When I went to Ann Arbor for Freshman Orientation, in late 1965, it was a week or so before I would return for the real thing. I had to be one of the most naive new students, in all senses, of all time:
* I'd never tasted alcohol.
* I'd never had sex.
* I didn't know that "writing" could be a career option.
* I'd never seen a naked woman.
* I didn't know what "pot" was.
* I didn't know what leaving a tip in a restaurant meant.
Now, before you choke to death laughing, there were a few things I did know:
* All the universe is based in mathematical patterns, which I could "see."
* Fantasy can be as good as, or better than, reality.
* Trees held more silent wisdom in their beings than most human beings ever will.
* Hitting a baseball begins with strength in your legs.
* Girls were astonishing creatures; their mere presence could make your knees quake, and your pants bulge.
* Cigarettes tasted crappy, and weren't worth the quarter you had to muster to acquire them from the corner gas station.
When I was on the University of Michigan campus for my orientation, I'm quite sure my parents worried that somehow I would be blown away like a leaf in a foreign wind, never knowing what had hit it.
Mine had been a strange childhood.
Labeled as a math genius at an early age, placed in front of every class as an object of curiosity, since I could add faster than any adding machine of the era, I of course felt awkward and weird. Chosen by the local bank as a young teen as their ideal "sponsored" future banker, due to my math skills, and carefully tested as to my potential computer skills (then barely a fantasy machine), I only experienced rejection as "not sufficiently motivated" to be a banker. I keenly felt my immigrant father's disappointment at my failure.
Identified as athletically gifted, particularly as a baseball player, plus being the (by far) fastest kid in our neighborhood, only to be soon condemned by my father and my brother-in-law as "lazy" when I stopped being able to even run down a routine fly ball, courtesy of an undiagnosed case of rheumatic fever that was eating away at my heart, I again felt the searing disappointment of my father toward his only son.
This deepened when our family doctor diagnosed my heart problem as "psychological;" I agreed, and embraced all of the negative interpretations of me. The future indeed, by age 11, seemed bleak.
This was the boy who for the very first time walked over to the "Diag" on the U of M campus, that summer of 1965, and was appalled by the sight of frat boys taunting a small group of anti-war students, sitting in a circle, holding candles, protesting the Vietnam War.
I was wearing the most ridiculous clothes imaginable, a ridiculous black sports coat over ridiculous white pants, and I was desperately fleeing a dance on the last night of orientation week, because I wouldn't have known how to dance with a girl if she asked me to, when I encountered this awful, life-changing scene.
The people doing the taunting were "my" people, I suppose -- athletes, loyal Americans, future soldiers, conservatives like me.
The people sitting in the circle, possibly risking injury or worse, were people the likes of which I'd never met -- gentle, bearded, thoughtful, outside of the mainstream.
I don't think that I knew it then, but I'd just encountered my natural fellow travelers -- those of us who could never quite fit into the accepted options then available to Americans. Those, who by virtue of skin color, sexual orientation, ideological instinct, or just plain old outsiderness didn't fit into the socially acceptable parameters of the American Dream.
I returned home after this experience in a deeply confused state. Now I knew who I was not, but I did not yet know who I was. The next chapter of this story is how I discovered my true place as a civil rights activist, an anti-war protester, and an advocate for outsiders of all stripes.
-30-
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