In My Wild and Crazy Youth



The only reason I entered college was because I was suppose to. It is what my senior class did. Or at least my special class of the senior class: the college bound. I took the obligatory tests for college entry, received higher than adequate scores, even got a scholarship offer or two, but it was my mother who filled out my college application to the University of New Mexico, told me of my acceptance, and made sure I got up and out the door at the appropriate time to register.

 She did that, I now believe, because she knew how dangerously close I was to losing it. Losing me. Mother and I were not close. And maybe at that time when she pushed me out the door further apart than we had ever been. But she made the right decision for me. I had always been a bookworm, and college was full of books, and people who loved books, people who debated books and authors and meanings.

 And on November 22, 1963 I was going to the SUB, student union building, to meet some of those bookish friends for lunch when I heard the news President Kennedy had been shot. Yes, I am one of those people who can tell you exactly where I was when I heard the news and who it was who told me. It was also the only day I ate Fritos. I hate Fritos. And I didn't know it then or in the days of watching the funeral on TV that it was the day I begun to care about what happened in my country ad in the world. 

 Watching the funeral of Senator John McCain, listening to Megan eulogize her father brought so much of my life back in clear focus. That is not easy because I had this head injury in 2001 and large blocks of my past seem to be just black holes. The memories are in some instances still there, as my neurologist explained, they just need accessed from a different direction, linked back up. I was a townie in 1963 so I watched the endless coverage of the funeral of President Kennedy with my family. I remember Mother's tears, she had been democratic precinct chairwoman when he was elected. And I remember my father's fears. He had only recently left the Air Force reserves. Russia became so real as talk about Oswald's time there entered the narrative. And whether Russia was involved.

 Megan's memories of her father were so like mine. Senator McCain's funeral much like President Kennedy's. Megan and her family so proper and correct and deeply in mourning so like First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert. Or my family in November 1963 staring endlessly for days at the television. Knowing when it was over life would begin again and what we did and how we did it mattered more than it had before.

 My remaining years at UNM and the years which followed were still filled with books but the debates over lunch with my friends was more about politics and fighting for the rights of free speech, and a woman's right to control her own body, and equal rights for all regardless of color or sex, and against the war in Vietnam and the draft, and the millions we spent on defense to remain equal to Russia.

 Now the GOP and the religious right wants to take away all those hard fought truths.

 We have to stop Trump and the GOP. Our lives depend upon it. 

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