I have been told the streets were icy and it was a frigid night 63 years ago in Muskogee, Oklahoma, U.S.A. That was when I made my debut on this planet at a little over six pounds. I'm also told I possessed a head of dark hair and let loose with all the crying and mewing that is associated with newly minted human beings.
It was a long time ago in so many ways.
I spent my first nine years in that town. I distinctly remember my parents buying our first television set. It was a huge thing and the images it displayed were a somewhat fuzzy black and white. If you went outside and looked across the roofs of the houses in the neighborhood you would see a weird forest of antennas reaching up into the air, all these shiny poles with metal branches tilted this way and that. We received three channels.
Early in the morning a guy would come and leave glass bottles of fresh milk on your porch capped with thin cardboard stoppers. During the summers especially, the street was full of kids playing. My father bought me boxing gloves and got down on his knees and taught me how to crouch, jab, deliver an uppercut, and throw a hook because, "a boy should never start a fight, but always be prepared to defend himself."
Because the town and all of Oklahoma was strictly segregated I honestly didn't even know African Americans existed for the longest time. Even after I did I rarely saw one. There were two high schools in Muskogee at that point, Muskogee Central and Muskogee Manual Training. Take a stab at which one was for the black kids.
Yes, it has been a long trip. In my six plus decades on this ball The United States has fought in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That would be a little less than one war every ten years. I didn't serve in any of them, although I did spend a considerable amount of time protesting the one in Vietnam on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. There have been other conflicts, or rather deadly skirmishes in places like Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama. There was also a week or so when the entire human race was on the verge of extinction as the U.S. and the Soviet Union squared off over missile bases in Cuba.
I've seen two presidents get shot and one killed. A third, Gerald Ford, was shot at once, but the assassin missed. Another attempt to take his life failed because the grotesque little geek forgot to chamber a round in the .45 she was holding. Also in my time here two presidential candidates have been shot. Robert Kennedy died of his wounds and George Wallace ended up in a wheel chair for the rest of his life. Martin Luther King was murdered which sparked riots in more than a few places. Although race riots, for a while anyway, didn't need anyone to be killed in order to ignite.
I grew up with plenty of kids who had fathers making a decent living building things with their hands in factories, but all that is over now. The blue collar middle class has gone the way of the Dodo. When I was young if some product had, "Made in Japan" stamped on it, you could count on it being the cheapest, most worthless piece of shit in the world. Now even the stuff from Japan seems pricey compared to what you can get from other parts of Asia.
From the age of ten to around twelve, or so my parents would drop me off at a movie theater with a buck or two and I'd spend about four hours watching films and cartoons with hundreds of other kids my age. I started smoking cigarettes during my eighth grade year because it was cool and there weren't any laws restricting tobacco sales to minors. The first time I got drunk I was fifteen. Some of us scored a pint bottle of J.T.S. Brown bourbon before a dance at the local YMCA. A little over a year later I got laid for the first time.
I heard the explosion and felt the concussion when Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I watched as the jets slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. On August first of 1966 I was on vacation with my parents. Our family was touring the Astrodome in Houston That was the day an ex marine named Charles Whitman opened fire on fellow summer school students from a tall building on the University of Texas campus. Before the cops got to him he'd killed 13 and wounded 32. In December of 2012 I watched the TV networks report the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown Connecticut. Tragically, it seems the more things change the more they stay the same.
I saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and if you'd asked me then, I would have told you that by 2013 we'd not only have a permanent presence on the moon, but an outpost on Mars. In the summer of 1969 I really thought we were on the verge of going to the stars. The Enterprise, Captain Kirk, Scotty, Uhuru, Chekov, and all the rest seemed right within our grasp.
I've watched my three children born. I've seen one brother and my mother die.
Every now and then I think I've witnessed too much, but then I realize I haven't seen enough.
We are such an ugly, brutal, yet decent and brave people. We are, I suppose, everything good and evil and all that entails. It is easy to become cynical, although in the end cynicism finally turns terribly sour. To be without at least some hope is to be dead.
And honestly-- there is no reason to rush into that final adventure is there? At least not yet, not from my perspective anyway.
Carpe diem
1-5-13
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