I was drinking coffee here in India this morning, and dipping into various random Youtube videos and something I saw, which I have forgotten already, made me suddenly ask myself what I was doing in 1970. I have missed writing on this blog and yet it is only my utter inertia that has kept me from doing so. So I thought that if I wrote down the year “1970”, I would just see where that led me. I have found that if i can make myself write just one sentence, I am off and running and can hardly stop writing thereafter. My personal letters have been known to run to ten pages which I often write in a single sitting without stopping for anything. I forget that I am writing and it feels to me like I am having a conversation. My block, if I can call it that, comes before that first sentence is put down. Give me any sentence and i can go on from there for a long time. So, having written “1970” this is where I went.
When the year 1970 began, I was 27 years old and just finishing the best and worst decade of my life. I suppose that there are many people like me who feel that their 20s are the equivalent of living through a ten-year earthquake. Ten years before the morning, of January 1, 1970, I was in my senior year of high school; I had never been outside the State of New York. I had rarely been outside the three-county area I was born in and the primary reason I had even been as far as the other two counties which were nearest to the one I lived in is because Reedville is in the very southeast corner of Maycomb County, which meant then that the closest shopping areas lay in another county rather than in Maycomb, even though a rather large city inside Maycomb was just 15 miles to the north of my home. As viewed by me, the 17 years since my birth had been, for America, one long upward curve of prosperity, enlightenment and scientific advance. We had won the war that America had entered just before my birth, in which it was quite clear to me was one where we did no wrong and the enemy had been unrelievedly evil. There were people, people I knew, who bought a new model car every year or two, and those cars grew steadily more beautiful, more reliable and just plain better each year. The school district in which I lived had built one of the most modern and well-equipped K-12 buildings in the state, to which students were transferred from a number of small local buildings scattered across the two towns, Reedville and Charlotte, that it served, when I was in fourth grade. College, even though neither of my parents had attended one, was the inevitable and unquestioned next step for me. Nearly all the families I knew had a working father and an at-home mother, and the father’s income allowed the family to have a made-for-TV life - maybe a cottage at the lake (or at least a two-week rental of one for summer vacation), a late model car, a nice. well-equipped home. Families wherein a divorce had occurred, or where there was only one parent present in the home were rare and an object of curiosity to me. My entire school district covering two townships, as I said, had had exactly two Black students during the whole of my twelve years, each of whom attended for a single year several years apart from each other. A single Asian family - Chinese - appeared during the last few years: a girl and her younger brother, some years behind me. Diversity (a term I never heard) was represented by the Italians who had begun moving into the district during the 50s when Charlotte became ‘suburban’, and who were resented quite a bit by some - more by parents than by their fellow students. There were, I now know, Jewish students, but I had no idea of this when I was in school, I thought they were German if I thought about them at all, and I thought this because their surnames tended to sound German.
On a more personal level, my family had gotten indoor plumbing. We were behind the curve in this but, as I say, the trend was ever upward toward better, toward the Dream. We were, in fact, poor, but we owned our farm and had lots of buildings and acres of safe space to play in. Although there were spots in some rooms of our home where plaster had fallen out, holes worn in the carpets in places, and bread and milk or bread and Campbell tomato soup suppers on occasion, I didn’t feel underprivileged or poor like the boys I read about in the books of Horatio Alger, or the “starving children in Europe” that I was reminded of when I didn’t want to eat what was on my plate. Yes, the starving children were in Europe during my early childhood, not in Bangladesh or Africa or other more modern famine areas. I once told a couple of English programmers who were my age that I worked with much later that I hoped they appreciated all the awful stuff I choked down on their behalf. One turned to the other and asked, “Do you remember ever having enough to eat back then?” Insofar as I thought about my life in relation to the amount of money available, I had the vague idea that all the families I knew were about the same; we just had more kids, so what we had had to be stretched further than in all those two-child families around us.
The personal secret that I bore, and was vaguely aware of before first grade and acutely aware of after sixth grade, was that in my innermost and most deeply hidden self I was not like the boys round me. It started out by me liking different toys than the others, enjoying the company of my sister and female cousins more than that of the boys, of not wanting to hang around adult males, whom I found intimidating and judgmental, and whose lives seemed to me to be hard, grey and bleak. Girls and women, I thought, got all the fun and easy stuff. Yes, I know now that the reverse is more true than not, but this was my view then. But no one ever seemed to suspect this difference in me and my life up until, and into, the sixties seemed normal, looked normal, and was, as a whole as normal as any. I was not threatened by anyone, although at times I felt bereft of the kind of friendships and attractions I saw around me.
Nonetheless, up to this day, when anyone mentions childhood or high school or the like, my first thought is of sunny days, songs I loved, fun I had, friends I loved, a loving family, the farm I loved with all my heart, an optimism about the future. When, during this period, I read history - assassinations, pogroms, slavery, oppression - I took for granted that was all over and finished, hunger was being dealt with, disease was being cured. Now we were progressive, kind-hearted, intrinsically better than all that. Whether or not I experienced inner glitches from time to time, the world was OK, it was a good place, I was born in the best of times. Although I occasionally experienced times of very black depressions I kept these to myself, and once such a spell was past I thought of it as an incident, almost trivial, and now over with, even though it happened again and again. As long as there were people around me - and with seven brothers and a sister and the neighbor kids preferring to come play at our house, there usually were people around, I was just fine. The thing that people who do not experience depression - clinical depression, not the one-off periods that result from a true demonstrable hurt: a death, an illness, a disappointment; the thing that these people do not understand is that the man or woman they know that is laughing and dancing and joking around nearly every time they see him or her is a real person, but the unseen and hidden despondent person is just as real. This person is not ‘faking it’, he really is both people and the two are equally genuine. I could write a history of my childhood that would sound as if I had one of the hardest and most painful lives ever, and every word would be true, but equally, I could write a tale of that same life that would sound as though I were the happiest, luckiest man ever born. My first instinct, when recalling those days, is the latter.
As the decade between Jan 1960 and January 1970 progressed, I became more my ‘real’ adult self, and the journey led me through high school graduation; college and dropping out thereof after five semesters; hitchhiking across the USA and back; my first 40-hour-a-week ‘real job’, my first alcoholic drink; my move from New York to California where I would live for much of my life; my beach days as a wannabe surfer; increasing depression leading to an eleven-moth sojourn in a mental hospital; first telling tsomeone that I was gay; training for and beginning the profession in which I would spend my working life - data processing; the assassinations and upheavals of the 1960s that proved to me that history was not an unbroken progress toward perfection; being drafted and being rejected for service; voting in 1964 for Goldwater and in 1968 for McGovern; moving to San Francisco just at the end of the Summer of Love; telling my first family member that I was gay; the complete and utter loss of my faith not only in Catholicism in which I was raised and in which I which I believed deeply and fervently, but also in any religious ‘truth’ whatever; the death of my youngest brother; and the meeting, falling in love with and moving in with the great love of my life, Tumwell , just six months before the decade ended. I began the 60s with a feeling of security and continuity and the feeling that although I was different (which I saw as defective) that I could handle this defect and live as if it didn’t exist; but I began the 70s with a feeling of complete uncertainty as to what was good, what was true and what the future held.
When the year 1970 began, I was 27 years old and just finishing the best and worst decade of my life. I suppose that there are many people like me who feel that their 20s are the equivalent of living through a ten-year earthquake. Ten years before the morning, of January 1, 1970, I was in my senior year of high school; I had never been outside the State of New York. I had rarely been outside the three-county area I was born in and the primary reason I had even been as far as the other two counties which were nearest to the one I lived in is because Reedville is in the very southeast corner of Maycomb County, which meant then that the closest shopping areas lay in another county rather than in Maycomb, even though a rather large city inside Maycomb was just 15 miles to the north of my home. As viewed by me, the 17 years since my birth had been, for America, one long upward curve of prosperity, enlightenment and scientific advance. We had won the war that America had entered just before my birth, in which it was quite clear to me was one where we did no wrong and the enemy had been unrelievedly evil. There were people, people I knew, who bought a new model car every year or two, and those cars grew steadily more beautiful, more reliable and just plain better each year. The school district in which I lived had built one of the most modern and well-equipped K-12 buildings in the state, to which students were transferred from a number of small local buildings scattered across the two towns, Reedville and Charlotte, that it served, when I was in fourth grade. College, even though neither of my parents had attended one, was the inevitable and unquestioned next step for me. Nearly all the families I knew had a working father and an at-home mother, and the father’s income allowed the family to have a made-for-TV life - maybe a cottage at the lake (or at least a two-week rental of one for summer vacation), a late model car, a nice. well-equipped home. Families wherein a divorce had occurred, or where there was only one parent present in the home were rare and an object of curiosity to me. My entire school district covering two townships, as I said, had had exactly two Black students during the whole of my twelve years, each of whom attended for a single year several years apart from each other. A single Asian family - Chinese - appeared during the last few years: a girl and her younger brother, some years behind me. Diversity (a term I never heard) was represented by the Italians who had begun moving into the district during the 50s when Charlotte became ‘suburban’, and who were resented quite a bit by some - more by parents than by their fellow students. There were, I now know, Jewish students, but I had no idea of this when I was in school, I thought they were German if I thought about them at all, and I thought this because their surnames tended to sound German.
On a more personal level, my family had gotten indoor plumbing. We were behind the curve in this but, as I say, the trend was ever upward toward better, toward the Dream. We were, in fact, poor, but we owned our farm and had lots of buildings and acres of safe space to play in. Although there were spots in some rooms of our home where plaster had fallen out, holes worn in the carpets in places, and bread and milk or bread and Campbell tomato soup suppers on occasion, I didn’t feel underprivileged or poor like the boys I read about in the books of Horatio Alger, or the “starving children in Europe” that I was reminded of when I didn’t want to eat what was on my plate. Yes, the starving children were in Europe during my early childhood, not in Bangladesh or Africa or other more modern famine areas. I once told a couple of English programmers who were my age that I worked with much later that I hoped they appreciated all the awful stuff I choked down on their behalf. One turned to the other and asked, “Do you remember ever having enough to eat back then?” Insofar as I thought about my life in relation to the amount of money available, I had the vague idea that all the families I knew were about the same; we just had more kids, so what we had had to be stretched further than in all those two-child families around us.
The personal secret that I bore, and was vaguely aware of before first grade and acutely aware of after sixth grade, was that in my innermost and most deeply hidden self I was not like the boys round me. It started out by me liking different toys than the others, enjoying the company of my sister and female cousins more than that of the boys, of not wanting to hang around adult males, whom I found intimidating and judgmental, and whose lives seemed to me to be hard, grey and bleak. Girls and women, I thought, got all the fun and easy stuff. Yes, I know now that the reverse is more true than not, but this was my view then. But no one ever seemed to suspect this difference in me and my life up until, and into, the sixties seemed normal, looked normal, and was, as a whole as normal as any. I was not threatened by anyone, although at times I felt bereft of the kind of friendships and attractions I saw around me.
Nonetheless, up to this day, when anyone mentions childhood or high school or the like, my first thought is of sunny days, songs I loved, fun I had, friends I loved, a loving family, the farm I loved with all my heart, an optimism about the future. When, during this period, I read history - assassinations, pogroms, slavery, oppression - I took for granted that was all over and finished, hunger was being dealt with, disease was being cured. Now we were progressive, kind-hearted, intrinsically better than all that. Whether or not I experienced inner glitches from time to time, the world was OK, it was a good place, I was born in the best of times. Although I occasionally experienced times of very black depressions I kept these to myself, and once such a spell was past I thought of it as an incident, almost trivial, and now over with, even though it happened again and again. As long as there were people around me - and with seven brothers and a sister and the neighbor kids preferring to come play at our house, there usually were people around, I was just fine. The thing that people who do not experience depression - clinical depression, not the one-off periods that result from a true demonstrable hurt: a death, an illness, a disappointment; the thing that these people do not understand is that the man or woman they know that is laughing and dancing and joking around nearly every time they see him or her is a real person, but the unseen and hidden despondent person is just as real. This person is not ‘faking it’, he really is both people and the two are equally genuine. I could write a history of my childhood that would sound as if I had one of the hardest and most painful lives ever, and every word would be true, but equally, I could write a tale of that same life that would sound as though I were the happiest, luckiest man ever born. My first instinct, when recalling those days, is the latter.
As the decade between Jan 1960 and January 1970 progressed, I became more my ‘real’ adult self, and the journey led me through high school graduation; college and dropping out thereof after five semesters; hitchhiking across the USA and back; my first 40-hour-a-week ‘real job’, my first alcoholic drink; my move from New York to California where I would live for much of my life; my beach days as a wannabe surfer; increasing depression leading to an eleven-moth sojourn in a mental hospital; first telling tsomeone that I was gay; training for and beginning the profession in which I would spend my working life - data processing; the assassinations and upheavals of the 1960s that proved to me that history was not an unbroken progress toward perfection; being drafted and being rejected for service; voting in 1964 for Goldwater and in 1968 for McGovern; moving to San Francisco just at the end of the Summer of Love; telling my first family member that I was gay; the complete and utter loss of my faith not only in Catholicism in which I was raised and in which I which I believed deeply and fervently, but also in any religious ‘truth’ whatever; the death of my youngest brother; and the meeting, falling in love with and moving in with the great love of my life, Tumwell , just six months before the decade ended. I began the 60s with a feeling of security and continuity and the feeling that although I was different (which I saw as defective) that I could handle this defect and live as if it didn’t exist; but I began the 70s with a feeling of complete uncertainty as to what was good, what was true and what the future held.
