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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (8881)	3/24/1998 11:43:00 PM
From: Lady Lurksalot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Jfred, Would you like to reopen our JFK assassination discussion? <vbg> According to my elders, V-J Day made more of an impact than FDR's death, the former occurring in August and the latter in April 1945. Back on the old Boomer thread we had discussed the year 1968 as being the biggest year for major events in all of history. I wonder if Sir James is lurking nearby . . . Holly

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (8881)	3/25/1998 12:04:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71178

I was two years old at the time. Suffice it to say that I had no clue where I was when Lee Harvey Oswald (and his shadowy backup?) did the bad thing. For me, the Defining Event of my decade occurred on an achingly blue cold January morning twelve years ago. I'd just finished a weekend visiting my folks and my honey in Maryland. On the long drive back to grad school in New Jersey, I stopped at a large upscale mall in the high north of Maryland to stretch my legs and perhaps score a cold Coke. I walked into the mall and even for a Monday morning it was peculiarly hushed. I chose a path through a department store. Back then they had the TV Wall - hundreds of sets lined up in a living mosaic, giving a dragonfly's-eye view of Good Morning America or maybe Days of our Lives. Everybody was at the Wall. The Wall was cobalt-blue, showing a repeating image of the same thing in a grid like a full sheet of wallet-size yearbook photos. Audio was turned up so I could hear an announcer picking his way through "Obviously a major malfunction - controllers are looking very carefully at the situation -" For over an hour, the TVs in their phalanx looped through the same blue&white scene unfolding like a fire-tipped lobster claw. The USA space program fell into a coma that day, and it's still in physical therapy.

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (8881)	3/25/1998 7:39:00 PM
From: Rambi	Respond to of 71178

Dec 4, 1996 to Freddy "We were stardust -we were golden" In the early 70's, I saw "Jacques Brel is Alive, Well, and Living in PAris" off-Broadway and fell in love with it. One of the songs is about young men going off to war. As I read your note, I realized Judy Collins was singing it in the background -have you heard it -"Sons of" ---there's a verse- Sons of tycoons, sons from the farms-All of the children ran from your arms-through fields of gold, through fields of ruin, All of the children vanish too soon. My second year at UVa I shared an apartment with a beauiful redhaired Irish girl-we were both in the theatre dept.,going through divorces-and waitressing at night. We used to bring home interesting assortments of actors, musicians, and artists. Anyway, one night, we were talking and she started to cry and cry. It was her brother's birthday, only her brother had died in Vietnam. But the saddest part was that her father was career army, and had been a proponent of the war. After her brother was killed, her father was devastated-I guess like Javert in Les Miserables when the id‚e fixe of his life proved to be without truth. He just sat in a chair and drank the rest of his life away. I always thought the immoral aspect of the war was that we sent our boys to die for someone else's cause. It would be awful enough to lose a son for your own country, or for a cause you understood and believed in. This was so ungraspable for most of us. Innocence and Eden-freedom, love, guiltless pleasure...we can't do it again-because we have knowledge. I like your metaphor. -Do you think we lived in a special time or does everyone have a coming of age summer that has a magical penumbral glow in their memory? Was it the contrast of a pampered, indulged group trying its wings against the backdrop of a crazy war they couldn't see or comprehend? I remember a group of us sitting around smoking and listening to the numbers being called that first draft, singing (remember Country Joe-"next stop Viet Nam"?)and understanding nothing. The risks we took and yet we were invincible that summer...the music, the colors, that flow through the scenes--someone saying "I love you" and the words drifting from his lips and taking shape as flowers and hearts as I inhaled them. Floating on the voices of Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell into some place so pure and holy it was like praying...and resting my head on someone's chest, feeling his heart beat with mine and knowing we were alive as no one had ever been alive before. How we loved without restraint, opened ourselves to every experience, laughed at the shadows cast by our parents' worries. Was it just youth? Or was it magic? And then some of us left....and we became conscious of some other reality. When I graduated in '70 and got my first real job as a probation officer, I lived down a long dirt road on a lake in a little cottage-another extension of my perfect life..I could go out at midnight and swim naked across the lake and never doubt that I was immune from harm. My only neighbor was a young man who worked in the Voc. Rehab. Dept.--one night he called wanting to talk but I had a rehearsal and couldn't go over. The next day, they found him squatting on his desk, sobbing and babbling and took him away. I never saw him again. He was just home from Vietnam. I really think the innocence began to leave at that time. I'd lay awake at night and wonder what did he see, what did he live, that did this to him. And I felt scared. If things could happen that did this to people, well, what about me and the people I loved? I have two boys and I would do anything to keep them from this knowledge. And I know I can't. And that I shouldn't. But I look into their clear, pure, fearless eyes and want to protect them so badly --I guess I'm looking into our eyes, Freddy, yours and mine in the summer of '69.