What Happened (Part 40, and the End of Chapter One)

 Such were the commonplace joys and fears and the manner of my life until I was six years old.  Looking back I can see I have focused a lot on things as well as people, but then I was highly affected by the animism of early childhood, when things have, if not personalities, then at least characters that can deeply affect you, with aesthetics that influence. They are equals in existence, and can even seem eternal, and not just disposable things. And the people I knew?  “What venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubim! And young men [were] glittering and sparkling angels and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born and should die....all things abided eternally as they were, in their proper places.”

I was growing up in the Sixties, but what that means to most people when they hear that term meant very little to us.  We were still struggling, in a way almost unconsciously, to live up to what President Johnson had called The Great Society.  In Texas, we were about ten years behind most cultural trends, and in Seguin, a little town far away from the big cities, even more so.  Hippies were just weirdoes and bums (a horrible, shaming insult in our family) and drugs were likely to kill you outright.  How we felt about the great wave of songs that Bob Dylan and the Beatles and the like were riding could be summed up in one term lifted from the prehistoric hillbillies on The Flintstones: “bug music;” although we did hear sanitized versions of some songs on the radio or in the variety shows.  Abstract art was “a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.” Pop was totally conservative, but Mom, being a little younger, could be slightly more open to new things: in pop cultural terms of the times, it was as if Andy Griffith had married Laura Petrie. It was a childhood that would not be unfamiliar to a kid from the Fifties.

It was a world where things were made of glass and metal, not plastic, and where phones were stationary and TV channels few. We ordered things out of catalogs and through the mail, and toys could come in boxes of detergent and books with a can of coffee.  We got our clothes and shoes from Sears and J.C. Penney’s, and cheap elegance for the house from pasting S&H Green Stamps. My mental state at the time might best be expressed in the lyrics of the old song: “you’re not too mad, and you’re not too sane, and you don’t compare and you don’t complain’-- or at least you didn’t complain too much -- “all you do is just sit tight.”

There were two circumstances auguring change in the years ahead, though I paid them little heed at the time. For one, Mom was starting to have regular visits from a nice young lady named Irene, where they would sit around, drink coffee and discuss things, like the condition of the world today.  For another, Mike started to go to school. Every morning we’d see him march stolidly down to the corner of the Loop to wait for the bus. I’d watch from the dining room picture window until he disappeared around the corner. I had been told that next year (a year was a very long time to a little boy) I would be going to school with him.  I would ask him about it when he got back, and got some vague ideas as to what went on, but I couldn’t imagine what it would be like.  But that’s the future for you, whether you’re five or fifty.