Congenial-speak #44

Pause in Case of Berries

My roots were, to some extent, those Chinese Lantern plants I mention on page nine. My mom grew, dried, and sold them to raise funds for the WILPF (womens international league for peace and freedom). I find these as my earliest memory of the politics that nurtured me in the house on Richfield's Aldrich Avenue. The plants were the story-board for many things. They retold fuzzy browned blankets and white hassocks. They drooped before stray cats and torn panda bears. They were my first inconceivable lesson in applied politics. My mom baked English toffee bars for the “WIL” sales. I remember seeing the great rectangular Hershey bar melting into a sprawling sheet of golden brown toffee.

My book, Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, is a memoir of me, my youngest days, and family dynamics of the years 1965 to 1975. To be sure, “liberal” is void of any of the bleeding heart connotations one may assign to it. It is liberal in the equal paradigm. It is not an ideology. The environment that first impressed me in 1965, as I entered the Amram's house as a biracial adopted child, was liberally measured. It was dove and not hawk. It was women can assume any task, not those for which society stereotypes them. It was one in which violent toys were generally discouraged—definitely not encouraged—but accepted as the youthful indiscretion toys for liberal growth that they were if one indulged his peers. An example of this light liberal latitude is explained on page 64.

They were “jack-o-lantern” plants to whomever was concerned. Droopy, sad, mourning a better day in silhouetted contrast, the plants were an irony. The cracked diamond-shaped casings had ripe berries perched inside. It fit somehow. In a way they were a metaphor for the war, for people coming out of whatever fed impediments to their judgment, their sense of morality and justice. The name jack-o-lantern is fortuitous. It has a share in the Vietnam War's story. Each presidential election cycle has an “October surprise,” an unpredictable or surreptitiously construed event in the last month of the cycle that either helps or hinders the election. I shuffled leaves that night as I solicited my costume and orange UNICEF box door to door. In 1968 President Johnson chose October 31 to announce that he was ending the bombing of North Vietnam that had begun three years and eight months earlier. America thought, they hoped, that peace was at hand. It was a tactical move. It was a teasing of America, an easement of a peoples' bereavement.. It was party politics storied to have been done as the last best chance to put Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the White House.

My book retells a simpler time before text messages instantly communicated half-baked thoughts of a president to the world. Words were slow and could be filtered and spun, censored, edited for the most free speech. I balance the war with windows into a world, a view (of crows that flew like sentrys, page 44) from a young witness of nurturing partiality. I paraphrase. I memorialize. The “evenings of séance” on which my friends and I channeled the longevity of summers comprise my memories of Aldrich Avenues. On nearby panes of neighbors' windows I saw “codes.” They were the flickers of TV, of the CBS evening news wrapping up. Cronkite had dutifully imparted another day of war to a progressively less trusting America. For my generation, the Xs born in progression, the events in Southeast Asia, its history, its footnotes, its epilogue destroyed trust in government. For the boomers who were given the fight or flight options, the resisters and activists, government was never again seen the same.

In Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, from marinades in the metaphorical resonance of the lantern plants to watching my mom nominate Shirley Chisholm at the 1972 DNC, I entwine the anti-war movement's painfully slow and frustrating progress with steps I took toward a safer, more peaceful world. I list the facts, the clandestine amnesties considered behind pentagon walls most high schools never taught. I show how one family stepped up in small suburban Richfield, MN to bring the opposition of a war to the national spotlight. I show how my dad's delegation to the 1968 DNC was affected by a consequential family commitment. All my lines, my sediments from those times, all the roots from the sidelines and growing partiality swim entwined in the jack-o-lantern stems.