Theme Week Two Coming of Age in the Sixties

Rural Maine in the sixties was a lot like the rest of the country in the fifties. Families with a mom, dad and their children. Not many blended families. Dad went to work. Mom stayed home. For the most part, people stayed married. Parents expected that their daughters would work in an office after high school, get married, have children. Boys would go to college or the draft would grab them. The parents had done their part, raising them through high school.

Was it a rising social consciousness or a changing world that changed my television viewing from From Dick Clark's Band Stand to Laugh-in. They were so irreverent and caused me to question things I never thought to question. I didn't have much, but I did have to have those white vinyl boots. Not good in winter in Maine. From Leave it to Beaver to the Vietnam war in my living room, not knowing it was going to come even closer in my life. From Rin Tin Tin to dogs biting Afro-Americans. There were no black people in my town. Not one. I had no real reference, but couldn't imagine why I would be mad at them. My father told me years later that he thought I would end up married to some kind of minority. No, that was the other sister. I was stuck between loving Elvis Presley and Dean Martin when The Beatles hit town. Look at that hair! Simple songs. She Loves You, Ya,Ya, Ya. What was there about them that we loved? We did not know how brilliant they were. They grew and evolved with us. They never stopped learning about themselves or their craft.

Real life came off the television when I met the older brother of a friend. Newly back from Vietnam, trying to drink away the smell of Napalm and the sight of ruined villages. Drink away the memories of the armed guard walking him through the protesters in the airport. Trying to retain the memories of people he wasn't mad at who were just trying to farm their beautiful land. Retain the memories of the Catholic churches and the Mountanard people who befriended him. Retain the memories of an America he loved and respected that asked him to go do this thing. Trying to make this narrow minded, opinionated new girlfriend understand that he went there with all good intentions. Able to quit the drinking long before coming to terms with it all in his head.

The sixties. Ten years. Years when I went from ten to twenty years old. From an innocent child happy in the woods, fields, and rivers of my little town. Through high school with my basketball team and my cheerleader friends, my boy friends who were my age and just friends and the older boys that I loved. Married, still in the sixties, to the young man newly back from Vietnam. A whole life in one decade.