“Fifty years ago, this summer,” the newscaster began, finishing with a tribute to actor-screenwriter Peter Fonda, who died on August 16, 2019 and whose seminal film, “Easy Rider” debuted fifty years ago. I used to grumpily muse on the fact that I could recall things that had happened decades ago. Now, those ten-year increments have multiplied and have been piled atop one another and I can easily stroll through half a hundred years of memories. Well, maybe not easily, but still: half a hundred. The number astounds me.
In Gary Snyder’s poem “Looking at Pictures to be Put Away,” the narrator muses about “What will we remember/Bodies thick with food and lovers/After twenty years.” I was exposed to that poem shortly after I had kicked over the traces that bound me to servitude (read, “job”) and at 35 years of age, after leaping over the qualifiers for adult students, I became a freshman at Indiana University Southeast, where I found the world of English: literature, poetry, creative writing. My youngest daughter was 12 when I first read Snyder’s poem; twenty years later, she would be a mother. I last attended IUS in 1985, which was not 50 years ago, but still, a long stretch of memory back in time. I suppose I should not be grumbling about being able to remember so much of “ago,” considering that I am soon due for my yearly exercise in mental acuity whereby, after a short meandering conversation, I am called upon to remember three words uttered at the beginning of it. To date, my brain, despite my body having been thickened by “food and lovers,” has been able to recall (as I wrote in an August 2018 column) “Orange. Cat. Pencil.”
Fifty years ago, on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong, after taking “one small step for man,” became the first person to set foot on the magical orb we call the moon. Six days later, in a lesser known event (nationally, at least) I was married for the first time. After our “none-y moon” (we could not afford a “honey” moon) I returned to work as a psychiatric attendant at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of my co-workers came to work on Monday night, saying that he had spent the weekend in Bethel, New York, wallowing in the mud and listening to music. He was the least friendly and most humorless of all the staff on the 8th floor of the hospital, and we were astonished that he had even attended a music festival. As the scope and scale of that August 15-18 event — called then “Three days of peace and music,” — became known as Woodstock, and grew in recorded history, we who had stayed home rued the loss of that historic opportunity. Sadly, sandwiched between Armstrong’s moonwalk and Woodstock, there occurred on August 8th, 9th and 10th a murderous rampage by Charles Manson and his so-called “family,” a killing spree that took seven lives.
On August 2nd of this year, while in Pittsburgh to help my ailing brother, I attended a small congregation of some of the Schenley High School class of 1965, most of whom had joined in the celebration of our 50th year reunion in 2015. This more recent gathering of school friends danced on the nighttime roof of the restaurant at which we had assembled, laughing in memory of days long gone, and building moments for the days to come.
Everything happened fifty years ago, and that thief, Time, has not stolen from me those fifty years of recorded memories.
cjon3acd@att.net