"Blessed".
Today, I feel blessed to have been a teen-ager in the 60's.
Hitch-hiking with a back pack and folk guitar from Mass. to San Diego at 18.
Walking the pacific coast highway from Mexico to 'Frisco - meeting people and taking jobs along the way.
Spending the summer of love living in Haight/Ashbury (the famous "Week-End Hippies" and lines of cars who'd flood the neighborhood every week end)
I smoked Camels, drank chocolate milk, hated wine, pot and acid. Loved the gentle people. Barefoot, Levis cords, glass beads, mustache.
Always in the back of my mind were: memories of practicing getting under our school desks in Florida; news of the SDS, Black Panthers, SLA; so many peace demonstrators as violent as any thug & motivated by fear for their own skins; sincere others;
...........and knowing that as soon as the mail catches up to me there likely will be a draft notice in there.
I really was leading a blessed life (as my daughter points out) - Spent the Summer of Love in California and then persuaded the Massachusetts draft board to let me go to Vietnam as a medic. "Unarmed' but All of us goofy medics thought we were bullet proof. We had the 'savior complex' - which is spooky because we had not near enough training for the undertaking
The music was a huge part of my experience. Two stand out: laying on the hood of a car with friends, somewhere on the beach, in heavy fog waiting for sunrise and hearing Whiter Shade of Pale on the radio for the 1st time. And sitting in a kitchen in Haight listening to the midnight premier of the whole of Sgt. Pepper's.
Wouldn't change any of it.
I was once persuaded to give a Veteran's Day class-room talk about my Vietnam experience by my daughter & her American History teacher. The one point I tried to share with the teenage boys in the class was to imagine moving, every week in your senior year, closer to the day you will be made available to the government.....and a very unpopular, unsupported, war. Look around the room. Some of you won't be coming home. "Now, carry on and be a kid."
Stig