When the Sixties turn Sixty

So, I was born in the second year of the massive wave of Baby Boomers who flodded U.S. society in the years following World War II. Our Dads came home from the war, and moved in with our Moms in the cities and suburbs of a newly ascendant global power.

The spoils of victory in war fueled our economy. Everything cheap was "Made in Japan." Germany's folk car showed up on our streets, and it was so cheap that it quickly became ubiquitous.



My generation stressed and strained every social institution we encountered, especially the schools. Yesterday, cleaning out a closet, some old papers fell into my view. Yellowed sheets of poems I wrote as a teenager! Some were so classically bad as to be publishable as parodies, only I'm afraid I didn't create them with that in mind.

Others were, well, passably odd. These I shall re-evaluate and perhaps publish here later on.

Among the other relics spilling out of my closet was an envelope containing my sister Kathy's report cards from 2nd and 3rd grade. She was a good student and a good citizen, clearly. I have scanned in the documents and will mail them back to her in Michigan.



Many of the apple blossoms, even as some scatter before the wind, hang gracefully overhead against our bluest sky. Proof of life and rebirth, the promise of spring. So many of us have spring birthdays, which always seem like the most natural of birthdays. I suspect that earlier in our evolution, when we lived and died more like other animals, our spring babies were the ones most successful at survival, especially in the colder climates.



My little girl and I took a walk yesterday, seeking wildflowers.



In my eyes, she is more beautiful than any flower, though in just as natural a way.



Pinks and purples, yellows, and whites, we saw them all.



The arts of babies. I purchased these in the fall of 2001.

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The photo at the top of this post is one I snapped many years ago, out at the end of a dock that stretched far out into the bay, looking back in at the cottage where my tender family sat, reading, after dark. Even now, I know the feeling from that moment: The outsider looking in.

I have always felt uncontainable love for those in my life. But sometimes the only way I can express it is in a photo like this, as if from space. As if I were a visitor from another planet, a temporary witness...

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