I was washing dishes in the kitchen of Brooklea CC while some of my Chili buddies headed off to the concert. In truth, I don't remember regretting not being able to go. There was a scene surrounding the festival that seemed ominous to me. Many felt it out to some degree, but it was scary how it seemed to grab hold of some.
It was quite a summer. Having returned home after an enjoyable 1st year of college, it started off with an ill-fated prom at Mercy; definitely NOT the fault of my prom partner, it was just an awkward time. I tried to apologize about it once but there was no recovering from that one. The awkwardness had to do with transitions that were inevitably happening as our worlds were changing. In retrospect, my biggest regret about such transitions is that they were made in such a definitive way. If only we had had the wisdom to make them a little softer, it might have been less awkward to revisit those friends later on. If we could have just known how natural it was for our friends, like ourselves, to grow and change, or for differences to arise which might preclude certain ways of being but not others, or even just to have given them the benefit of the doubt in whatever arose, we might have been able to look back on a more continuous path than one littered with discontinuities.
I got a summer job with a construction company building the Child St bridge of 490. They said I'd be helping the "engineers" but in fact I was a pure gopher and when I brought it up they just chuckled. I was foolishly indignant and foolishly quit which explains why I was washing dishes at Brooklea for the rest of the summer.
In July everyone gathered around the TV to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I wish I could recall who exactly was sitting around our TV that night, but I do remember many of us were sitting on the floor. It seemed like a positive highlight about the times we were living in and a welcome respite from so much more troubling news of the day.
It's kind of amazing to think that the moon landing and Woodstock happened a month apart. Like I said I was not that interested in attending Woodstock at the time, but that is not to discount how great the music was. We would listen to that music for years to come...some of the great rock performances of all time. Maybe the whole festival would have seemed more positive if only it hadn't rained so incessantly.
Summers seemed longer then. They were sort of endless. By the time the school year began it was always like a new beginning. We would return to school a little older and a little different for all our summer experiences.
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