In 1969 and 70, I was part of three crowds of more than a half-million people, including the massive demonstration to protest Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in May 1970. So I’m in this picture, somewhere…
Not sure where to begin this.. so I’ll start with this llink:
….and offer this by way of explanation:
A couple of months ago, I was suddenly inspired to revisit “the archives” – two large Rubbermaid tubs filled with paraphernalia that I started accumulating in the late 1960s… during my senior year in high school, and my first year attempting to go to college.
I don’t remember now exactly what motivated me to dig into those archives, but getting in there has been something of a turning point.
I look at the stuff in that now and realize I sent myself a time capsule from 1969. And in that time capsule are the beginnings of a (partly fictional?) memoir about coming to age at the end of the 1960s. That’s what I’ve been working on for the past couple of months – a book that I started writing 45 years ago. What I’ve posted above is an excerpt…
Two weeks ago I dove into a stack of letters from a girlfriend I met during that period, and the experience was unexpectedly visceral. I tried to capture the essence of that experience in a couple of pages of free-form verse, which I published to Medium.com this morning in the piece I linked above.
In that post I think I found the emotional heart of what I’ve been working on.
Beyond that, probably the less said, the better.