One Planet, Two Worlds
The memories of the chaos and the confusion and the joys are still fairly vivid. For a little boy in the late 1960’s – seven, eight, nine years old, the world was weird and wonderful and wild.
Sonic booms occasionally erupted high in the atmosphere, echoing outward in a quick single explosion and then fade soon thereafter. We thought nothing of it and continued our current activity.
Bomb threats at our parochial school from mischievous teenagers who went to the public school meant extra recess. The alarm would sound and without panic the nuns would tell us to go outside, and if we were going to play kickball, let Randy or Mary Jean pitch, they always complained they didn’t get a turn. The sheriff’s canine made the obligatory search and sniff and we were back in class in a couple of hours.
The vague, not totally understood news of a riot or an assassination or a war briefly caught your attention, and you filed it away somewhere in your head for its importance, but didn’t give it much additional thought.
The music spoke about peace and love and revolt and insurrection.
People called hippies wore flowers in their hair and took drugs in a city called San Francisco. A rock concert called Woodstock drew half a million of them to a farm in New York. A demonstration outside a political convention in Chicago turned into a fistfight; everyone was angry. We just went on about our happy little lives, catching bluegill and drinking Royal Crown cola and wrecking our bicycles.
Margaret had been busy with graduation party prep, school board and church guild meetings and extra hours in the evening, closing the books for the end of the school year.
I had complete and total control of the remote and the refrigerator, satisfying my bizarre concoctions in the kitchen.
As a child, I was never a fan of PBS or anything faintly resembling an educational type of program; Muppets and puppets and adults, perfectly groomed, always polite and speaking softly without even a cigarette or a beer in the scene. It was fiction at its finest.
A documentary by Ken Burns on Vietnam was airing and the decision was mine….all mine. As an extraordinarily amateurish historian on the subject, my lonely hours with Margaret away were now occupied. It was like watching Jeopardy; I wanted to see how many answers I got right.
I sit and I watch and I listen, briefly pausing to search Google for more detail on something that wasn’t quite clear or perhaps not covered thoroughly enough for my liking.
The dates and the years are shown, appearing in the byline below the title of each segment or episode. Raw footage of combat, interviews with soldiers and parents, politicos and pals, weary men and women whose futures were altered or destroyed, and the emotions displayed cause me to choke up from time to time.
Where was I in April of 1967?
Ah, I remember! We were hitting walnuts with tennis rackets across the cove toward the Henke house. They returned fire with equal accuracy.
We stopped and ran when a window broke. But somewhere else at that exact moment a million miles away, a young kid who hadn’t even kissed a girl yet was killing someone or being killed.
How about June of 1968? Ah yes!
We were building tree houses in the woods and catching crawdads in the little creeks that ran through it.
But somewhere else, a mother and a father were crying after the minister from their church had just left their home; their son was coming back in a flag-draped metal box.
November ’69? I was acting as a bird dog, busting coveys of quail from the hedgerows for my uncles.
But somewhere else, a white skinned brunette nurse from a farm in rural America was holding the hand and comforting a black infantryman from a Philadelphia ghetto who was going to die in a field hospital, riddled with bullets.
My eyes welled. Why have I been so lucky? I can’t wait till she gets home. The off button is colored red.
The veterans deserve my attention.
