article section of the TV Guide. There was more to life than a beer with the buddies, a gold watch and a pension. It was the sixties, the time of love and peace and social upheaval— contradictions that walked side by side. Women's rights. Civil rights. The Vietnam War. I got it in my head I could do some good out there, make things better for the underprivileged. I changed my major from business to sociology and went to anti-war rallies and sang some folk songs, collected Beatles albums, and let my hair grow long.
At one rally held at a Unitarian church, I met Trudy. I looked across the heads of long, straight hair and Afros and saw her on the other side of the room talking to a pear-shaped girl in a flowered dress that belled and dragged the floor.
God, but Trudy was beautiful. Painfully young, a proto type for Eve. Long gold hair rippled to her waist and her eyes were so bright green they looked supernatural. Spangles of silver hung from her ears. She was wearing a white midi-blouse, a blue jean mini-skirt and wooden clog shoes. Beneath the midi was a flat brown stomach and a marvelous belly button, and beneath the mini were legs like God would have given his very own woman.
I got over there without running and introduced myself. We made shameless small talk, mostly stupid mumblings, some of it about the war.
Pretty soon we had our arms around each other and we were out of there. We both lived in dorms then, and as the dorm mothers were furiously against fucking, I took her to the parking place that was to become our haven, and we did what we had wanted to do since the first moment we laid eyes on one another. We generated so much electricity upon that pine-covered hill, I'm surprised we didn't cause a forest fire. I feel certain we didn't do the shocks in my old Chevy much good.
This went on for a time, and things got better and hotter. And on the night of my fondest memory, when she wore the zebra-striped outfit, we decided to rent an apartment and move in together.
We pooled our money and found a little room on the grubby side of town and lived there for two months. It got better yet, and we decided to get married. It was a simple wedding with lots of flowers and barefoot guests and a female minister younger than Trudy.
God, those were odd times. If you missed them, and you know someone who went through them, soaked it all in, and you catch them late at night, after maybe a beer or two, or the kids are all in bed and the TV's dead, and you say, 'Hey, what were the sixties really like?' There's a good chance they'll say, 'It was magical,' or 'It was special.'
For a time it sure seemed that way. Peace and love seemed like more than words. We thought everyone could live in a world full of mutual respect, long hair, and cooperation. It was as if the sky had split open and God had given us a ray of light, and in its glow, wonderful things happened.
An example being the sparrow incident the night after our wedding.
We dropped the apartment and rented a small house on the edge of town. It wasn't much of a house. The ceiling in the living room was too low and the plumbing squeaked like giant mice.
Trudy turned on the back porch light and went out there to toss some potato peels, and found a sparrow sitting on the porch. It was weak and nodding and couldn't fly. She called me and I looked at it. It was a baby, and as far as I could determine, there were no wounds on it. It seemed sick.
I picked up the bird with some reluctance, because I had once been told if birds smelled the human scent on another bird they would peck it to death, and carried it into the house. I got an old shoebox and tore some newspaper up and put it in the bottom of the box and the bird on that. I got an eyedropper and used it to give the bird some cold beef bouillon.
That was the procedure from then on. First thing in the morning, and between classes, we would give the bird bouillon and clean its box and put fresh paper in the bottom. At night we stood over it and looked at it and clucked our tongues like parents worried about a sick child.
About this same time, I went to work part-time in a restaurant in LaBorde, and brought home scraps I thought the bird might eat. At first he wouldn't touch them, but after a while he ate them out of my hand. Noodles were his favorite. I suppose they were as close as he ever got to worms.
The bird got stronger. He started flying around the house.
You could open doors and windows and he wouldn't fly out. He liked it in there. He liked us. He'd light on our shoulders and our outstretched palms. He cheeped a lot, and because of that, we named him Cheep. The only time he showed distress was when we weren't wearing black. Guess because I had on a black tee-shirt and Trudy a black peasant dress the night we found him, and he bonded to black.
We were so excited about our bird, we dyed everything we owned black. On those occasions when we did buy new clothes, they were always black. That way Cheep stayed happy.
Sweet alchemy was thicker in the air than radio waves then, and it seemed especially thick around Trudy and me. We thought it would last forever.
But the best-looking apple can contain a worm.
When 1970 rolled in just a few weeks after we were married, the Vietnam War still raged on. The relatively innocent smoking of grass had been exchanged by many for pills and shit-filled needles. The wonderful, if admittedly hokey, beauty of Woodstock had to stand shoulder to shoulder with the senseless tragedy at Kent State.
Our bird continued to fly about the house, but the magic of the era was gone. A deep, dark awareness that perhaps it had never actually existed settled in; we had glimpsed some shopworn cards up the magician's sleeve, and with each passing moment, the glow of the act was dimming.
The sixties were dead. They may never have lived.
I began to feel guilty about hiding out in college with my deferment when so many were dying in Vietnam. Asking that everyone be peaceful and love one another wasn't enough. I wanted to make some statement against the war, and I didn't want to hide behind a deferment to do it. I was one of those who felt our original cause in Vietnam was just, but that it had become a political nightmare. The government we were
defending, in spite of cries of 'We are a democracy,' showed little evidence of being different from the one we were fighting. Our role there was as aimless as the Flying Dutchman. We took a hill, we gave it back. The American dead stacked up. Seemed to me, we ought to have known when to cut our losses.
I talked to Trudy long and hard, and it was the sort of thing she loved. Noble involvement. It lit her like a torch.
