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| BK at Cummington 1970. Photo by James Baker Hall |
"What you remember saves you. To remember/Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never/Has fallen silent..." W.S. Merwin
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our
own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio…” Neil Young:“Ohio” May 1970
In June 1970, weeks after the protest occupation, I left
Galesburg, Illinois and Knox College. They had been one center of my life since
1964. Except for a brief visit in the 1980s, I never returned.
While in Galesburg I was staying with Carol Hartman, who
was finishing her third year as a student.
She and three friends were planning to spend the summer in Boston. Since I had been accepted for the eight week
summer session at the Cummington Community of the Arts in western
Massachusetts, I decided to join them.
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| Jane Langer and Carol at Knox |
By then of course it was more than that. Carol and I had been friends since her first
year at Knox, when I was a senior. A mutual attraction was evident from the
start. But I was more of an older
confidant then. Carol and her close
friends—among them Jane Langer, Judy Bowker, Jan Byrne, and Steve Phillips—more
or less adopted me. For awhile, Judy was
“the Little Kid” and I was “the Big Kid.”
I won’t say it was foremost in my mind, but I did remember how important
my relationships with older students were in my first and second years.
Our attraction led
to a romance that flowered in that spring of 1970 when we were both free of
other such active relationships. The
summer together—before and after Cummington-- was to be the next step.
Carol passed away in August 2020. Partly in deference to those who were an active part of her life
in recent years, and partly because I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with this,
I haven’t shared memories before. There
were decades when our contacts lapsed. She got back in touch with me by 2000,
and I have a Christmas card from 2001. At some point a couple of my emails went
unanswered. After that I had news of
her mostly through the Knox alumni magazine. In a recent year I emailed her
birthday greetings out of the blue—it might even have been in January 2020.
To do more than
describe the Carol I knew in the 1970s would be presumptuous. So I can’t even
attempt a full portrait or tribute. But with the discretion appropriate to
circumstances—including the purpose of these posts—I can allude to what I know
from that time.
We stopped in Chicago first. While Carol visited her parents, I stayed with Knox alum Howard
Partner at his apartment in the city. It was in a then-funky neighborhood at
Dickens and Fremont. My first night
there I listened to the second Poco album, unable to sleep. (So I recorded in a
notebook, which otherwise has the usual and frustrating lack of details about
that time, but is filled instead with notes on writing projects, memories and
bits of verse. Though I did record impressions of a free concert in Lincoln
Park, and a noisy voyage on the L to meet Carol at the Carson Pirie Scott
department store, where I was still getting hostile stares for my long hair.)
At Howard’s I picked a book off his shelf I’d meant to read:
Joy: Expanding Human Awareness by William C. Schultz. Turns out, he said later, that it was my
book that he’d borrowed. So I got it
back, and I have it still. Most of it was derived from the Human Potentials
Movement, encounter groups and so on.
But one thing jumped out at me then (or so I noted): the relationship
between the body (and its ills or health) and the mind or emotions. Pretty
standard now, it was largely disregarded in the conventional medicine of 1970.
Schultz’s book begins with a description of his infant son,
his innocent absorption in his surroundings, his joy in discovery, learning and
experience. It wasn’t just that his son was often joyful: “Ethan is joy,” he
writes. But typically this does not
last. “Where does the joy go?” Reading
this now, I realize that a version of this question—what happens to this kind
of innocence, why is it destroyed, and how can some of it be recovered—was the
active subtext of my twenties.
Meanwhile Carol was having some conflicts with her parents,
particularly concerning her reluctance to return to Knox for another year. But they also were skeptical about me,
though we never met. They (meaning her
mother mostly) referred to me as “the Polish poet.” Carol said (fondly) that her parents had strange nicknames for her, including "Miss Pasadena" and "Zookie."
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| Carol and her mother |
After exploring other options, Carol and I simply used
half-fare cards (mine borrowed) to fly to Boston, with what we could carry. Carol’s older brother Raymond was attending M.I.T. (or Harvard, or both.) She
and her friends were to stay at his Fairwood Circle apartment in Cambridge,
before a summer sublet was available that probably Raymond arranged. After a few days there on the floor, I was
off to western Massachusetts and the Cummington Community of the Arts.
My actual memories of Cummington are like snapshots, loosely
related. I also haven’t found
manuscripts or notebooks that I can attribute specifically to my time there,
which turned out to be only about four weeks.
But I do have a few relevant documents. And I have many letters
(remember them?) that Carol wrote to me as well as letters I wrote to her,
beginning in 1968 and including while we were separated that summer. Some of the contents provide details and a few prods—or even
corrections—to memories of Cummington.
I also have a supplement to memory that’s unique in my experience: a
published novel written about the Cummington Community and partially about that
summer
. Music From a Broken Piano by
James Baker Hall was published in 1982 by the Fiction Collective—the outfit
founded by the previously mentioned novelist Ronald Sukenick, among
others. I remember James Baker Hall
being there in Cummington that summer of 1970—though I was introduced to him as
a photographer, not a writer.
Some of the
characters, a few events and relationships, and even some words spoken, I
recall from that summer. But the novel is actually set in the summer of 1969,
when this arts community was formed (called “Farmington” in the novel.) Some, perhaps many people were there for
both summers. The novel seems highly
fictionalized, and is somewhat cleverly confusing in that he gives the names of
a couple of actual people to characters not based on them but (it seemed to me)
on someone else I recognized. Some of
the novel’s events may have in some sense happened in 1969. That summer did feature (according to a subsequent
newsletter), for example, the presentation of “3 Pieces for Broken Piano.”
Of course I first paged through this novel to see if there
was a character based on me. When I was
pretty sure there wasn’t, I lost interest for awhile. Though reading it
recently I recognize an imaginative story of those times, it’s useful in this context
mostly for ambiance, description of the places, which seem accurate to my
recollections. The ambiance included frequent seemingly important discussions and rapid interpersonal events and impressions, most of which I've forgotten, but even if I remembered them, Baker Hall's novel would convince me to ignore most of them.
James Baker Hall was indeed known for his photographs as
well as his writing, principally poetry, and was much honored as a poet and
teacher in his native Kentucky, where he was the state's Poet Laureate.
The Cummington
Community of the Arts was located on some 150 acres of woods and fields,
between Northampton and Pittsfield in western Massachusetts. It was centered on what had been a working
farm, though not in cultivation for decades, perhaps generations. Beginning in the 1922 when
it was called The Music Box (which apparently was a summer theatre), Cummington
had hosted a succession of arts schools and summer workshops. A number of famous people had participated
at one time or another, including poets Marianne Moore and Archibald MacLeish,
artists Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler, and photographer Diane
Arbus.
The Cummington area was best known for another sprawling
fallow farm, the former residence of the poet and journalist William Cullen
Bryant. Though I don’t think I knew it
at the time, we also weren’t very far from the farm where Herman Melville lived
when he was writing Moby Dick, and occasionally dining and telling tall
tales at the neighboring farm of the Nathaniel Hawthornes.
Partly because of all this, and the presence of teachers and
students from prestigious New England universities, I was perhaps dimly if not
consciously aware that I was swimming in different waters, closer to
traditional centers of power, past and future.
It wasn’t western Pennsylvania or the Midwest anymore.
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| cover of brochure with photo from 1969 |
This Cummington spread had been reconstituted as a
self-organizing Community of the Arts just the year before—that is, the summer
of 1969 that Baker Hall had novelized.
Evidently one of the poetry readings I attended at Yale when I was in
Stony Creek the previous winter had included a few Cummington attendees showing
a film and making a pitch for the community.
I wrote to the address they gave and applied for this summer. I was invited to attend, pretty much cost-free. The invitation followed me to Buffalo.
So on Sunday, June 20 I arrived for the session that was to
end August 15. Part way up a hill was the center of the Cummington spread: a
large building with kitchen and dining hall, a large barn that served as a
dormitory and another barn-like structure with art studios and darkroom. One of Cummington’s selling points was that
it could accommodate several families, and they were housed mostly in cabins
further up the hill. There were also buildings down the hill that I don’t think
I ever visited, but as it turned out, that’s where the cool people wound up.
There were some 45 people there at Cummington in 1970, somewhat straining its capacity.
As a solo, a newbie and a freebie, I was housed in the big
barn. Baker Hall described it well: I
was to live in “more of a stall than a room, with four walls and a door but no
ceiling.” There was no privacy based on
sound. I had a bed and a table for a desk.
The nearest bathroom and source of hot water was in the main building next to
the barn. My first letter back to Carol
mentioned the cold (later it would be the heat), the weak light (I requested
and got a decent reading lamp), and the incessant sound of an oboe player
relentlessly practicing his scales. As I was soon to discover, close to half of the “community” were classical musicians and music students, many from
Yale. It was as if a busload of them
got lost on their way to Tanglewood.
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| One of the C. structures (not THE barn) |
Though I was impressed by the country silence and the skyful
of stars, the first group meal didn’t suggest that this was going to be a
community experience for me (or so I wrote to Carol.) What I was
hoping for I suppose was something like the Black Mountain College experience
of the 1930s through the 1950s, that Robert Creeley was part of and talked
about—cutting-edge artists and students in various arts (and in Black
Mountain’s case, sciences) in an environment of experimentation and
cross-fertilization.
Apart from high expectations, my hopes were doomed (as I
think I knew then) by another imperative: the overriding political issues of
the moment. We were less than two
months past Cambodia and Kent State. The Vietnam War was still expanding. It was supposed to be the summer we’d hear
the drumming. But all I was hearing was
the oboe, and the vast silence of the country.
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| Harvard spring 1970 |
Not that there was much drumming elsewhere. We arrived in Cambridge in time to witness
and participate in an antiwar march through Harvard Square, but it clearly was
nothing like what we heard had happened there that spring. It turned out to be the last such demonstration
I ever saw there. For one thing, the
students had taken their drums and gone home. That had happened
everywhere. And though political
ferment was not over, it had turned sullen on the war, and fractured into
separate and sometimes hostile movements. Women’s lib, for instance, and Black Power. But I was still
experiencing those emotions from the spring, including the anger I had
suppressed so as not to endanger others during the Knox occupation. That didn’t make me a happy camper.
Plus my own diffidence in an unfamiliar situation with
people I didn’t quite get. The only
time Cummington is mentioned in a surviving notebook is to quote some unnamed
person after I’d evidently held forth on something or other. “Gee, I didn’t know you could talk like that,”
this person said. “I didn’t know you
talked at all.”
Though I probably read fiction and poetry as well as
journalism and so on, the most characteristic reading I did at Cummington—and
the only thing I specifically recall—was the Black Panther Party
newspaper. I was constructing a play
out of fragments, quotes from its articles as well as other elements, a series
of voices. I never finished it, but the
reading helped me see things from another perspective, as I began to more
deeply understand what was and is called institutional and structural
racism. Some of this amplified the
personal point of view I first found in James Baldwin’s essays, as far back as
high school. This time I did get caught
in the rhetoric (revolutionary and otherwise) of the Panthers political
engagement and analysis, though not the imagery of violence. Mostly I learned a
little more of what it was like to be Black in America.
The Black Panthers were known in the media for their
aggressive rhetoric in favor of violent revolution, which owed some of its
intellectual basis to Marxism. But as
their newspaper chronicled, they pioneered social services directed to the
Black community. The best known of
these was the free breakfast program, in which the Panthers organization fed more
children in the Oakland area particularly, than did the state of
California. The federal public school
free breakfast program didn’t exist then, and may well have been inspired by
the success of their efforts. But all
levels of government in those years felt free to harass, arrest and at least in
the case of Fred Hampton, murder people because they were Black Panthers.
This was within the more general context of the times. The Vietnam War period of the 1960s and
1970s was an intense dance of the apocalyptic and utopian. As poet W.S. Merwin
described it: “Wild aspiration and
vertiginous despair existed not alternately but at once, and at times we may
have clung to visionary hopes not so much because they were really credible as
because we felt it would be not only mean-spirited but fatal to abandon
them. We knew a kind of willful
desperation.” And I would add, a kind of willed innocence.
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| W.S. Merwin. Photo by James Baker Hall |
It may be hard to remember and difficult to explain in
today’s context, just how different this period was, and how it nevertheless
still echoes.
“We know that age to be utterly beyond our reach now,
irretrievably past, a period whose distance we already feel as though it had
stretched into centuries,” Merwin continues (in the preface to his 1992 collection
The Second Four Books of Poems),
“and yet it appears to us to be not only recent
but present, still with us not as a memory but as a part of our unfinished
days, a ground or backdrop before which we live. It could be said that we are haunted by it, which would suggest that
that time was not done with in us, that what we saw and felt then is still part
of our incompleteness and our choices.”Cummington was not untouched by countercultural concerns,
and some of it founding members probably wanted to integrate them into its
communal experience. But I didn’t sense
much awareness around me there of the political ideas and ferment going on
then. The place seemed to be divided
among oblivious academics, spaced-out hippie artists and frightened music
students. I felt isolated.
Later in the summer I came to some empathetic understanding
of at least the frightened music students.
On a trip to town or somewhere with a few Cummington people, I found
myself at a coffee shop table across from a quiet young woman I hadn’t really talked
with before. She was a music student at
Yale. Our somewhat stilted conversation seemed to be loosening up until I said
something about the war. She became quiet as I babbled on, until her eyes
filled with tears. “I just want to study music,” she finally said. So I saw that her life, too, was being
deformed by the war.
By then my isolation had already been dramatized. Since I was getting
a largely free ride at Cummington based on my work, I felt obligated to share
it, so I gave a poetry reading after a couple of weeks. However, some discussion the previous day
infuriated me so much that I stayed up all night writing a long discursive and
often angry poem which ended with the words, “Cummington, you are up against
yourselves.” It was the last thing I
read, and I sat down to a complete and lasting silence. Oddly, I hadn’t expected that.
However, I was to
have one more public performance with a different outcome, before I left
halfway through the scheduled eight weeks.
I had other moments of alienation, as when many were talking
about (and participating in) an “environmental art” project, which essentially
was digging a big ditch. To me it was the opposite of “environmental” in the
sense of ecological, since it was basically an act of needless (and to me, worse than pointless)
destruction of the environment—and as such, a demonstration of human ego that
was a principal cause of our depleted planet.
I don’t think anyone else got my point.
On the other hand
there was one event I recall that gave me a Black Mountain College community
vibe. Someone organized a performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” which is
comprised of a short musical passage to be played 840 times. A complete
performance could take from 18 to 36 hours.
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New York premiere of Vexations: John Cage
(standing) with one of the pianists, John Cale
(later of the Velvet Underground.) Seated is
the only audience member to witness the
entire 18 hour performance. |
Though the eccentric
and influential composer in late nineteenth/ early twentieth century Paris is
now known for several haunting piano works, this Satie piece was not published
or performed in his lifetime. In fact
it was not commercially published in the U.S. until 1969. John Cage (who incidentally had participated
in Black Mountain College) discovered the manuscript, and later organized the
first concert, in New York City in 1963, in which a dozen pianists played the
repeated motif continuously for just over 18 hours.
The same basic format was followed at Cummington, which may
well have been the second performance anywhere of this piece (most of the
documented performances seem actually to have been in the last decade or so.)
The grand piano was
moved in front of the fireplace in the main building, with candles around
it. Seats were provided, and audience
members came and went over the hours. There were enough pianists to perform it
in relays, though probably they had more than one shift. I went to listen three times—at the
beginning, at some point late at night, and for the finish. I stayed long enough each time to feel the
hypnotic effect, which fatigue and a few tokes tended to enhance.
I was not entirely solitary or even misanthropic at
Cummington. I participated in community
discussions and some events, did my turns in the kitchen, played volleyball and spent sociable
hours usually inflected with wine and dope.
On one of the first days I was part of a group that piled into a car to
see the Beatles movie Let It Be at a Northampton theatre, much to the
consternation of Chris Horton, an artist and the person in charge of the
community, who wanted everyone to focus on Cummington. But people came and went all summer anyway. (As for the movie, it played as the dour
prequel to the recent breakup of the Beatles, but on the evidence of the recent
Get Back cuts of the same 1969 footage, seems more like a reflection of
the original director’s offended ego.)
I also observed (as apparently did James Baker Hall) some of
the sexual and interpersonal dynamics of an idealistic group of high achievers
isolated together. I’d already heard of
a summer in which four young male philosophers and their wives lived together
in one house to “do” philosophy together, and all four marriages collapsed
before fall. At least one marriage
openly lapsed at Cummington: a blond wife, the most glamorously attractive
woman there, took up with the most strikingly attractive young man. There were also racial dynamics too complex
to get into (though Baker Hall gives it a try, with limited success in my
view.)
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| Heather McHugh in 1981 |
One of the first people I met at Cummington was a young poet
named Heather McHugh, 22 at the time, who was assigned a room (or stall) near
mine on the barn’s second floor. She
visited my room, read some of my poems and declared that I might become as
famous as she would be. Then she
reclined on my bed. I was frozen at my
desk for a little too long, so by the time I could move she had already
left.
In memory, that was about the last I saw of her, though
letters to Carol indicate we were casually friendly throughout. Carol even met
her a couple of times. Heather did quickly disappear from the barn, however, becoming
associated with the residents of a cabin elsewhere—visual artists or
ceramicists and filmmakers, I think.
Anyway, they were what I thought of as the Cool Kids of the
community. She moved down there.
And Heather McHugh indeed became famous, at least in poetry
and academic circles, with prize-winning poetry collections, much-praised
translations and literary essays, as well as teaching. She’s a literary eminence now.
I had other casually friendly relationships with people
whose names I unfortunately no longer remember, including the slightly older
man, also a writer, with whom I got roaring drunk one night. When he tried to
drive us in his big old Buick up the rutted hill to his family cabin, it slid
into a ditch and we were suddenly pitched at an angle looking up at the stars,
laughing hysterically.
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| Rhea Ormond at C. 1970. BK photo |
I made one friend, an artist and photographer named Rhea
Ormond. She lived in the smaller
barnlike building some yards from the big barn, with an enormous studio and a
darkroom. Rhea was enthusiastic,
open-hearted, astute and generous. She
got me to collaborate on an oil painting with her, and she also showed me how
to develop photos. I believe she had
been at Cummington the summer before, and returned at least one more year. We exchanged infrequent letters for several
years, and met at least once more.
Rhea eventually settled in rural North
Carolina and specializes in murals and large canvases, while also teaching at a
community college. She’s a valued
artist and respected member of her community.
After awhile I met a guitarist, Alan Jaffe, who lived on the
ground floor of the barn. The “stalls”
that Baker Hall described pertained mostly to the second floor, which was on
the level of a hayloft. At least some
of the first floor stalls had ceilings and full-length walls, so they were
fully enclosed rooms. Alan lived in one
of these. I’m not sure how we met. Perhaps I heard him playing jazz on his
electric guitar, or maybe Rhea introduced us. In any case, we wound up
collaborating on a set of my songs, working them out in relaxed sessions in his
large room over a couple of weeks.
Alan Jaffe was a Yale music student then, and has since
become a notable jazz guitarist in New York.
I think he especially enjoyed playing the rock riffs and country licks
he probably didn’t usually get to do otherwise. He had both taste and touch as a guitarist, so these hours were
easily among the best I experienced at Cummington.
Meanwhile, Carol and I were exchanging frequent letters and
occasional phone calls. Soon she arrived for a few days visit. I found an
unused room at the bottom of the barn—not really fit for ordinary habitation,
but private, so we slept there. At
first Carol was wary, perhaps intimidated by the people at Cummington, and
didn’t want to participate in much. But she warmed up to several, like Rhea,
one at a time.
Her visit definitely changed how people viewed me. They
could now tell themselves my moodiness was a natural response to being
separated from such a beautiful girlfriend. Women whose interest in me had gone
nowhere now understood, and at least pretended to approve of, my faithfulness. When Carol left—hitching a ride with
several community members driving to Boston, including Heather—I knew that I
wasn’t going to spend the whole summer apart from her.
Though I was in some ways settling into Cummington life,
taking afternoon baths in the main building, heating up water in the empty
kitchen late at night for my instant espresso, I decided to go back to
Cambridge early. About halfway through
the summer there was a kind of open house event, with community members giving
recitals, showing their artwork and so on. Alan and I were going to perform my
songs. That seemed like the best time
to leave. I worked out the plan with Carol, who somehow got the use of a
vehicle large enough to bring her friends (including a driver) and haul me and
my stuff back with them.
My memory is that Alan and I were set to perform late in the
afternoon, pretty much at the end of the schedule. Most of the strangers who
I’d seen wandering around all day were already gone, so our audience was a good
chunk of the Cummington community, plus Carol and her friends.
I’ve managed to unearth the lyrics to the songs we did, and I have a tape. Songwriting for me
was (and sometimes still is) a process of working with sounds, including the
sounds of words, how they fit the rhythm, with rhymes at the end of the
lines. Interpreting them might come
later, if at all.
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| Alan Jaffe |
Alan and I had worked out seven or eight songs, though I
doubt we did them all that afternoon.
Alan played electric guitar, I played acoustic guitar, with a mike or
pickup, and I sang. We’d prepared two
hard rockers, both which qualified as a possibly new genre of apocalyptic rock:
“SST” (surreal imagery of ecological devastation) and “Baby, Are You Looking
for Me Now?” which formed the same sort of lurid imagery into a relationship
song. I’m sure we did this one live, as
it is the better song, very propulsive, with lines
like “Snarls of bible
ministers’ broken lives/death cry of the power mower wives…”
We did a mid-tempo rocker called “It’s Right,” with a kind
of John Fogerty Creedence Clearwater vocal line, though with a bit of structure
copped from “Get Back.”
This was becoming the “personal is political” era, though
these interpretations come after the fact of composition. "It's Right" starts with verses about personal relationships ("When I'm away love, your eyes are in my mind"), then moves to a wider source of
meaning: “When love is winning/crying in the streets/ Everyone you meet is
your tomorrow.” “To cast the numbers/against the darkened sky/all we
know is why and we can be there.” Then it moves to action, if only marching
in the street: “When light is moving/across the face of time/the moment’s
changing rhyme becomes/the sound of happy feet and I know it’s right…” A bit of self-mockery there with "happy feet"--a little Lennonesque.
We probably did my 50s-style rock and roll tribute to the
Chuck Berry era, called “Berrybush,” which I must have written while I was a Knox
student. We had a jazzy, neo-Dylan/Lennon rant, which never got a
title better than “Dostoevsky and the Purple Voice,” but I doubt if we did this
one live, as I couldn’t possibly remember all the words. We must have done “His Blue Image,” a slower
song with Alan’s choice licks as background to chilling imagery about President
Nixon (“the king of ice/with his melted smile and his dagger dice”) and the
war. I notice now that I managed to
shoehorn images from Blake (“the horses of instruction”) and James Joyce (“the
cabman’s battered face”) in the same verse. The blue image is Nixon on
so-called black and white TV.
We’d worked out two straight-ahead country songs, of the
type common on the radio in those days, with simple structures that turned on
the reversal of a phrase or image, like “Act Naturally” (which the Beatles
copped from Buck Owens.)
Of these, I’d
written “Leaves That Are Green in the Winter” as a novelty number for my
hometown group, the Crosscurrents. “No Down Payment,” came more recently, at
Iowa. It’s got a line that resonates
with my memories of those months ostensibly at the Writers Workshop, in my
narrow Iowa City room. Several times
the singer lists his possessions, which include: “and a bottle of red wine/a
book of empty pages/and an awful lot of time,” before the chorus: “But
fair is fair/and trade is trade/no complaining about the deal when the
bargain’s made/my terms were loneliness for the freedom of a dove/and I’ve made
no down payment on your love.” We probably performed this one.
All of these songs were more or less heartfelt; none more
than “We’re All Together Again,” which used the jaunty old ditty (“We’re all
together again/we’re here, we’re here) that you can find sung by Berle Ives on
the site devoted to Scout camp songs.
My version was slower, with the brilliant, mournful country-inflected
backing Alan devised. With the
traditional chorus, it added verses that suggested an inventory of gently
disappointed lives at a school reunion.
My cache of letters from friends contains many stories about
the sad outcomes of clashes with the “real world” of jobs, the meaningless
work, crazed or sterile work environments, the awful bosses, the mindless
humiliation and boredom, and the accompanying crazed world-- the sense of
imprisonment in a lunatic asylum.
These accounts began
with summer jobs while we were still in college, but the stories—on and off
such pages—became weightier after schooldays were over. This song reflects these sentiments.
Though the lyrics were completed some time before, letters
from Carol this summer also included such stories, as she and her friends dealt
with the job market. Carol applied for
an opening as a telephone operator, but was told she was too intelligent. Her friend Julienne planned to apply the
next day, but now knew to play dumb. Carol knew she could have almost any entry
level job she wanted, but she kept backing off, as they all seemed so bleak.
Later in the summer, the Little Kid visited, and said she
had to suppress her true answer to yet another erroneously arrogant boss asking
why he should hire her: “Because I’m smarter than you.”
My song included a verse loosely based on two people I had
known, including a Knox student in the past: “Marcia dropped from college,
and went into the city/Wrote ads for a bookstore, dressing very pretty/but the
air in the city made Marcia blink and cry/She rented an apartment and stayed
there till she died. But we’re all together again, we’re here, we’re here.
We’re all together again, we’re here.”
What I felt dying were dreams, hopes, integrity, innocence,
changing who we were, and could be. This is not the last word on the eventual careers and achievements
over a lifetime of people I knew, but these experiences and sentiments were
prominent at that early stage, and at that historical time.
As for Cummington audience reaction, apparently such
sentiments were easier to swallow combined with a melody, a tasty guitar and
bouncy lines familiar from youth, however ironically used. The song went over well, as did the entire
performance. When it was over, a number
of community members with big smiles congratulated me, and also stayed to say
goodbye. I even got a big embrace from
the beautiful blond having the affair who hadn’t said three words to me all
summer.
Then I grabbed my gear from the barn, and with Carol and her
friends, left Cummington in the rear view mirror. In three or four hours we were in Cambridge, where over the next
years, life would change, more than once.
