Sidetracked Charley

  The family story goes that they could not get me to run away from home so they ran away from me. Certainly seemed that way in January 1964 when I unpacked my trunk in my dorm room. I was still in Albuquerque, where I mostly grew up, but my family was in Lakewood, Colorado. I met my friends from high school as usual at the Student Union Building but it wasn't the same. They were townies and I was now a dorm resident. I soon gave up getting a sack lunch from the cafeteria so I could eat with them. When the various breaks in the school year came my new friends went home. I, at first, went to where my family lived. But clearly that was no longer home. I began making plans to spend breaks somewhere else. Or to stay in the dorm and study in the library. I could stand alone. This morning in a chat with my sister she asked why I cared about the election outcome so much. I love history. Why she asked. Why people do what they do. What they did. It struck me that my studies are in so many w...

In my radical youth there were so many causes to be involved in from abortion to civil rights to the draft to the ERA to freedom of speech to Vietnam to the President's right to declare war. And it seemed at times so few of us fighting because we had college and new careers and marriages and babies. You could at the time avoid the draft if you were in college, then in college and married, and then in college, married, and a parent. Many a coed sacrificed herself. And then none of that worked. Vietnam just sucked all the young men away to become cannon fodder. Birth control at the time was condoms. All else was illegal unless you were married. And one of the biggest black market drugs around was birth control pills. And if a married college friend found herself pregnant to save her husband she gave you her script. They came without instructions. And so almost as many young women got pregnant on them as those not taking them. And abortion was illegal.  Mind you that did not...

Heading West There comes a point in every journey where the conscious person realizes it is not about the destination. As we left Las Vegas bound to drop Barb-from-Santa-Barbara off in Barstow I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass. Penny had shotgun and I tried to sleep. I had not slept since before my last final, four hours before our departure. The trip could no longer be counted in hours but in images and flashing across my memory like slides shown in the backyard. Slides were after film and before digital. Dad was an avid recorder of our family adventures. He gave me a Kodak camera when I was eight and his Rolex when I went off to college. For some reason I left it back at the dorm as if this forbidden escape should not be recorded except in my mind. It it was. Each image recorded like a power point presentation with a caption. "Why Barstow?", I asked Barb as we got her bags out of the trunk at the railroad station there. "Because we moved here." ...