01-Jan-2009
Fifty Years – The Retroquel*
1959 - 2009
1959
I am in the middle of ninth grade, my first year back in my hometown after an absence of a half dozen years. We’d recently moved into my uncle’s house in DeKalb (IL) because my uncle had taken a job as a high school principal in Agana, Guam. Hawaii might have been a better choice since it became a state that year, as did Alaska.
Some railroad tracks and sidings from nearby factories were out behind our house, and it was in a parked boxcar that I had my first cigarette. A boxcar is a neat place to hang out, especially if it’s right behind your house. One day I was sitting in there pouting over some adolescent ailment when the car gave a fierce bounce. I got out quickly.
It was during this year that I dated Pam Hayes and ruined a perfectly good high school football career when my Achilles tendons said, “No way.” I remember that we got pretty excited about a new television program that came on called “Bonanza.” Those not given to much TV might have been excited, though, over the publication of Dr. Zhivago and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The car of choice at the time (not that anyone in my teen world had either cars or driver’s licenses) was the Chevrolet Impala. Not surprising, then, that this was the year Fidel Castro came to power. I understand a good many of those old Impalas are still tooling along Cuba’s streets and highways.
Still, fifty years is a long time, even with unemployment in 1959 at 6.8% giving us kind of a homey, familiar feel, as do both Brian Williams and Jason Alexander, born this year.
1969
In March of this year I listened to my grandfather’s wife say, “Goodbye, sweetheart,” as we buried him. I was a pall bearer for him and still have the terse Western Union telegram saying that he’d died.
Graduate school, year one at Purdue, is going on at this time though it is not going well – not so much me, not so much the professors or the school or the coursework. Perhaps it’s just that the country’s falling just a bit apart. In April I wrote this in my diary: “There is more revolt going on at Purdue. I have been in and out of it like a crow flying over a dump, circling, unsure whether the odor is smoldering garbage or cooking food. And like a good crow, in the end it may not matter.”
Purdue didn’t take kindly to protests over the war. This diary entry reads like it came out of Robert Stone’s A Hall of Mirrors: “Campus turmoil, state police, Mace, shouting, speeches, young feminine feet washing themselves in the Union toilets, young masculine bodies confronting the stolid hatred of sixty state policemen, doors smashing, crowds gathering, five-hundred here, three-thousand there…. I am innocent, but I have refused this time to step away from it. Unsure of a definite commitment, I am most aware of the polarities. I love these students, my students, but I am also one of them.”
There are riots all over the place because of the Vietnam war and things don’t seem all that sanguine with our new president, Richard M. Nixon. We also witness a monstrous explosion from the cartoon world as Charles Manson and his girly-goons murder seven people.
Yet the future is also just a giggle on the horizon as ARPANET emerges, that wan forerunner of the internet. Speaking of giggles, Woodstock – that great gathering of the tribes – happened in August.
1979
I’m now an admissions dean at a college so we buy our first house. It’s in an oddly-named small town in Pennsylvania called Trucksville, a mountain town with the feel of a Swiss village. I almost had to cancel a party for seven-hundred prospective students when a nuclear reactor pooped out a hundred miles south at Three Mile Island. A woman told me her doctor had advised her not to go into Pennsylvania for awhile.
Our kids are now six and nine so we’re pretty hard core into the young family game with school activities, soccer, Little League. An interesting program begins on National Public Radio called Morning Edition and we get hooked on it pretty quickly. Speaking of hooked, the country had a good laugh when President Carter, while fishing in Georgia, was attacked by a swamp rabbit. All in all, it’s an odd year as Margaret Thatcher begins her reign as assistant queen in the U.K., the Iranians seize nearly a hundred hostages from the U.S. embassy in Teheran, it snowed for thirty minutes in the Sahara Desert, and an American Airlines jet crashed at O’Hare in Chicago, killing 271.
I’m doing a lot of traveling at this time in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, beginning the accumulation of some 11,000 hotel points that would, eleven years later, result in a free Zenith television courtesy of Holiday Inn. Unfortunately, this nasty business of making a living has pretty much booted my writing out of the picture. That will eventually change. I’d just won an important literary prize though I wouldn’t find out about it for sixteen years.
The world, though, continued its odd exchanges as both Heath Ledger and Claire Danes were born, and Mr. Ed, the talking horse, and Josef Mengele, Nazi atrocitizer, died.
1989
We’ve been back in Illinois for a couple of years now, a job at a small college that just happened to coincide with the deaths of both of my parents. They both died in the summer almost exactly one year apart, though that year was punctuated in January with the death of my brother-in-law.
On the work front, the small Illinois college I’m at brings in a new president, a woman, who a) wants to go in a totally new direction from that under which I was hired; and b) hates my guts. Even the Human Resource people know that this one’s not going to work out.
I’m out of work for a good part of this year, then, higher education, as few people know, among the more brutal venues for pursuing a career. Certainly, I’m not in the same situation as those thousands of Chinese killed in Tiananmen Square, but you just never get used to the indignities of the job search: a flight out to Wyoming where your prospective boss didn’t show up for two different meetings; the marketing plan you sketched-out for a place that never called you back but you suspect they found the marketing plan quite useful; the small Catholic college in Pittsburgh where you sat in a line with other candidates waiting for an interview – and this for a major administrative position. Ironically, I gained a bit of dignity one time when, home alone, I leaped out of the shower to answer the phone and did a respectable telephone interview totally naked (and dripping). Take that, you strange people.
It’s easier to feel sad over the deaths of Lucille Ball and Gilda Radner than it is over the career implosion of Pete Rose and his lifetime ban from baseball. In truth, with George H.W. Bush becoming president, and the Exxon Valdez puking off the shores of Alaska there doesn’t seem to be much bounce to this year, at least not until July with the premiere of a new television series, Seinfeld.
If some years might inspire you to prayer, that one didn’t. Still, I did manage to get a deanship at a Protestant seminary in Maine. Going “back east” had a nice feel to it, if only to get away from all the grieving we’d gone through.
I knew the move would be tough, that Gayle would have to stay in Illinois to sell the house – a process that could, and did, take months – while I started the new job. Perhaps I should have been uplifted by the top song of 1989: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” by Bobby McFerrin. I wasn’t.
1999
Nobody is quite sure whether the century and the millennium will end this year or the next, largely because the fundamentals of arithmetic escape nearly everyone, all six billion of us (that number rather amazingly finalized by a birth in Bosnia-Herzegovina). We embrace, though, something called Y2K and wonder if it will mean the end of the world.
One thing I am sure about is that I’m on a much-fabled book tour following publication of my first book, the story collection Nude In Tub. One of my first stops is at The Guild Complex in Chicago where I give a reading to around fifty people. The reception is warm, the mood upbeat, and the applause generous at the end of my reading. There is a lot, though, within this group that is not being said, or that does not want to be said, or that has been said over and over too much on the radio and television all day long. The date, that is, is April 20, 1999, and a new name just got permanently etched into our national consciousness: Columbine High School.
Move ahead, then, to more strangeness. It’s a Saturday in July and we’re all in a happy dither because it’s my son’s wedding day. A light rain starts the day, then it gets a bit humid, but, overall, it’s a good day with much transiting from hotel to church to tuxedo place and trying somewhere to get a bite to eat, all that good hectic stuff but, again, the radio is on with people stealing furtive listens to see if he’s been found, if the wreckage has been found – John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife crashing a plane somewhere in the ocean near Martha’s Vineyard.
With my first book out and being favorably reviewed, I now have a deal for my novel. This commitment, though, to writing full-time is both exciting and scary. A national reputation is being built and that can thin out the oxygen enough to make you dizzy and goofy. But you also know what your friends and relatives don’t know – that no one makes a living as a writer (the exceptions statistically insignificant). One of those exceptions is Stephen King, almost killed this year when he was hit by a van while out walking in the Maine countryside. I walk a lot, too, so I don’t know what that means.
2009
Well, it’s January 1st and not much has happened yet. Maybe that’s a good sign.
*This is a word I just made up that plays off of things like sequel, which means something that follows, or prequel, which has no meaning because it’s made wrong. If it were correct, it would be presequel, which would mean that which precedes that which follows, sort of like a snake swallowing itself. Retroquel, or retrosequel, would have to mean, then, something that follows something reminiscent of the past. Really, it’s a fun word, but please don’t use it ever again. I know I won’t.
