(Photo by Lisha Riabinina on Unsplash). The future is still out there over that same horizon
(Iām a little slow to get back aboard in here. I realize it and Iām trying to fight my way back. Weāve had some difficult family issues of the sort that are not helpful to one's writing output. Nevertheless, I persist. Bear with me.) *
* EJS Downs 1
_____________________
California has been in the news a lot lately mostly for the wrong reasons, in the fastidious judgement of the perverts and reprobates in dubious authority currently in our befuddled country. I can vividly remember when it was a very different story. As an honest-to-goodness ābaby boomerā, I was born into a different world than most of you. Books have been written on these generational divides, but donāt worry; I have no intention of doing that. Iām just going to explore a single song from 1966 to take us into a wormhole of sorts to both a distant past, and perhaps toward a better future:
As soon as I hear the first notes of this iconic song, Iām back in my senior year in high school on my way to the Kentucky State High School Basketball tournament in Louisville; WAKY on the radio and a group of teenage high school friends heading up I-64 on a mid-week afternoon. Iām not there in merely some sense of fuzzy nostalgia. Thatās exactly where I am; Weāre past Winchester and about ten miles east of Lexington. We can hardly wait to get there.
School is close to being out (in fact, I went to the 60-year reunion of my senior class just the other day). The basketball tournament is a state-wide cultural event š. If you can believe it, I was a respectable player myself in those days. The tournament is always full of excitement and surprises (on and off the court). On this beautiful day, the future looks bright and dazzling. As far as the eye can see, thereās no premonition that there will ever be any wrong turns.
Weāre eating-up road: Not only to Louisville, but as the vanguard of the golden generation roaring out of our small-town driveways to a golden future. Weāre going all the way for sure: college, a life in the glory of the open road; nothing to be forbidden or denied.
This is the very song I hear in my head today when I reimagine that youthful attitude. It was a wonderful sensation. I feel genuinely sorry for those among you who havenāt experienced it that way.
Just as we were the golden generation (and we somehow knew that we were exactly thatā¦sorry), the golden nation-state of California was beginning to take flight in our imaginations. It was just starting to turn from being an interesting and faraway geographiclocation, into asun-drenched state of-mind and a trailblazer on the cusp of a new and exotic future.
John Wooden at UCLA had created the first couple of what would eventually be ten national championships in NCAA major-college basketball (that mattered to those of us in Kentucky). The theatrics of UCLA basketball became as something from another world: Color TV, Hollywood glamor, eye-catching blonde cheerleaders and players out of central casting, one juggernaut team after another.
Then there were the beaches and the surfers and the rest of the music and the entire frantic, edgy panoply of what was becoming asometimes-zany futuristic concept that would dominate our culture for years to come.
The rest of us had no chance. Even the past glories of UK basketball began to look obsolete and faded in this supercharged new environment. The great eastern cities appeared melancholy, bleak, and threatening (so āyesterdayā š) in comparison.
We were to be spared the arrival of the so-called āNew Southā (same as the old South, pretty muchš) for a decade or two yet (we had that mercy as well). Vietnam loomed, but it was a little early for those of us with college privilege to be concerned. It was a brief perfect storm of hopes and possibilities.
_______________________
My mother had three surviving adult sisters. All had been born in Kentucky but had moved around to other places as my late grandfather worked as an electrician in the WPA. They lived in Florida for a while. The youngest sister married in Cincinnati and later relocated with her husband to New Jersey and then to Maryland. The two oldest sisters also married in Ohio and relocated with their families to California in the 1950s to join the booming aerospace industry.
My mom stayed home and came to reside in Mount Sterling, KY with my father. ((As an aside, my dadās only surviving sister also relocated with her husband (a GE executive originally from Kentucky). They went on to live all over the country and the world before eventually settling in Syracuse, NY)).
My family were the stay-at-homes who took on the role of the familial anchors. We represented home to a vaguely uprooted and dispersed family diaspora (in certain symbolic ways, we still do). We were the ones waiting when they came home for visits. We were the touchstones and the keepers of family institutions.
_______________________
My cousins were objects of benign local curiosity. As urban trendsetters each in their own way, they appeared a little exotic to my small-town mid-south cultural environment. We were in the same rough age-segment (all āboomersā). They had āā¦been aroundā¦ā as the saying still goes (sometimes they werenāt above letting you know it in small, innocent ways š). But I think they enjoyed their time with us and may have even been slightly envious of our comparatively innocent, idyllic small-town childhoods. I think we all got along well, and they were well-accepted by my local friends. Weāve enjoyed periodic lifetime relationships with my eastern cousins.
In our teenage years, one branch of my California cousins visited us in Mount Sterling once (we rarely saw the other one for many years due to health issues in the family). As I recall, on their last full family visit (1963 maybe?), they arrived with a large airstream-style trailer and parked it in our back yard on Sycamore Street. That in itself was something we didnāt see every day in Mount Sterling š®.
āLooksā had always run in Momās family. She and all her sisters were all photogenically attractive. For some reason, the western family had mostly female children. They inherited the same traits. And something else as well.
They were born and raised in California! When my three or four (exact numbers and even names are a bit vague today. Itās been a long timeš¤) cousins walked out of the trailer, it was immediately clear to all that they wereā¦wellā¦different. They had that same casual California bearing and style that was just short of becoming universal. And here it was, right here in our leafy summertime backyard in little oleā Mount Sterling KY! We could not have been more surprised if aliens had stepped from a spaceship.
I donāt want to imply that they caused any unusual uproar around our close-knit little neighborhood. Iāll only say this, and itās something my late brother and I used to talk about: We never knew we had so many young friends as during that magic summertime week. Virtually all of them (and even some we didnāt know all that well) found a reason to show-up at our house. We had never been so popular before, and we never would be again. š
______________________
I never made it out there š. I always wanted to, but the planets never aligned. It remains a figment of my long-ago imagination (maybe thatās for the best). My aunts, uncles, and some cousins would continue sporadic trips to Kentucky over the years but we were all much older by then. Obligations and time had begun to weigh. The early stark differences had merged into each other.
But I still think of those early scenes when I think of California. I think of what opportunities for optimism there might be in the lessons of those early faraway and unafraid days. We owned the future and nobody was going to steal it from us, try as they might. Just maybe itās time to take that future back again (?) š
