Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Where Was I by Nicholas


          In the early 1960s, I was in high school studying French, struggling with chemistry, hating algebra and the jerk who taught it, but loving English Lit and the teacher who taught that. High school was nothing until my senior year and then I learned to party and enjoy myself. The promise of just getting out of high school was enough to liberate my spirit. It was the great age of liberation with the civil rights movement and its innumerable clashes on the nightly news every day.

          Liberation for me came in drive down Interstate 71 from Cleveland to Columbus where I joined 45,000 other students at Ohio State University. New people, new studies, new challenges and suddenly I got to make my own decisions. OSU is where I took part in my first political demonstrations, volunteered to work in a community development project in Columbus, first doubted my Catholic faith, and first voiced opposition to the Viet Nam War. It was also where I had my first disastrous love affair that I didn’t even realize was a love affair until many years later.  

          And then I came out—to California, that is. Experiences in San Francisco and elsewhere in California are what I associate with “what did you do in the 60s?” When the ‘60s began and ended is a matter of interpretation or maybe just mood. Like many of the drug-induced experiences back then, the decade tends to wiggle and undulate on and off the calendar. It is not contained in a simple ten year span of time.

My political activism, however, was short lived. I stayed on the fringe looking in. I was on the edge of the crowd trying to escape the tear gas and bullets that summer day on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, not in the thick of it getting beaten up by police. I was in the back of the throng at the Altamont concert, kind of wishing I wasn’t there at all, but thankfully not crushed in front of the stage and amidst some lethal violence. I was stunned one day to see a friend appear in the bright California sunshine when he ventured out of his heavily curtained, smoky sanctuary/den, looking like a cadaver. But I wasn’t that drugged out cadaver and wasn’t headed in that direction.

I would work for a few months and then take off for a while, go hitchhiking, spend days climbing Mt. Tamalpais and watching the ocean from a sunny meadow. I came to think that this is how life ought to be. I would grow up, that is, settle down, commit to something, have a career, later, I kept thinking. There was plenty of time for that.

My project then was to stay out of the war and out of the army, a commitment based both on principle and downright fear. The fear was as realistic as the principle was laudable. I was against that war and couldn’t see myself joining in any war and when drafted to do so, said, no.

The motivation for my and others’ actions did not stem entirely from a sense that we were acting out grand laws of history as earlier revolutionaries might have but we came from a very personal sense of what was at stake for us. Beyond mere egoism and self-indulgence, it was an ethical standard based on me.

And there was music, always there was the music. Rock music took on an artistry ranging from the Beatles’ tunes and the poetry of Jim Morrison and the Doors to the blues of the Grateful Dead with the exquisite guitar of Jerry Garcia and the hard rocking of the Rolling Stones. From them I learned about Chicago blues, electric blues, hard and fast urban blues.

So, where was I in the 60s. I was in the city hearing black people tell their stories. I was on the all-night bus to New York City for the first huge anti-war march. I was hiking through Point Reyes on the Pacific Coast. I was filing appeal after appeal with my draft board. I was discovering yoga and quiet and meditation. I was discovering brown rice. I learned to bake bread. I was dodging cops to avoid getting arrested. I was bouncing around Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park probably hearing the Grateful Dead or Janis Joplin or Quicksilver Messenger Service. I was growing up and life was good.


© 2 June 2014  

About the Author  

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.


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