds. That’s what someone said, probably Debbie, since she lived on the same street and lived with her grandmother too. Did they all live with their grandmothers on that side of town?

It was around that time I met my first famous person. Actually, I don't remember if I actually met this person, or just saw him from afar; let's say I was in the proximity; his name was George Romney and he was just elected Republican Governor of the State of Michigan. My father, who was a mostly unemployed cook/car salesman/private eye/process server, somehow wangled tickets to the Governor's Ball. It was in a hotel in Lansing and I wore a white dress. My mom did not attend. My dad and I sat in this room with a bunch of guys my dad's age, and older. (This was 1960 remember, my dad was 35 years old!) We watched TV, I'm guessing the victory speeches? then went down to this ballroom where everyone was taller than me and I danced with my Dad.

Later, of course, that man's son, a Mormon, no less, would run for President in the Republican primary, after serving as Governor of Massachusetts. That was my closest brush with Republican politics.

1962 I do not remember so well, except yes I do that was the year Sara Schellenberger and I read about lesbians and taunted our friend Janie Samuelson, we called her Puppy, that she was one, "Puppy is a lezzie" we would say; we thought it was a hysterical, then we worried that might be lezzies ourselves and the counselor at the junior high called us in to talk about it without ever using those words. Years Later, I caught up with Sara on the web and she mailed me she was happily living in another state with her lover. "It wasn't a phase with me," she said. I still worry about Puppy, whether she ever recoverd from our merciless taunts, (whether she was or wasn't; kids are cruel, and I wasn't even one of the Mean Girls).

I also had a big crush on Greg Malomar, who was kind of a jock (basketball) and kind of in with the in crowd (the fringier elements of it), but looked sad and in need of my friendship, so I read teenage advice columns that said if you liked a boy you would sort of turn up where he is and say hi with a big smile on your face. I did that a lot, I would be at the door when he came out of class, with my big smile and say "Hi Greg;" he would scowl and walk away and once he said, “scag”

Once one of the fringy Mean Girls said Greg really likes you but he is shy, but I knew she was making fun of me, because she didn’t like me one bit and she would never tell the truth.

If she said it, it was a lie, but I still kept my hopes and said “Hi Greg” once again and he said "Scag!" in a louder voice,

I had thick glasses and home perms my Mom did called Tonettes, and wore clothes from the Lerner Ships, so was not likely to get a rise out of Greg or anyone else for that matter.

The Beginning

The sky was the color of runny eggwhite; there was a not quite smell in the not quite hot air. It was April, 1967, Cambridge Massachusetts. The Street was called Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave. It was the main artery connecting Boston and Cambridge. A river ran under it.

When I got there, it was my own yellow brick road. This was my family and my world. Methuen was a million miles of Trailways bus rides behind, another lifetime.

I was reborn, out of the larva of Christianity into the butterfly of hip. My trinities were many, peace love and understanding; sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, Wendy, Steve and Karen (roommates) Harvard Square, Central Square and Park (subway stops)

My first stop was the draft resistance office. Don’t believe people when they tell you they can remember every detail of a person’s face, or the description of a place, even if I’ve been there a million times, I forget. The name of the draft resistance group. The name of the young man filling boxes as I walked ready to be an eager beaver volunteer.

I do remember this: he was leaving, getting ready to bolt the doors, not for the night, but forever. He was going somewhere, back to Kansas? Back to school? To Canada? To jail? He said: I was just closing down, but if you want, you can take over. It’s all yours. Do you want me to leave some of the books?

But I’m only 18, I said. There must be rent. Who pays the rent? I whined.

He shrugged. I left. Someday I will write another story; the story of the girl who stayed. It probably ends the same way.

Wendy and Karen were the official roommates. Steve went with Wendy . He played the guitar and rode a motorcycle and went to Harvard and was Black. Wendy and Steve were Quakers from Rhode Island, They had road maps for their life. Wendy looked like Mary of Peter Paul and Mary. It was fate. They appointed themselves my keepers. As a newly unChristianed, I needed help.

I wanted it all, the hippie garb, the red tinted sunglasses, the be-ins, the mini skirts, the Indian print dresses, the banana skins in the park.

Now that I have turned 60, my mind turns back to the sixties. How could there be people not yet born at that time, that pivotal time in the life of our Country?

I could not have been alive at any other time, it was my moment. April 1967 I was in Cambridge, it had to be Cambridge, Massachusetts. No other city would do, and of course, no other time.

But I need to go back, to the start of the sixties; we are doing decades here after all.

In the beginning I was twelve and John Kennedy was on the stump.