Caveat: Self-indulgent. Non-political. Old person.
I'm getting pretty old. And there's a birthday coming, which -- AARP notwithstanding -- is not filling me with a sense of possibilities or hopeful glimpses of a rainbow-filled tomorrow.
It makes me feel old.
Not many years old.
Many decades old.
So I thought about looking back.
50 years ago. 1957. 5 Decades.
Little Rock High School was integrated thanks to federal troops. There was a picture in the newspaper. We talked about it in school -- we had a one room schoolhouse -- and wondered what it would be like to be in a school with hundreds of other kids.
Stamps cost $.03 each. I had my first pen pal, a girl named Linda who lived in Mississippi. She stopped writing after a while.
The Soviet Union launched Sputnik. I stopped outside the barn that night and peered up at the sky wondering if I could see it. There were no satellites in the night sky. No planes. Nothing but stars. We listened to Sputnik beeping on the radio (we didn't have a TV yet) and my mother was scared.
40 years ago. 1967. 4 Decades.
There were race riots in Detroit. Thurgood Marshall became a Supreme Court Justice.
I had my draft physical. I still have my Selective Service card. I was classified I-A-O (conscientious objector available for noncombatant service) but turned my card in and demanded to be reclassified. It didn't feel right. I ended up I-A. My mother was scared, but I didn't get called.
Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?
I was going to join the Peace Corps. They could use farmers, right? Or maybe Appalachia.
30 years ago. 1977. 3 decades.
Nothing happened in the world that year. Undoubtedly, I was still drunk.
I had my first same-sex sexual experience.
I listened to a lot of music and I smoked a lot of weed, I think. About then was the last time I hitched between Cheyenne and Denver and I got beat up pretty bad.
It was right about then that I stopped believing that the world would get better.
. . . .
That's enough. There's no turning back. I have nothing left of those times except memories and an old draft card.
I want to believe again.
...
Sometimes the light when evening fails
stains all haystacked country and hills,
runs the cornrows and clasps the barn
with that kind of color escaped from corn
that brings to autumn the winter word—
a level shaft that tells the world:
It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find them—fail.
In one stride night then takes the hill.
—William Stafford, Level Light