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.
