1968

Pecan trees against a blue, Louisiana summer sky.

That was a momentous year in the history of civil rights and race relations in the United States. I was 7 years old and unfortunately don't remember very much.

I remember a big hippie festival on the levee in a south Louisiana town. All those white people with beards--that was an unusual sight. My cousin from Minnesota had come to spend time with my family. He looked white, like many of my relatives and he seemed cool like the hippie types.

My family went on a big car trip to Washington, D.C. in 1968! I remember a little of the White House. It had a blue room and a red room. That's all I remember of it. The Smithsonian Institute was BIG. I think I got to see some dinosaur skeletons and a woolly mammoth--also some rockets. The Washington zoo was amazing--I can't remember what animals I saw, and I can faintly remember being tired from walking. But it had to have been something amazing.

I remember my crazy cousin Jimmy. He pierced his own ear with the hook clamp of a small chain. He lived in a house that had a basement. I had never seen anything like that before. That was so cool.

Robert Kennedy's funeral was going on. I don't even recall knowing that he had been assassinated. I don't even recall anything about Martin Luther King's assassination. But I remember the Poor City erected in the Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and I remember John F. Kennedy's eternal flame. It is probably the photograph of the memorial that has burnt itself into my memory.


Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968.

I remember peering through the car window at skyscrapers lining the freeway that ran through the city of Richmond, on the way to Washington. I remember seeing mountains for the first time in the Appalachians and my mother buying a huge deer mural made of carpet.

1968 has left me with only anecdotal recollections. Those for me were the days of crawfish on the bayou and pecan pickings in the backyard. How I hated picking pecans and having to rake the autumn leaves. Pecan trees were everywhere. Why so many pecan trees!

Next door was my elderly French-speaking neighbor. She always gave me candy or pennies, so I liked to go there when I could sneak away from home. There were a lot of hurricanes in those days. It was more exciting than frightening--no school, the wind blowing the trees wildly and lots of rain.

School was very unusual that year. It was my second year and I was in my second school. I was a celebrity among a class and a school full of white students. I liked the privileged status. I loved my teacher, Mrs. Bradley, and she loved me. The only French I ever learned was then and from her. I was a happy teacher's pet. School was a lot of fun that year.

I went to church every Sunday and catechism every Saturday. I hated having to pull myself away from the cartoons to go to catechism, but it was obligatory as I no longer attended Catholic school. Once there it was OK. It was like school--I liked being in the classroom and I liked learning. God loves me because he made me. That was one of the things we often repeated. It was so logical--those words seemed to make perfect sense.

1968 must have been a very formative year in my life. It was a formative year in the life of the country.


Robert Kennedy Funeral, 1968.

The Reality That I Know

The 1961 "Freedom Rides" heightened tensions between King and younger activists, as he faced criticism for his decision not to participate in the rides.

Stanford.edu MLK, Jr Biography

Some things in life just feel right--some don't. You watch a film and are put off by its non-realism. Sometimes it isn't just you who are put off; many other viewers might have the same reaction. So, who in his right mind would even put such a story to film? Even a fantasy should have some basis in reality otherwise it doesn't work. There have to be rules of some sort, parameters that restrict what happens even within the world of fiction and fantasy.

So, what is this reality and why do some writers or storytellers seem not to quite get it? Perhaps reality, as we interpret it, differs from one person to the next. Perhaps it is largely interpretation, rather than fact, arising from the accumulation of who and what we are. It is perhaps no more and no less than that which was borne of our genes and filtered through the place and time in which we evolved.

Reality, as we perceive it, is shaped by what we have read, learned and experienced. Certain elements of this reality will be shared by others to greater or lesser extent. Conversely, no two individuals will have the exact same perception of reality. Therein lies our individuality, and therein lies the storyline which is, even to the fantasy writer, based on reality--the writer's reality, which is shared to greater or lesser extent by the reader or the viewer of a film.

The reality that I know...


Across the Great Divide, NYT book review

It started in 1961. It started in a small USA town in the American South, in a community defined by race, in a whole country defined by race and in a society where--history and recollection tell me--changes were-a-coming. The decade of the 1960's was a decade of not only discontent, but one of pronounced activity to change the world--or change reality.

The reality that I know started unbeknownst to me within this setting in 1961.