Ghosts From 1968
Ghosts From 1968
Were the things we loved as children, and the things that frightened us, more powerful than what is happening to us today? Or were our brains just more elastic back then, more open to impression? Some memories of childhood remain crystal-clear, and I can trace my scariest memories, and some of my greatest loves, to 1968.
The Bomb and Tet
I wrote the beginning of a story about something that happened in Catholic school, the year I was 7. This would have been 1967:
Second grade, and the gloves come off. “Say you have a bomb shelter, but only room for 10 people.”
I remember like it was yesterday, discussing with my classmates and the nuns why we needed nurses and teachers. We needed healthy young women in our bomb shelter, so they could have babies to repopulate the planet and contribute needed skills, and we gave them a man to run things and make up the laws. The artists all seemed to be fifty and were deemed both too old to contribute and did we really need artists? I mean, we had a limited supply of food in those bomb shelters. They were left to face nuclear winter alone. Was there really any question I was going to be a nurse? I have felt guilty for abandoning those artists for 45 years. Now I think—I’m 52, and a writer of gay romances. Oops, sorry! No room for you, Sarah. Looks like the bomb shelter is full up!
By 1968, though, there was a new demon even more frightening than the bomb, especially for a kid whose father was in the military. My dad was gone most of 1968 on some secret something in his submarine. Naturally, listening to Walter Cronkite’s solemn voice talking about Tet, and watching the pictures on our little TV coming from Vietnam, I thought he was in the middle of it all. I never missed the nightly news. I was looking for him in those horrible pictures, in those news reports.
My son’s father and I were both in the military, and we were in war zones, sometimes together. I never worried about him the way I worried about my dad in 1968, looking for his face on the TV screen. I was busier as an adult, for one thing, and I knew we were both very competent and there were all sorts of fail-safes in place. It was just work, after all. I suspect now I had used up my allotment of worry during Tet.
The Scorpion
And while I was busy worrying about Vietnam, something happened even closer to home. On May 27, 1968, the happy and excited families of the 99 men on board the USS Scorpion waited on the docks in Norfolk for the sub to come back from deployment. The Navy was not surprised the sub never showed up. They had been frantically looking for it for days. The families showed up and stood around and stared out at the horizon and waited for a ship that was not coming home. When it got dark, most of the tired mothers bundled their kids up and took them home. The Navy finally announced the ship was lost at sea on June 5, 1968. This was the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
There have been many theories and much study since the Scorpion went down about what happened. They exceeded crush depth we know for sure, and the theory I heard most, growing up around submariners, is that a torpedo exploded in the tube. Regardless, the remains sit just off the Azores, where the Scorpion was engaged in the business of submarines of the day- observing Soviet naval activities. We were watching them and they were watching us. It was a cold war down at the bottom of the sea, while the world was watching the hot war across another ocean. But what I remember most clearly was the wives talking about what had happened in our kitchen. Their pale drawn faces, the way they pulled each other into corners to quietly ask if there had been any news. It wasn’t my dad’s submarine, but it could have been.
Mexico and Prague and the rest of the screwed-up world
While I was busy listening to Walter Cronkite, waiting for him to announce my father was being hauled out of the mud of Vietnam, I heard lots of other disturbing news. What the heck was going on in Mexico? They lined their student protestors up against a wall and shot them? Because of the Olympics? I knew what Mexico looked like, of course, since we were Clint Eastwood fans and the Spaghetti Westerns showed the world the face of the banditos, with their fierce mustaches and droopy sombreros.
What the heck was going on in Prague? What was the matter with the Soviets, with their big tanks?
And what the heck was happening here? Everybody was rioting, the students, the Panthers, the entire city of Detroit was in flames, and the hippy war protestors were being shot down in the streets by the good guys, the guys in uniform. America was on fire, everybody had a gun, and people were being assassinated. Martin Luther King, then RFK. I can see Cronkite’s face like it was yesterday, announcing that the Reverend MLK was dead, with the knowledge on his face about what was going to happen next.
Barnabas Collins
But I was a kid, and my TV watching was not confined to Uncle Walter and the nightly news. I was a huge fan of the soap Dark Shadows. We all were, everyone, and all the kids in the neighborhood watched Dark Shadows after school, and then we put on plays for the mothers, acting out new story lines. I was in love with Barnabas Collins. My role was to swoon backward into Barnabas’s dark and steely arms while he ravished my neck over and over again. When he was finished sucking my blood, he would lay my insensate body down in the grass. Good St. Augustine grass is very prickly on the back, but then my nerves were especially sensitive after Barnabas had finished with me. I don’t remember anything else about the storylines of the plays we put on. I only remember the joy of swooning, knowing I was going to be caught, and that a vampire was going to bite my neck.
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
I recently read my old report cards. Mother sent them to me when she was cleaning out the attic. Oddly enough, they seemed to say the same thing year after year. To paraphrase, the nuns did not appreciate my uniform noncompliance, and I would do better in school if I would stop talking so much. But in 1968, the year I was 8, a teacher found a solution to the problem of my talking too much in class. We had these boxes of stories, and each story had a group of questions designed to assess reading comprehension. They were for “reading groups” at different levels. The teacher sent me to the back of the room where all those boxes were stored and said I could read them for as long as I wanted. I had to stay in the back, though. Did I have to answer the questions? No, I could just read. I stayed back there until the end of the school year, reading all day, and when she saw I was working on the last box, she got the boxes from the upper grades, and then she brought in armfuls of Reader’s Digest Condensed books.
I was very happy to see these, as we had them at home, too. In my house, we believed in education and we believed in reading. But the rest of my family was normal about it. I would wait on the day the Reader’s Digest Condensed book was due to arrive and carry it to my room, and no one would see me or the book again until I had read every page. If the book arrived when I was at school, it would be sitting, waiting for me, still in the cardboard box. Only watching the news could pull me from Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. But by the end of the year my dad was back home, and he told me not to worry, he was not going to Vietnam in his submarine. It has only recently occurred to me, after forty or so years, that he was not telling me the truth. Mother must have noticed that I was watching the news every night and started to worry.
The Chemistry Set
In between my obsession with Barnabas Collins and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, I fell in love with the chemistry laboratory. Not chemistry itself, just the lab, with all the cool bubbling test tubes and fumes and liquids and mad scientists. I asked for a chemistry set for Christmas, and Santa obliged. It was the coolest present of my entire life, with a Bunsen Burner (real flames!) and a little test tube holder and packets of various chemicals and glass test tubes. I dove right in, doing experiments left and right until my ingredients ran dry. I wasn’t as interested in doing experiments where you knew what was going to happen. I wanted to do experiments where the end result was a question. Most of the chemistry designed for eight year olds is not set up for the random. Now, of course, I completely agree with this safety feature, but at the time I was a bit disappointed nothing would blow up and I could not perform a transformation of any significant nature. Chemistry lab in college was even worse, the rigid nature of doing experiments to prove a point that they already knew!! Was I the only one who saw the futility of this? But I still get a little lightheaded with happiness when I see a Bunsen Burner and test tube rack.
Music
Janis Piece of My Heart (Janis nearly got me kicked out of Catholic School. That story for another time. Mother said she was “not a lady.”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJb7cB...
Glen Campbell Galveston (I’ve got a story in the planning stages called The Persian Rose that features this heartbreaking song)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsHUgp...
Buffalo Springfield For What It’s Worth (I have listened to Buffalo Springfield Again every year since 1968. It was my first record album)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCr...
Blood Sweat and Tears You Made Me So Very Happy (My mother was a big fan of Blood Sweat and Tears, and also Gordon Lightfoot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxWSOu...
Jefferson Airplane White Rabbit (from the Smothers Brothers!)( I was not allowed to listen to them, as they promoted drugs use. Mother suspected this song had something to do with drugs. )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnP72u...
Writing
It was always my intention to write when I ‘got old’. I wanted to work off enough good karma as a nurse to earn my place in the bomb shelter, and to help repopulate the planet in the event of nuclear winter. But somewhere about age 45, it occurred to me that, if I was going to write when I got old, the time was now. I also was stalling, I think, with the idea that I hadn’t read enough. My obsessive reading behavior had not abated, but there were still so many more books to read! Would I have to choose between reading and writing?
And my first few efforts were, frankly, pornographic. I excused myself by allowing that this was normal human behavior; after all, I wasn’t having sex, most people I knew weren’t having sex, and so naturally we were all thinking about sex. I suspected this obsessive interest in sex was based on some flawed idea that sex was a shortcut to intimacy. Regardless, over time I became more interested in writing about love. As expected my readership went down until I am now at about 20 regular readers, a small but strong cadre of readers I suspect were sitting in the back of their classrooms in third grade with boxes of stories. I love you guys.
1968 was a beautiful rich heartbreaking killer of a year. I hear that music, listen to the voices, watch the newsreels and it feels like I’m home again, in my small safe place, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, watching the world tear itself to pieces. And now, like then, after all of those sorts of years, we wake up and get to work, because we’re the grown-ups, putting the pieces back together again.
Were the things we loved as children, and the things that frightened us, more powerful than what is happening to us today? Or were our brains just more elastic back then, more open to impression? Some memories of childhood remain crystal-clear, and I can trace my scariest memories, and some of my greatest loves, to 1968.
The Bomb and Tet
I wrote the beginning of a story about something that happened in Catholic school, the year I was 7. This would have been 1967:
Second grade, and the gloves come off. “Say you have a bomb shelter, but only room for 10 people.”
I remember like it was yesterday, discussing with my classmates and the nuns why we needed nurses and teachers. We needed healthy young women in our bomb shelter, so they could have babies to repopulate the planet and contribute needed skills, and we gave them a man to run things and make up the laws. The artists all seemed to be fifty and were deemed both too old to contribute and did we really need artists? I mean, we had a limited supply of food in those bomb shelters. They were left to face nuclear winter alone. Was there really any question I was going to be a nurse? I have felt guilty for abandoning those artists for 45 years. Now I think—I’m 52, and a writer of gay romances. Oops, sorry! No room for you, Sarah. Looks like the bomb shelter is full up!
By 1968, though, there was a new demon even more frightening than the bomb, especially for a kid whose father was in the military. My dad was gone most of 1968 on some secret something in his submarine. Naturally, listening to Walter Cronkite’s solemn voice talking about Tet, and watching the pictures on our little TV coming from Vietnam, I thought he was in the middle of it all. I never missed the nightly news. I was looking for him in those horrible pictures, in those news reports.
My son’s father and I were both in the military, and we were in war zones, sometimes together. I never worried about him the way I worried about my dad in 1968, looking for his face on the TV screen. I was busier as an adult, for one thing, and I knew we were both very competent and there were all sorts of fail-safes in place. It was just work, after all. I suspect now I had used up my allotment of worry during Tet.
The Scorpion
And while I was busy worrying about Vietnam, something happened even closer to home. On May 27, 1968, the happy and excited families of the 99 men on board the USS Scorpion waited on the docks in Norfolk for the sub to come back from deployment. The Navy was not surprised the sub never showed up. They had been frantically looking for it for days. The families showed up and stood around and stared out at the horizon and waited for a ship that was not coming home. When it got dark, most of the tired mothers bundled their kids up and took them home. The Navy finally announced the ship was lost at sea on June 5, 1968. This was the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
There have been many theories and much study since the Scorpion went down about what happened. They exceeded crush depth we know for sure, and the theory I heard most, growing up around submariners, is that a torpedo exploded in the tube. Regardless, the remains sit just off the Azores, where the Scorpion was engaged in the business of submarines of the day- observing Soviet naval activities. We were watching them and they were watching us. It was a cold war down at the bottom of the sea, while the world was watching the hot war across another ocean. But what I remember most clearly was the wives talking about what had happened in our kitchen. Their pale drawn faces, the way they pulled each other into corners to quietly ask if there had been any news. It wasn’t my dad’s submarine, but it could have been.
Mexico and Prague and the rest of the screwed-up world
While I was busy listening to Walter Cronkite, waiting for him to announce my father was being hauled out of the mud of Vietnam, I heard lots of other disturbing news. What the heck was going on in Mexico? They lined their student protestors up against a wall and shot them? Because of the Olympics? I knew what Mexico looked like, of course, since we were Clint Eastwood fans and the Spaghetti Westerns showed the world the face of the banditos, with their fierce mustaches and droopy sombreros.
What the heck was going on in Prague? What was the matter with the Soviets, with their big tanks?
And what the heck was happening here? Everybody was rioting, the students, the Panthers, the entire city of Detroit was in flames, and the hippy war protestors were being shot down in the streets by the good guys, the guys in uniform. America was on fire, everybody had a gun, and people were being assassinated. Martin Luther King, then RFK. I can see Cronkite’s face like it was yesterday, announcing that the Reverend MLK was dead, with the knowledge on his face about what was going to happen next.
Barnabas Collins
But I was a kid, and my TV watching was not confined to Uncle Walter and the nightly news. I was a huge fan of the soap Dark Shadows. We all were, everyone, and all the kids in the neighborhood watched Dark Shadows after school, and then we put on plays for the mothers, acting out new story lines. I was in love with Barnabas Collins. My role was to swoon backward into Barnabas’s dark and steely arms while he ravished my neck over and over again. When he was finished sucking my blood, he would lay my insensate body down in the grass. Good St. Augustine grass is very prickly on the back, but then my nerves were especially sensitive after Barnabas had finished with me. I don’t remember anything else about the storylines of the plays we put on. I only remember the joy of swooning, knowing I was going to be caught, and that a vampire was going to bite my neck.
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
I recently read my old report cards. Mother sent them to me when she was cleaning out the attic. Oddly enough, they seemed to say the same thing year after year. To paraphrase, the nuns did not appreciate my uniform noncompliance, and I would do better in school if I would stop talking so much. But in 1968, the year I was 8, a teacher found a solution to the problem of my talking too much in class. We had these boxes of stories, and each story had a group of questions designed to assess reading comprehension. They were for “reading groups” at different levels. The teacher sent me to the back of the room where all those boxes were stored and said I could read them for as long as I wanted. I had to stay in the back, though. Did I have to answer the questions? No, I could just read. I stayed back there until the end of the school year, reading all day, and when she saw I was working on the last box, she got the boxes from the upper grades, and then she brought in armfuls of Reader’s Digest Condensed books.
I was very happy to see these, as we had them at home, too. In my house, we believed in education and we believed in reading. But the rest of my family was normal about it. I would wait on the day the Reader’s Digest Condensed book was due to arrive and carry it to my room, and no one would see me or the book again until I had read every page. If the book arrived when I was at school, it would be sitting, waiting for me, still in the cardboard box. Only watching the news could pull me from Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. But by the end of the year my dad was back home, and he told me not to worry, he was not going to Vietnam in his submarine. It has only recently occurred to me, after forty or so years, that he was not telling me the truth. Mother must have noticed that I was watching the news every night and started to worry.
The Chemistry Set
In between my obsession with Barnabas Collins and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, I fell in love with the chemistry laboratory. Not chemistry itself, just the lab, with all the cool bubbling test tubes and fumes and liquids and mad scientists. I asked for a chemistry set for Christmas, and Santa obliged. It was the coolest present of my entire life, with a Bunsen Burner (real flames!) and a little test tube holder and packets of various chemicals and glass test tubes. I dove right in, doing experiments left and right until my ingredients ran dry. I wasn’t as interested in doing experiments where you knew what was going to happen. I wanted to do experiments where the end result was a question. Most of the chemistry designed for eight year olds is not set up for the random. Now, of course, I completely agree with this safety feature, but at the time I was a bit disappointed nothing would blow up and I could not perform a transformation of any significant nature. Chemistry lab in college was even worse, the rigid nature of doing experiments to prove a point that they already knew!! Was I the only one who saw the futility of this? But I still get a little lightheaded with happiness when I see a Bunsen Burner and test tube rack.
Music
Janis Piece of My Heart (Janis nearly got me kicked out of Catholic School. That story for another time. Mother said she was “not a lady.”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJb7cB...
Glen Campbell Galveston (I’ve got a story in the planning stages called The Persian Rose that features this heartbreaking song)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsHUgp...
Buffalo Springfield For What It’s Worth (I have listened to Buffalo Springfield Again every year since 1968. It was my first record album)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCr...
Blood Sweat and Tears You Made Me So Very Happy (My mother was a big fan of Blood Sweat and Tears, and also Gordon Lightfoot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxWSOu...
Jefferson Airplane White Rabbit (from the Smothers Brothers!)( I was not allowed to listen to them, as they promoted drugs use. Mother suspected this song had something to do with drugs. )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnP72u...
Writing
It was always my intention to write when I ‘got old’. I wanted to work off enough good karma as a nurse to earn my place in the bomb shelter, and to help repopulate the planet in the event of nuclear winter. But somewhere about age 45, it occurred to me that, if I was going to write when I got old, the time was now. I also was stalling, I think, with the idea that I hadn’t read enough. My obsessive reading behavior had not abated, but there were still so many more books to read! Would I have to choose between reading and writing?
And my first few efforts were, frankly, pornographic. I excused myself by allowing that this was normal human behavior; after all, I wasn’t having sex, most people I knew weren’t having sex, and so naturally we were all thinking about sex. I suspected this obsessive interest in sex was based on some flawed idea that sex was a shortcut to intimacy. Regardless, over time I became more interested in writing about love. As expected my readership went down until I am now at about 20 regular readers, a small but strong cadre of readers I suspect were sitting in the back of their classrooms in third grade with boxes of stories. I love you guys.
1968 was a beautiful rich heartbreaking killer of a year. I hear that music, listen to the voices, watch the newsreels and it feels like I’m home again, in my small safe place, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, watching the world tear itself to pieces. And now, like then, after all of those sorts of years, we wake up and get to work, because we’re the grown-ups, putting the pieces back together again.
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Lady*M wrote: "I am now at about 20 regular readers, a small but strong cadre of readers I suspect were sitting in the back of their classrooms in third grade with boxes of stories
While this is a pretty accurat..."
hee hee! I feel like you just gave me a bouquet of roses!
While this is a pretty accurat..."
hee hee! I feel like you just gave me a bouquet of roses!
Certainly more than 20 Sarah, and all of us are grateful that you started to write the things that you WANTED to write. We are very appreciate indeed and you are two right about reading at the back of the class, also at restaurants using the cloth napkin as a camo...Even at the movies sometimes if I sat in a strategically well lit row :)
I love the Basque story by the way the things you write about always seem to be things that have a special place in my heart. Basque Country was forever one of the places I longed to visit, I finally got to go with my best friend in 2010 and the it was everything I thought it would be :)!
I love the Basque story by the way the things you write about always seem to be things that have a special place in my heart. Basque Country was forever one of the places I longed to visit, I finally got to go with my best friend in 2010 and the it was everything I thought it would be :)!
Lauraadriana wrote: "Certainly more than 20 Sarah, and all of us are grateful that you started to write the things that you WANTED to write. We are very appreciate indeed and you are two right about reading at the back..."
thanks for the kind words- I haven't been to Basque country! But I did read Mark Kurlansky's The Basque History of the World, and there is an excellent book about Gernika- I'll have to track that down. Can't remember now.
If you walk around in the Basque Quarter in downtown Boise you can hear old men and their grandkids speaking in Euskara- and the real San Juan is in the museum!
thanks for the kind words- I haven't been to Basque country! But I did read Mark Kurlansky's The Basque History of the World, and there is an excellent book about Gernika- I'll have to track that down. Can't remember now.
If you walk around in the Basque Quarter in downtown Boise you can hear old men and their grandkids speaking in Euskara- and the real San Juan is in the museum!
Way more than 20, I'd imagine. Count me among them. And yeah, I read books under the desk all through highschool, and look where it took me :)Keep writing and I'll keep reading.
" I suspected this obsessive interest in sex was based on some flawed idea that sex was a shortcut to intimacy." Still a major (and unrealistic) tenet of romance books. I enjoy stories that don't just go there.
Sarah wrote: I became more interested in writing about love
It makes all the difference...
It makes all the difference...
"Mother said she was 'not a lady.'" Okay, my mother never said that to me, but it's the kind of thing she would have said, if Janice had been alive, if I had been alive, and if, during that overlapping moment in time, I had dug her! That will undoubtedly be the line of the day for me. Awesome! Thank you!(And not only do you have more than 20 fans, lol!, I'm doing my part to make your readership grow as big as it can possibly can by evangelizing about you when I can! :-) If anyone deserved it.... God. And yeah, you know who your readers are. We didn't have Readers Digest, but I was that little girl who lived for the day when the teacher would pass out the colorful listing from which we could order new books each month. Scholastica? I don't remember its name. Anyway, my mother gave me a limit -- $5. I would sit for hours and decide which books I would get, circling some books as definites, crossing off others as definite "Nos," and finally settling on my list. It was fun!
In the first grade, I saw this wonderful set of 7 novels that I simply had to have, but they cost, if I recall correctly, $6.95. I was terrified that my mother would not allow me to have them since they exceeded my budget, but I went to her and begged. She knew how much I loved to read, and she knew I would get lost in the books. I'm grateful to her, to this day, for saying yes -- they were The Chronicles of Narnia. :-))
" I suspected this obsessive interest in sex was based on some flawed idea that sex was a shortcut to intimacy."
I certainly believed it! Or at least tried it out. And guess what, it doesn't work! We ought to try a different paradigm.
I certainly believed it! Or at least tried it out. And guess what, it doesn't work! We ought to try a different paradigm.
Salsera1974 wrote: ""Mother said she was 'not a lady.'" Okay, my mother never said that to me, but it's the kind of thing she would have said, if Janice had been alive, if I had been alive, and if, during that overlap..."
I know the books you mean- Scholastic Book Club! I loved those. I couldn't wait for my son to bring his home from school. And Narnia! Now that's what series fiction was meant to be. Thanks for your kind words- I feel surrounded by so many nice people! That's a great feeling.
I know the books you mean- Scholastic Book Club! I loved those. I couldn't wait for my son to bring his home from school. And Narnia! Now that's what series fiction was meant to be. Thanks for your kind words- I feel surrounded by so many nice people! That's a great feeling.
i would pounce on that pulpy catalogue like a vulture every time.my mother lived in mortal terror of its arrival into our home
my mother was talked into buying a copy of the Great Books when she was very young--we dragged those books around with us for so many years. They even survived a hurricane that knocked the rest of the house down. I think I was the only person in the family who ever opened one, and I never made it through the entire bunch. Another project for my declining years!
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While this is a pretty accurate assumption (about us sitting in the back reading), I think it's safe to say that there are much more of us than 20. Or, at least, each of us is worth a legion. You know: We are loud, we are proud, we are Sarah Black fans! XD
It's amazing how you can make me laugh and cry even with a blog post. :)